Then now’s the time to pledge your support and not get a free tote bag or whatever PBS is shilling these days. I don’t even have any cool interns to man the phone banks I also don’t have, so don’t expect any of that business, either.
PROGRESS TO GOAL: 70%
What I do have is the yearly renewal on my hosting plan coming up, with nothing budgeted to pay for it. I recently started a new job, which required a small move, which required fighting a ridiculous custody battle that I can’t even describe, which depleted any savings we had, etc…
Things are fine now, financially and in every other way. We’re back on our feet and things are turning around; I can pay our bills and our lawyer (because that particular nightmare isn’t over yet), I can put food on the table and a nice new roof over our heads. I could probably even pay to renew my hosting plan, if I really wanted to. But that’s money that could be better spent on Trey, so that’s where I want to spend it.
So, that being said, what am I going to do with Coquetting Tarradiddles? Well, that’s entirely up to you.
To renew my server hosting at its current level (which is pretty necessary, unless you want the site crashing every time I get a traffic spike, or whenever some jellyheaded script kiddie tries to hack my Gibson), it’ll cost me $250 clams. That I don’t want to spend anymore.
I don’t run ads here, because I think they’re annoying. I get no revenue from this site whatsoever, so it’s all just expense. Back when I was helping fight the good fight to fix the local school district in Beaumont, Texas, I hosted gigabytes of data for the community to access – and none of it came free. Or even cheap. But I could help, so I did help. Or tried to, anyway.
I’ve written a lot of stuff about a lot of different things. Some of what I’ve written (such as my posts on Depression) have had a significant impact on the lives of a surprising number of people, which is why I wrote them. I’ve helped people, and they’ve helped me. I’ve tried to entertain you guys with silly posts, goofy jokes, and even a few short stories (the most successful of which ended with a pathetic SWATTING attempt by just a really super cool dude, so that was fun).
What I’m getting at here is this: I’ve been writing and paying to host this site for a little over 8 years now, and I’ve always done it for free. And I want to keep doing it for free, but I just don’t feel like paying to do it for free anymore.
Which is where you come in.
I need to raise $250 by the 15th, or Coquetting Tarradiddles will cease to coquette or tarradiddle. Forever.
So, I ask you again:
If the answer to any of those questions is yes – and if you want this site to continue – then head over here and toss me a couple of pennies to pay for the hosting renewal.
NOTE: THIS IS NOT CHARITY.
This is for nothing more or less than paying the minimal cost to keep Coquetting Tarradiddles alive and running for another year. If that’s something you want to see happen, then contribute what you can. If it’s not, then don’t. Simple, really.
I might come back later and add some kind of progress bar or something, to indicate how close to (or far, far away from) we are to the $250 goal.
PROGRESS TO GOAL: 70%
Once (if) we hit it, I’ll update this page and tell people to stop sending me money unless they just really, really want to because they’re crazy and rich and wipe their gold-plated butts with $100 bills or whatever. Like I said, this isn’t charity. I’m not asking for a handout, or for any money to do anything other than keep this site alive. I considered setting up Patreon, but this isn’t a regular thing. I don’t need you to pay me to write. I’ll do that for free; I just don’t want to pay for the privilege. Besides, I don’t have nearly enough hipster facial hair for patrons.
I’ve paid the tab here for 8 years now. If you want me to keep going, it’s your turn.
I’ll probably come up with some kind of thank you to send to anyone who contributes, although I have no idea what that will be yet. I might put up a poll, and you can just tell me what you want. A new short story? An insightful commentary on the dichotomy of good and evil? A ten page report of the efficacy of fart jokes? The possibilities are endless.
The point is, you’ll get something for giving anything. I just don’t know what that is yet.
All the cool kids are doing it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?
I was going to post this all in one go, but people seemed to really like the serialization I did throughout this past October with my Halloween horror story, so I thought it’d be fun to do it again.
When I started writing this, I had something very different in mind than where the story actually went, which is something new and scary for me since I like to know exactly what it is I’m writing as I write it. But this one took on a life of its own, and I just went where it led me. I’ll be posting new entries irregularly, so check back often.
I hope you enjoy it.
“I like your shoes.”
“Thank you,” replied The Click-Clack Man. He crossed one of his long, thin legs over his lap and pointed to the shiny black dress shoe on his right foot. “Do you have any like these?”
The boy paused for a moment, nibbling his bottom lip as he thought. “Yes,” he said, his eyes wide with recognition. “For Sunday mornings when we go to church sometimes.”
The Click-Clack man tilted his head to the side, his thin lips parting into a wide grin. “Only sometimes?” he asked the boy.
“Yeah. For, like, Christmas and Easter and stuff. We don’t go much other times.”
“Pity,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Church is good for you.”
“Do you go to church a lot?”
“Oh, yes,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Every Sunday. You can come with me,” he said. His lips stretched thinner as his grin grew wider. He leaned closer to the boy and whispered, “if you want.”
The boy pushed back a little in his bed until his back touched the wall of his bedroom. It was covered in comic books his dad had made into wallpaper the year before, and his shoulder smooshed into Superman’s face.
“I don’t think my mom would let me,” he said, trailing the sentence off as he spoke. He was nibbling his bottom lip again. “Do you know my mom?” he asked.
The Click-Clack Man nodded. “I know everyone,” he said.
The boy relaxed a little. “Then I can ask her, if you want.”
“That’s okay,” replied The Click-Clack Man. “She wouldn’t like that.”
“Why not?”
The Click-Clack Man uncrossed his legs and stood up, the fabric of his thin black suit letting out a gentle whoosh of air as he rose. He took a few steps away from the boy’s bed, nodded, then turned toward the door. As his hand reached out to open it, he turned his wide grin back to the boy and said, “She doesn’t know I’m here.”
The door closed behind him, and the hallway light switched off.
click-clack, click clack
The boy listened to The Click-Clack Man’s shiny black shoes fade into the distance, then went to sleep.
************
He came like that at first, when the boy was young; brief visits in the nighttime. The Click-Clack Man was always friendly, always smiling. The pair talked about random things, while The Click-Clack Man made the boy laugh with a well-placed joke or a funny face. The boy would answer his questions.
“Do you remember the first time I met you?” The Click-Clack Man asked the boy.
“No,” he replied. “I don’t think so.” He nibbled his bottom lip again as he always did, making little sucking noises as he thought. “Haven’t you just always been here?”
The Click-Clack man smiled. “It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said the boy. “It does.”
And it really did.
************
“Are you ready to go?” asked The Click-Clack Man.
The boy looked at the superhero clock by his bed, noted the time, then grabbed the handle of his backpack and pulled its straps over his shoulder. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m ready.”
The Click-Clack Man smiled, the smooth, thin skin of his face wrinkling only slightly around the edge of his cheeks. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He reached out his long right arm to the boy and extended his hand. The boy reached out and grabbed it. The Click-Clack Man turned and walked toward the boy’s closet door, which had been propped open by a little toy firetruck. The light inside had been left on.
As they got closer, the bulb in the top of the closet flickered slightly, then switched off. The Click-Clack Man extended one long, thin leg and gently nudged the firetruck aside as they walked through the door.
It closed shut behind them.
************
On the other side of the closet door, The Click-Clack Man led the boy into a large, green field with waves of soft grass rippling as far away into the distance as he could see.
“Wow,” said the boy. “Where are we?”
“This is my home,” said The Click-Clack Man.
“Where’s your house?”
The Click-Clack Man pointed to a gnarled oak tree on the other side of a small, quiet lake. Its water reflected the sky.
“You live in a tree?” asked the boy.
“No,” said The Click-Clack Man. “The tree lives in me.”
The boy furrowed his brow and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Come,” said The Click-Clack Man. “I’ll show you.”
They walked up to the edge of the quiet lake, until the perfectly still water just barely touched the tip of The Click-Clack Man’s shiny black shoes. The water crackled and popped as ice crystals began to form, first from the edge of the lake, then shooting out in a straight line across to the other side.
The boy’s jaw went loose and he chin dangled in the soft breeze. “Woah,” he sighed.
The Click-Clack Man took a step forward, onto the ice. Water lapped around the edges of the little frozen bridge. “Follow me,” he said.
The boy stayed where he stood, jaw still agape as he listened to The Click-Clack Man cross to the other side.
click-clack, click-clack
The Click-Clack Man stepped off the bridge, turned, and smiled at the boy. He raised one long, thin arm and waved him over, his wrist bending and twisting as his long, thin fingers curled out, then in.
The boy stepped on the ice, but it cracked under his weight and startled him.
“Don’t worry,” shouted The Click-Clack Man from the other side. “It won’t melt until I tell it to.”
He took another step. Another crack. A pop. Another step. Inch by inch and foot by foot, the boy crossed to the other side. As he stepped onto the grass, he heard a gentle plop behind him. When he turned around, the bridge was gone.
“Melted,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Just like I said.”
“Wow,” sighed the boy. Again. “That’s cool.”
The Click-Clack Man smiled. Again. “Thank you.”
He led the boy up to the gnarled oak tree, then reached out his arm and placed his hand on the trunk. “Watch this,” he said.
The oak groaned a deep, throaty creak from somewhere far inside the wood. The boy could feel it more than he could hear the sound. The ground rumbled, and his feet tickled from the vibration.
“What’s happening?” asked the boy.
The Click-Clack Man said nothing, and closed his eyes. The thin, pale skin of his eyelids were almost see-through, which the boy had never noticed before, back in the darkness of his bedroom.
The rumble grew stronger as the groans and creaks of the tree grew louder. The long, twisting branches began to sway, and then to move. They bent and curled, and wrapped themselves around the boy and The Click-Clack Man, who still had his eyes closed and was still smiling.
“Stop it,” the boy pleaded. “I’m scared.”
The Click-Clack Man opened his thin lips and laughed.
“Please? I want to go home!” cried the boy.
The branches fully enclosed them now, and the world went dark.
The Click-Clack Man opened his eyes.
************
The darkness vanished in the brightest light the boy had ever seen, which hurt his eyes. He shut them, and started to cry.
“Wait,” said The Click-Clack Man. “Wait.”
The boy fell to his knees and sobbed, his face buried in his hands. “I just want to go home.”
The Click-Clack Man reached out and touched the boy’s head. “Open your eyes.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Please?” asked The Click-Clack Man.
The boy cautiously opened one eye, slowly. The light wasn’t as bright now, and it no longer hurt his eyes. He opened the other one and blinked.
“Woah,” he said, once more.
“See?” said The Click-Clack Man. “Nothing to worry about.”
The boy looked out into a massive room, the entrance hall of a grand mansion. The walls were thick and dark, like the gnarled bark of the tree. The floor was polished marble so shiny it reflected everything around it. In the middle of the room, a grand staircase went straight back and up, then branched off in two directions, each leading to an opposite side of the second floor. There were candles everywhere.
“Are we inside the tree?” asked the boy.
“Yes,” said The Click-Clack Man. “And no.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to,” replied The Click-Clack Man. “Come this way. I want to show you something”
The boy followed as The Click-Clack Man led the way upstairs, to a small door in a small corner of a small room.
The little door opened as they approached, with the tiniest of creaks. The Click-Clack Man stopped short of walking inside, and stood beside the door. He motioned for the boy to walk on through.
“What’s in there?” he asked.
“Home,” said The Click-Clack Man.
The boy walked through the door and into more darkness. He felt something soft brush his face, then heard a slight buzz from somewhere over his head. A little light flickered, and another door opened.
He was back in his room, walking through his closet. He turned to see where he’d come from, but all he found were clothes and toys, and that thing in the corner that his mother had told him to throw away but he hadn’t.
The Click-Clack Man was gone, along with the little door he’d just walked through. It was nighttime again, and the boy was back in his bedroom. The superhero clock next to his bed showed the same time as when he’d left, which was half past bedtime, and his mother would be coming to check on him soon.
The boy crawled into bed, pulled the covers up over his chest, then closed his eyes and listened.
The Click-Clack Man was walking away, somewhere beyond his closet, in his mansion inside a tree by a quiet lake in a green field of soft grass that went on forever.
click-clack, click-clack
************
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Once upon a time, a legendary candyman held a contest in which five lucky children won a tour of his mythical chocolate factory. That man was Mr. Wonka, and this is the story you were never told…
The moment Wonka launched his famous contest, rival candy maker Slugworth Cruz immediately began trying to steal Wonka’s secrets for himself. He prowled the streets at night, looking for the first winner by approaching random children in the darkness to ask them about golden tickets and candy. It was kinda weird.
“Hey. Got any candy?”
The first winner was a large, angry young man who was driven by an all-consuming passion to consume anything could. Augustus Christie was his name, but he never made it to the factory. Tragically, he insulted Wonka’s union workers in his acceptance speech, who then tricked him into mistaking the brown water of one of New Jersey’s rivers for chocolate. Augustus Christie dove in, head first, and was never seen again.
“Trumpa Lumpa, Doopa Dee Doo…”
The next winner was also the youngest. His name was Rubio Teevee, and Slugworth Cruz found him before he ever left for the factory. No one knows what Cruz whispered into Rubio’s young ears while the pair sat on his mother’s couch in the family room, but from that moment on, all Rubio Teevee could do was repeat the same three or four sentences over and over.
“Wonka knows EXACTLY what he’s doing.”
Ben Carson would’ve won a ticket, but he fell asleep before he finished opening his Wonka Bar, then stashed it away in a pyramid for later after he woke up. Violet Fiorina also would’ve won a ticket, but she laid off the entire staff she’d hired to unwrap candy bars just before the winning one was found.
The next lucky winner was Veruca Clinton, who felt winning the contest was her birthright because she felt that winning everything was her birthright. Spoiled, loud and obnoxious, she was last seen demanding Wonka give her a goose to lay gold eggs for Easter. Wonka just smiled and tossed her down a garbage shoot.
“Bad egg,” he said.
“It’s mine. Whatever it is, it’s mine. Gimme!”
The last young man to win a ticket was approximately 800 years old, which was getting on for a 12 year old boy, but the years had not been kind. Born into poverty, Bernie Bucket was convinced he would win a ticket, because he wanted it more than anyone. Positive that he could use the contest to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the 1% and expose Wonka for the elitist fraud that he was, Bernie fished around in raw sewage for a coin some rich guy dropped, then miraculously bought the last winning Wonka Bar in existence.
“Let them eat chocolate.”
But then he redistributed Fizzy Lifting Drinks to the 99% and bumped into the ceiling which then had to be washed and sterilized, so he got nothing.
None of the children won the real prize that day, which would’ve seen one of them inheriting Obama Wonka’s factory after he retired. However, Wonka was now more convinced than ever that no other living human would ever be qualified for the job, so he just smiled to himself, breathed deeply, and decided to stay. Forever.
“I said good day, sir!”
As I write this, it’s the last day of 2015 and I’m surrounded by Top Ten lists for everything from the best games of the year, to the best fast food burgers in the nation.
It’s annoying, so I thought I’d write my own, because my Top Ten Games of 2015 are way different than everyone else’s Top Ten Games of 2015. But then I thought, I don’t want to do that because Top Ten of the year lists are stupid and predictable and omnipresent.
So I decided to do it anyway, but not just for 2015.
BUT FOR ALL THE YEARS.
Well, since 1988, anyway. Which is when I got my first IBM-compatible PC and entered the Real Gamer demographic. I had an Apple ][ clone for years before that, but I’m doing a PC gaming list, so I’m limiting it to games I played on the PC. This means that only games I played on my PC will be here. Any cross-platform titles that I played on, say, my Xbox or Playstation or whatever won’t be.
It’s also a list of my top ten games of each year, so it’s not necessarily made up of the objectively best games. All that’s here are the games I actually played the year they were released. Remakes, reboots, and remasters won’t be included, either. Your favorite game will probably be omitted, because it’s my list. You can just go make your own, if you feel that strongly about Speedball 2.
I was originally going to post this all at once here on New Year’s Eve, but it’s kind of a monumental task. I bit off more than I can chew, as usual, so I’m just going to add years as I complete them. My plan is to add at least one year each day until we hit 2015, but I’ll try to squeeze in a few more here and there, time permitting.
Now go! Gather your party and venture forth or whatever.
I beat Doogie Howser to surgeonhood by a full year by playing this game. Neil Patrick Harris wouldn’t start suturing patients until 1989, and his character was 16 when the show started. I was only 13 the first time I started up Life & Death and immediately murdered a patient. I forgot to administer any anesthetic before I cut into him, so he screamed out in agony and promptly died.
I never did get the hang of this game because screw it, I was only 13 years old. I still had a lot of fun trying, though. And the lamentations of my patients never got old.
This game. My first PC was an 8088 with an EGA monitor, which I thought made me pretty hot shit, until I bought Rocket Ranger based on the the screenshots on the back of its box. After I got back home and installed it, I realized EGA was actually pretty crap. The screenshots were from the Amiga version, and they were beautiful. However, the image on my monitor was limited to 16 colors of sadness.
The game was still great fun, though. Flying around, zapping Nazis, falling on your face over and over when you can’t manage to take off because you suck at life. Running out of fuel and crashing on your way to save the day because you didn’t read the code wheel right. Good times.
I’ve always enjoyed chess, but I’ve never been very good at it. I like to laugh at people who think that mastering the game is some sign of superior intelligence rather than just being really good at a game, and nothing was funnier than playing Battle Chess. All of the little animations were genuinely comical to my 13 year old brain, and I’m sure I remember more than one crotch-shot, which was pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement in comedy as far as I was concerned.
The only problem with Battle Chess was that after you’d seen every animation for the hundred billionth time, they just got annoying. I’d eventually switch them off, but then I’d realize that I was just playing chess at that point, which was pretty damn boring. There isn’t a lot of staying power in this classic, but the fun times are pretty great. Until they’re not.
The first in Lucasfilm’s WWII flight sim series, Battlehawks 1942 was as fun to play as it was to not. That’s because it came with a big, spiral-bound manual filled with all sorts of WWII facts and tidbits. One of the best ways to play the game was to read through a bit of the manual to get psyched up, then hop into the game to shoot down some baddies. I played it a lot with my dad, who was always better at it than I was. The jerk.
This game also ignited my interest in WWII history, which would continue through college when I accidentally signed up for a graduate level course as a freshman. I managed to pass, but just barely. Ah, memories.
Outside of Ultima II (which I played on my Apple ][ clone), I never knew you could combine sci-fi and RPGs until I played this game. The title screen was much cooler than anything the actual game had to offer, but it was still a lot of fun. I never made it very far because it was kind of complicated, I was only 13, and I didn’t have a manual for it because reasons. Still, I always had fun trying to figure out what the heck I was doing in a universe I didn’t understand.
Plus, giant robots.
They don’t make games like Police Quest today. And they didn’t really make them like Police Quest back when they made Police Quest. Sierra went out on a limb with this series, and it usually paid off. I wouldn’t play the first game until years after I played part two, but it’s just as well. The first one was super short and focused more on the mundane routine of an officer’s life (which was way more fun than it sounds) more than it did its central story. The sequel improved on that, and by the time Police Quest III came out, I was pretty sure the series was going to be around forever as it kept improving.
Then Daryl Gates happened, and it wasn’t anymore.
I was never very good at card games, but I was getting older and thought it was a skill I should pick up so I could fit in at parties as an adult or whatever. I discovered this questionable poker simulation on a local BBS and found that it had a surprisingly robust and challenging AI that would help me quickly learn the basics of the game before moving on to the more challenging difficulty levels as I made my way toward mastery over the various complex systems governing the game of poker.
Yeah, whatever. I was a 13 year old boy. Shut up.
Manhunter was one of the weirdest games Sierra ever made. Heck, it’s one of the weirdest games anyone has ever made. It’s set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic version of New York after giant intergalactic eyeballs have enslaved humanity and forced everyone to dress as monks or something. It was never very clear. It was also the first point and click adventure game I’d ever played, since it did away with Sierra’s traditional text parser in favor of a 1st person slideshow view more like we’d see in Myst years later. I spent hours trying to figure this game out, but mostly I just wandered around and died a lot.
My most distinct memory of this game comes from very early on (which is about as far as I ever got), where I was able to do the knife/hand thing I saw Bishop do in Aliens. So that was cool.
I’ve played and completed every Ultima game…except Ultima V. It is my secret shame.
It was actually one of the first games I bought after getting my first PC, because I’d been unable to run it on my old Apple ][ due to the game wanting a crazy amount (64k) of RAM. My machine only had 48k, so it’d play the intro but always crap out when trying to start up the game itself. Which sucked, because Ultima V is widely regarded as being one of the best entries in the series.
So why didn’t I ever complete it? Or even get very far? A couple of reasons, really. The biggest one probably has to do with my top game of 1988. Once I found it, I had very little time for anything else. But the second reason is that Ultima VI was just around the corner…
This game changed everything for me. Hell, it changed everything for everyone. Multiple characters, different endings, a mouse-driven point-and-click interface. Humor. Maniac Mansion had it all.
Once I discovered it, I never went back. All the Sierra games were suddenly clunky nightmares of keyboard controls and fiddly text parsers, and I wanted nothing more to do with them. I also didn’t want more serious narratives or overly fanciful, saccharine fairy tell nonsense. I wanted good jokes, funny characters, and skewed humor.
I wanted…Lucasfilm Games.
Lucasfilm Games didn’t just stick to one or two genres, back in its early days. It tried its hand at a number of different games, sometimes developing them in-house, and sometimes buying up an existing property to publish. Pipe Dream was originally released for the Amiga under the name Pipe Mania. Lucasfilm grabbed it, ported it to other platforms, and called in Pipe Dream.
It was a fun time killer that could get pretty challenging for my budding young intellect. You might remember having played it every single time you hacked a machine in Bioshock.
I sucked at this game, but boy was it fun. I never had any idea what I was doing, since I was again playing a game sans manual because reasons. (Hey, I was 14. BBSs were a thing, and I was friends with a lot of sysops. Sysops who had “special” file sections for trusted users. Don’t judge me.)
It was far too complicated for my stupid newly-teenaged brain to quite grasp. There were lots of controls and fiddly systems, and I just wanted to blow things up. But something about figuring out how to make the game do anything was part of the fun, which I guess was the case with a lot of old games.
My first god sim. Everyone’s first god sim. There’s not much to say about Populous that hasn’t already been said before. I liked it for the same reasons everyone else liked it. You got to play as a god, you had little worshipers you could smite at will, and you could murder everyone. Or help them. Whichever.
I never did get the hang of raising and lowering land, though. And I never understood why a god would need to bother with such mundane levels of civic planning. Why not just set a bush on fire and command it to tell of one of your subjects to “Go ye forth and grab yonder shovel”?
Ah, well. It’s still a fun game.
Hey, you got your RPG in my adventure game! No, you got your adventure game in my RPG!
Two genres that should have never worked together somehow blended like chocolate and peanut butter. Yeah, it still had Sierra’s crappy interface and you died stupidly every five minutes, and you could get yourself into no-win scenarios like other people get into their clothes, but damn was it a fun game. It was originally called Hero’s Quest, but Sierra forgot to trademark the name. After Milton Bradley trademarked an electronic version of HeroQuest, they were forced to change the name to the now familiar Quest for Glory.
Sierra had a real thing for sticking Quest somewhere in their titles.
The first in the long Laura Bow series of two whole games, this one was an absolute mess. It had a lot of timed events where you had to either follow characters or be in a certain spot at a specific time, and the puzzles were traditionally Sierra Stupid™. Yet, even with everything the game got wrong, it was still intriguing as hell.
It was a murder mystery, which we still don’t have a lot of in today’s gaming. It focused on characters rather than puzzles, and had an interesting story, even if it was mired in the typical bad puns and cliches of Sierra’s writing.
Yet another game acquired from the dubious file section of a local BBS, this game had absolutely no point. I’m sure there was a story involved in some way, but whatever it was didn’t matter. All you did was fly through these colorful tunnels while trying not to crash into walls and explode.
That was pretty much it. And it was awesome.
I used to put on some ’80s heavy metal and then pretend I was an ace tunnel pilot in some alternate reality where tunnel pilots were a thing, and then I’d tear into the game for hours. If you manage to track this game down to give it a whirl – and I highly recommend it – be advised that a joystick is a must.
All the cool tunnel pilots have them. Don’t you want to be cool, too?
The original city planning game. What more is there to say? It birthed a genre, eventually led to The Sims, and you could build nightmare roadways to cause epic traffic jams. It was great.
I played a lot of this one, but mostly just when I was bored with all my other games and couldn’t think of anything better to do. It would take a few sequels for the design to really come together, but there’s still a quirky charm with how simple yet rewarding the first game can be.
I spent more hours in this flight sim than with any other action game I had on my PC, including Tunnels of Armageddon. It took everything that was great about Battlehawks 1942 and cranked it up to eleven. Or really, just 10. The eleven wouldn’t come until the next game in the series, but Their Finest Hour was responsible for some of the best gaming memories with my dad that I have.
We played the Ultima games together, and we played Their Finest Hour. It was our thing.
I desperately wanted a VGA card and monitor, along with a sound card around the time I discovered the original Prince of Persia. I remember that distinctly, because one of the selling points of the game was that its EGA graphics weren’t bad, and it had surprisingly good PC speaker support.
I never managed to save the princess or whatever because the game was crazy with its time limit and lack of saves, but everything else was awesome. The animation remains impressive to this day, and the sudden deaths from the various traps still make me laugh.
My favorite is the blade chomper death. So good.
This was – and remains – THE BEST MOVIE TIE-IN GAME EVER MADE.
Yes, the caps were necessary. The Last Crusade is one of the most influential, yet overlooked point-and-click games ever, and I honestly don’t understand why. It took the story from the movie, added a bunch of stuff (and cut out a little bit), then combined it all together in a great adventure game that didn’t take itself too seriously.
It even came with an awesome copy of Henry Jones’ Grail Diary, complete with little scribbled notes and coffee stains on the pages. It introduced dialog trees, and also eliminated no-win scenarios, and even in the one spot where you could die (while navigating the traps at the end of the game), it made a great joke out of it and you didn’t lose any progress. You just tried again until you got it.
The design philosophy behind The Last Crusade would go on to dominate all subsequent Lucasfilm (later LucasArts) graphic adventures, along with the point-and-click genre as a whole. Eventually, even Sierra would get in on the game, even if they never managed to get it quite right.
Find this game. Play it. YOU ARE WELCOME.
The year I finally got a VGA card, Life & Death 2 showed up with 256 color graphics and brain surgery. This one is even better than the last, because you can kinda sorta actually tell what you’re doing once you’ve cut some poor soul’s head open, which is nice.
These days, I can only think of it as a Ben Carson simulator, though. I played it a little bit last night, and every time I cut into someone, I shouted something about pyramid grain silos and then tried to cut the gay out of my patient’s brain.
Good times.
This was a cool little game that had to wait until its sequel to really get good, but it was still fun. It’s totally not a Star Trek simulator, though. And you totally don’t use the Enterprise to shoot at Klingons or anything. Those are Ilwraths. Obviously.
It was mostly an arcade affair, though I remember there being a bit of light strategy involved, as well. Mostly, you set things up and then went into the pew-pew battle screen where you shot at other ships until they exploded. And that was pretty much it. And yet, it still somehow managed to become a huge time sink for me. Go figure.
Origin tried to mix things up a little with the Ultima franchise by taking everything everyone had grown to love about the series and throwing it away. But it worked.
In the Worlds of Ultima games, of which there were only two, you still play as the Avatar, but aren’t on Britannia. In Savage Empire, you’re whisked away to the Valley of Eodon, which is basically the set piece of any given pulp fiction rag of yesteryear featuring a lost jungle world filled with giant insects and dinosaurs.
It wasn’t a proper Ultima, but it was close enough to kill some time while I waited for Ultima VII to come out.
The second entry in the Quest for Glory series took the player away from the familiar tropes of European medieval fantasy and plopped you down in more of an Arabian Nights setting. It was a breath of fresh air at the time, and it all seemed super exotic.
If I went and replayed it today though, I’m pretty sure I’d notice all the stereotypes and subtle racism that was sort of an undercurrent in most Sierra titles that I was incapable of perceiving as a kid. Maybe not, but I don’t want to replay it and take any chances.
Better safe than sorry.
Another Cinemaware game, but this time I finally had a VGA monitor! After seeing this beauty running on a demo loop in my local software store for ages, I couldn’t wait to buy it and run home to check out the amazing graphics I missed out on with Rocket Ranger.
I installed the game, ran the executable, and then…EGA graphics. Again.
The store had been running the Amiga version, of course, and Cinemaware hadn’t bothered to start adding 256-color graphics to their PC ports yet, so I was screwed again. I still enjoyed the game and put a lot of hours into it, but I learned to never trust screenshots again.
I hadn’t played a King’s Quest game in ages when this one came out, but I was suckered in by Sierra’s new engine. VGA graphics! Point and click interface! All the cool things!
It’s too bad its puzzles were awful, but the worst part about the game was how they hadn’t fully embraced point and click yet. No, you didn’t move around with the keyboard anymore, and yes, you clicked where you wanted to go and your little dude went there, but…he didn’t always. Because Sierra loved killing the player ALL THE DAMN TIME, so sometimes you had to click in just the right spot and make a million little clicks so he’d walk inch-by-inch through a screen because you couldn’t rely on his pathfinding to not have him plummet to his death from off a cliff.
Fortunately, the original version of this game came on floppies because CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet, which meant I only had to read the bad dialog rather than hear it “acted” out by whoever happened to be walking by Roberta William’s office on their way to the bathroom that day.
I have a deep and unyielding love for the Ultima series, so you might be wondering why Ultima VI isn’t higher up on the list of my top games from 1990. It’s pretty simple, really. It just didn’t grab me like the other entries in the series. There wasn’t anything wrong with the game – and, in many ways, it was much better than all of the previous games.
But for whatever reason, it just didn’t grab hold of my like, say, Ultima IV did or Ultima VII would a couple of years later. I think it mostly had to do with the user interface. It was pretty clunky, but it was also the first mouse-driven Ultima game, so I cut it some slack. It did some things better and some things worse, but the story was still great. And all my old friends were back, so I didn’t mind too much.
My big Christmas present in 1990 was a sound card, along with two Lucasfilm Games. Loom was one of them, and it was the perfect showcase for my new Sound Blaster card, since the entire game is based around using music to cast magic spells.
The game was short and obviously planned to be the first in a new series that never materialized, but it was magical. It was designed by Brian Moriarty, who also designed Wishbringer, one of my favorite Infocom titles. The game even came with an audio cassette containing a radio drama setting up the game world and your place in it.
I lost count of how many times I listened to that thing.
A friend of mine gave me a copy of this game, and I was immediately hooked. So was my dad. We used to fight over who got computer time, just to play it. It had everything: a great soundtrack, awesome graphics, a cool branching storyline. It was a Star Wars sim before there was a Star Wars sim, and I loved it.
Unfortunately, since I had a new VGA monitor, I used to enjoy playing my games in EGA mode for a few minutes, just to appreciate how much better the graphics were on my new rig. For most games, this was fine. I’d check out EGA, laugh at all the dithered red people, then pop back over to VGA and relish my graphical snobbery. However, the way Wing Commander changed graphics modes was by way of overwriting the VGA files with EGA ones, which meant that once I’d converted it to EGA, it was stuck that way until I was able to get another copy from my friend.
When my dad came home later that day and tried to play a game, he was…displeased.
Another year, another Lucasfilm game in the top spot. But no one can argue with this choice. The Secret of Monkey Island was an even better showcase for my new Sound Blaster card than Loom, with a much better soundtrack that I still listen to and love to this very day. (The main theme is even my wife’s ringtone on my phone.)
Everything about the game was great. EVERYTHING.
The puzzles were fun. The dialog was sharp. The characters were fully realized. The music was amazing. The graphics were crisp.
I was in love.
Ah, Lemmings. Many countless hours were devoted to both saving and annihilating these little bastards, in equal measure. There’s a reason this game has seen so many iterations and sequels over the years: it’s damn addictive. Even today, starting up the original game risks me losing oceans of time to it. I can’t play just one level, and I always have to just see what the next level looks like after I beat one.
Until I get super frustrated and just nuke them all, that is.
Which kind of happens a lot, actually.
I still love this game, and I still play it fairly regularly.
Another one of Lucasfilm Games’ dip into the wading pool of other genres, Night Shift was developed by a third party who brought it to Lucasfilm. They rebranded it and published it as a toy factory making Star Wars and Lucasfilm Games related action figures.
You play as a guy or a girl charged with keeping The Machine working, which is a crazy, multi-storied contraption that’s constantly failing in spectacular ways.
The toy company is called Industrial Might and Logic instead of Industrial Light and Magic, and the title screen of the game is a clever modification of ILM’s old wizard logo. There are also lemmings involved, but not the suicidal kind from other games or any of Disney’s fake True Life Adventure movies. There are two of the little beasts in this game: one that slows you down by humping your leg, and another who runs around and mucks up the machine. Then, there’s an angry lawyer who constantly tries to bludgeon you with the hammer of litigation or whatever, so it’s a constant race up and down the machine, repairing what’s broken and trying to keep everything in sync.
It starts out pretty simple, but gets really crazy before you get to the end of the game, which explains why I’ve never made it to the end of the game. I’ve been trying for a couple of decades now, but I only ever manage to progress one or two levels every few years. Maybe by the time I die, I’ll have completed it.
But probably not.
This was the first Space Quest game I played, because it had VGA graphics and a point and click interface. For whatever reason, the series just didn’t appeal to me any sooner. I remember looking at the screenshots of SQIV before I had my VGA monitor and was longing for one with my nose pressed up again the pages of a Computer Shopper magazine like a Dickensian street urchin peering at day old bread in a bakery window, imagining that I could never get bored with a game that looked that good.
Unfortunately, it was still a Sierra game. It was funnier than other Sierra games, and even the multiple deaths were kind of endearing, but it was still filled with the same no-win states and lousy design decisions that plagued almost every Sierra title. The last straw for me was probably around the time I found their little joke about Loom, which was one of my favorite games. It was basically Sierra taking a stab at Lucasfilm’s design philosophy, and it irked me. I never did complete the game, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
I just eventually gave up. You know, like with life.
This was the game that taught me I have absolutely no sense of direction. It was super cool and super Dungeons & Dragons, which was a pen-and-paper RPG I always wanted to play, but never got a chance to on account of not really having many friends because I’m a giant weirdo.
Booting up Eye of the Beholder for the first time was a revelation, because I could finally play D&D instead of just sitting in my closet alone, reading sourcebooks and pretending I had friends.
Unfortunately, the stepped slideshow movement and making my own graph paper maps proved far too daunting a task, and I just ended up getting lost and dying a lot.
It didn’t stop me from playing, though. Or from playing the next game in the series. Or the next one.
While getting lost and dying in each and every one of them.
I suck.
The tagline for this game was something along the lines of, “Who wouldn’t want to be 9 years old again?”, which was weird because I’d just been nine years old, like, 7 years earlier. But whatever; I was already nostalgic. Plus, this game looked like a freaking cartoon, which was amazing back in 1991. I bought it immediately.
It wasn’t as open as other adventure games, because you couldn’t just click to walk anywhere. You could only click on interactive objects and room exit points, but it was still a great technological achievement.
The story is about an evil corporation pumping sludge into the town’s water supply or something, and it’s up to Willy Beamish, his gang of treehouse pals and his pet frog Horny to save the day. And somehow win the Totally Not Nintendo (Nintari) world championship along the way.
I haven’t played it in years, so I honestly have no idea how well it holds up today, but I loved it way back when. I think it was even ported to the DS not too long ago. I should probably try to track a down a copy.
The creeping racism of Sierra really started to bubble up to the surface with some of the traffic stops in this game, but solving the main storyline was a lot of fun. It’s basically the same as the other Police Quest games, but with VGA graphics along with point-and-click gameplay.
I don’t remember any no-win situations exactly, but I do know you could screw up some of your traffic stops when they went to court if you didn’t exactly follow proper police procedure. Which is weird, because this was California in the ’90s, when proper police procedure was basically just, “Beat up all the black guys and then lie about it later”.
Which is kinda still the procedure, really.
The next game was called Open Season, which was “designed” by Daryl Gates and filled with racism and horrible FMV. Seriously, the game was awful. Just awful.
But PQ3 was still fun. I replayed it not too long ago, and still enjoyed it, even if I winced at a few characterizations.
Here’s a friendly tip to everyone on the planet: Don’t try to write in dialect. Ever. Just don’t.
Same as Wing Commander I, only better.
What else is there to say? It was the last great hurrah before Chris Roberts’ Hollywood envy would drive him down the dark, dark road of FMV. And then actually to Hollywood, where he made the Wing Commander movie that we do not speak of. Ever. Seriously, there’s nothing more to say here.
Besides, I KNOW THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TIGER’S CLAW WAS YOUR FAULT!
The third and final game in Lucasfilm’s WWII flight simulators was also its best. It took everything great about Battlehawks 1942 and Their Finest Hour, and cranked it up to eleven. (See? I told you it would.)
Better graphics, better sound, and experimental jets. The game had everything, and SWOTL was one of the last games my dad and I actively played together on a regular basis. I don’t mean we played competitively or anything. He’d play his missions and I’d play mine, but we’d talk about them later and it was basically like playing the game together.
It was pretty much the 1991 version of co-op.
I don’t really need to write anything about this one, do I? We all know Civilization. Everyone knows Civilization. We all live it every day.
But Sid Meier squeezed it into a few floppies and unleashed the first real taste of gaming crack to the world. You don’t just play a quick game of Civilization. You play epic games of Civilization that take as long as they need to in order for you to either vanquish your enemies or die trying.
Or maybe go for one of those namby-pamby non-military victories all the hippies seem to love so much.
Damn hippies.
Monkey Island 2 remains the gold standard for adventure game design. Non-linear progression, interconnected puzzles, brilliant writing, great characters, multiple interesting locations, constant new art rewards, etc…
This game had it all.
I still love it so much, I used it to propose to my wife.
This is probably one of the least known titles on my entire list. Released by Disney, it was an odd combination of flight sim, movie maker, and non-linear video editing simulator. Whichever area was its focus depends on who you talk to.
Some people think it was first and foremost a flight simulator; specifically, a stunt flying simulator. You played the role of a pilot working for a movie studio, and it was your job to pull off various stunts and get the shot for a film. Other people think it’s a movie creator, and all that stunt flying business is just one of the flim-making tools the game gives you.
Whichever camp you fell into, it was a really fun game. Unique in every way, its flight model was a little wonky and its editing tools a bit clunky, but playing it taught you a little bit about a lot. You had to learn light scripting to move “actors” around in the world at the right times, light flight-simming to get your plane to do what you needed it to do without exploding, and light video editing to put it all together.
Stunt Island also used a fully polygonal 3D engine with gouraud shading, and was almost entirely coded in assembly, so chew on that. It also produced what was I think were probably the first recorded machinimas in gaming. But I can’t prove that, so please don’t write me angry letters about your awesome Halo videos or whatever.
This Sierra game doesn’t really feel like a Sierra game. It kind of plays like one, but it’s actually really good. It’s also one of their lesser known titles, which is just inexplicable to me.
You play as Robin Hood, and you pretty much know the story from there. The game has the usual inventory-based puzzles of a traditional adventure game, but it also has little minigames like light archery and an medieval board game called Nine Men’s Morris, which I became so obsessed with, I made my own board out of a piece of plywood and the wood-burning kit I had because I was a weird kid.
The game also opens with a lyrical intro, although the lyrics weren’t sung by anyone because CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet, and Sierra would’ve probably just had Diana down in Purchasing sing it anyway because she was always going on about how great her church choir was or something.
Still, it was an original lyrical song opening a video game, which is the first time that ever happened, I think. Sierra would do it again the following year, but more on that when I get to ’93.
Lovecraftian horror meets the impossible geometry of 1992 polygonal characters. The true horror of this game obviously came from the LSD-infused visuals of Triangle Man beating Particle Cthulhu or whatever, but the rest of the game’s scares weren’t too shabby, either.
Beating Resident Evil to market by four years or so, Alone in the Dark was the very first survival horror game. It was slow and clunky and kind of goofy, but horror games without Elvira’s boobs in them were few and far between back in those days, so we took what we could get.
The sequels would get progressively ridiculous and awful as the years went on, so if you’ve ever had any curiosity about the series, play the first one first. It makes swallowing the spooky cowboy-shaped triangle people that come later go down a lot easier.
More Quest for Glory!
Again, it’s basically more of the same, but this time we leave the Arabian Nights setting and move on to darkest Africa. Except it’s called Fricana and is entirely populated by lion people. Which made sense, because there was a brief period in the early ’90s when an African setting was all the rage, back before new age “spiritualism” crept in and made the appropriation of Native American traditions by white people a thing.
One of the lion people’s names was Simba, who was even the son of the king if I remember correctly, but don’t get your hopes up. Nobody ever holds him up on a rock to a rising crescendo of Elton John or anything.
The whole plot revolves around stopping a war between the lion people and the leopard people that’s being orchestrated by an evil wizard who somehow isn’t named Jaffar. Do that, and you save the day and are ready to move on to the next Quest for Glory, which I never actually played.
Sorry.
I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but this was my first Wizardry game. It had some really great music, and creating my characters at the start was detailed and a lot of fun. Then, the story happened and I had no idea what was going on.
There was something about spaceships and intergalactic overlords, and then there was crashing on a medieval planet or something, and none of it made any sense, but I’m pretty sure it was about Scientology.
Fun game. Played it a lot. Got lost and died, mostly. Basically, it was Eye of the Beholder all over again, but with the occasional space alien rat monster.
Who knew that Star Trek would lend itself so well to the adventure game format? Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and its sequel, Judgment Rites, proved that the franchise could not only work as an adventure game, but was incredibly well suited for it.
As long as you pretended the atrocious realtime, starships-as-nimble-fighters battle segments didn’t happen, anyway. Because they were awful. just awful.
But everything else about the game was great. The puzzles even managed to mostly avoid traditional adventure game logic, which was probably a side effect of being confined to the sciencey-science of Star Trek.
Then again, that also means you ran into the occasional ridiculously obtuse puzzle, like one where you had to convert Base 10 math to Base 3 math, which I guess was this game’s version of Leisure Suit Larry’s “Prove You’re An Adult” quiz, but for nerds.
I looked forward to this Lucasfilm (which had now become LucasArts) game probably more than any other, including my beloved Monkey Island series. It was more Indy, which was always welcome in my Indiana Jones obsessed brain.
(Yes, I own a licensed Indy fedora. And a brown leather jacket. And a whip. Shut up.)
Everyone loves this game, and people are always citing it as the objectively best Indy game to date, which is kind of silly because The Last Crusade exists and is clearly the better game. Fate of Atlantis is by no means bad or anything, but everything it did, The Last Crusade did just a little bit better.
I’m pretty sure Fate of Atlantis was also the first game I bought on CD after finally getting a single speed CD-ROM drive, which means it was the first “talkie” adventure game I ever played, which is what they were called back when things like adding digitized sound to games was a huge deal. Some games did this with optional add-ons you could buy that were usually called Speech Packs. They were basically the precursor to the money-grubbing DLC we have today.
I remember downloading the shareware version of Wolf3D from a local BBS back in ’92. It was near the end of my junior year in high school, and the sysop of the Around The Clock BBS broke into chat after I dialed in, to tell me about this amazing new game I just had to try. Having played Castle Wolfenstein on my Apple][ and remembering it as a really fun game, I headed over to the Files section and started my download of Wolfenstein 3D Shareware. Then, I went and ate dinner. And watched some TV. And then went to school the next day, because these were the days of 1200 baud modems, noisy phone lines and non-resumable file transfers. That shit took time.
Anyway, once I finally got my hands on it and installed the thing, I was hooked. I burned through the shareware levels, and decided that I actually wanted to buy a copy. I’d never actually bought any shareware game before, seeing as how the demos were usually enough to warn me off of most of the crap that was out there, but Wolf3D was actually good. And I wanted more.
Unfortunately, my parents didn’t feel the same way about putting a check in the mail, or giving their credit card info to some unknown game studio they didn’t care about, so I had to either wait until retail copies started showing up, or for the sysop of the BBS to buy it…and then make it available in the secret file section.
Sadly, the rest of the game didn’t live up to those initial Shareware levels (which was often the case, back in those days, when the best of the game was shoved to the front to convince people to buy it), but it was still a good time.
This game pissed me off. It ran a lot slower than Wolfenstein 3D and had a much smaller view window! How could that even be possible?! Those guys are Origin just don’t know how to program!
Then, I played it. And I slowly realized that there was a whole helluva lot more going on in Ultima Underworld than there was in Wolf3D. I could look up and down, for starters. The graphics were also more detailed, with more textures and animation. Then there were the RPG stats, the combat, the magic system, NPCs, puzzles, etc…
It was Ultima, but underground. It was all those dungeons I’d crawled through years before in 1st person that looked like the scribbled line drawings of a coked up four-year-old with an awful drug habit for a toddler, only this time it was in “real” 3D. I was hooked, and I couldn’t stop playing it.
I’m still playing it. I go back to it every year or two, just to experience the Stygian Abyss all over again. And, thanks to the handy automap and full movement (as opposed to the stepped slideshows of, say, the Eye of the Beholder series), I can even manage to play it without getting lost and dying ALL THE TIME.
The perfect Ultima.
No game in the series before or (especially) after ever came as close to realizing a simulated world better than Ultima VII and it’s kinda/sorta sequel, Ultima VII: Part Two: The Serpent Isle. The story was great, the Guardian was a terrific villain, and all my old friends were back, but it was the world that got me in U7.
You could cut down wheat and take it to a mill, where you could grind it into flour that you could then add water to and make dough, which you could then stick in an oven to make bread. And that was just one of the many things you could do in the game.
NPCs went about their business, independent of the player’s presence. People had lives, the world had a schedule, and things mattered. Or they seemed to, at least. Which was good enough for me.
The only real downside to the game was the “realistic” way all the shit in your backpack would jostle around as your walked, thereby making the three-pixel key you needed to find later a damn near impossible task.
Also, getting everyone to sit the hell down in that damnable wagon was a pain in my ass I’ve still not fully recovered from.
But everything else? AMAZING.
Another little-known title that I loved is once again from Disney Interactive. Coaster really kindled my deep love of the marriage of art and science that is the rollercoaster, and I’m still thankful to it for that. The things used to terrify my as a kid, mostly because I weighed negative pounds and always felt like I was one corkscrew away from sliding under the safety bar and plummeting to my untimely death.
That never happened, though. Spoilers.
I was never very good at this game, which is something I’m now realizing was kind of a common theme with me and the games of my youth. Still, I loved trying to make legitimate coasters that would thrill the crazy panel of judges assembled in this game. But it was freaking hard.
You designed your rollercoasters on what to my soon-to-be-a-high-school-graduate mind was a veritable fully-realized AutoCAD workstation, but was really just a simplified bit of trickery. The hardest part of any coaster design, though, was connecting the final bit of track to the station.
Which is probably a pretty crucial thing to get right if you want repeat customers, but it was so infuriating, I usually just gave up and made a simple track with impossible G-forces that would pretty much kill anyone who looked at it funny.
The last Space Quest I played was also my favorite. I don’t know exactly why SQ5 clicked with me, but it was probably because I was a huge space and Star Trek nerd, so it hit all the right parody notes rattling around inside my dusty braincase.
From cheating on my final exam at the Academy, to doing time in the totally-not-the-millennium-falcon simulator, I loved every minute of it. Even the stupid fart joke every time Roger sat down in the captain’s chair of his garbage scow made me giggle like I was 12 years old.
I don’t remember there being a single no-win state in the game, either. Which was kind of amazing, considering it was a Sierra title. It’s probably the only real reason I was ever able to complete the thing, now that I think about it.
Okay, this one is a little bit of a cop-out, but I couldn’t choose one of these games over the other. They were my first (and last) willing forays into the FMV-crazed world of the ’90s (not counting Wing Commander and one or two other misadventures in really bad videoland), and my memory of both of them really is a flat tie.
The 7th Guest had the cooler atmosphere, but the whole thing being more or less just Myst dressed up in a Halloween costume really put me off. I don’t mind the occasional logic puzzle in an adventure game, but I don’t want to play a whole game entirely composed of moving chess pieces around and dividing up slices of cake evenly between demon ghost people. I don’t want to re-arrange soup cans in an obtuse word puzzle, and I absolutely hated how none of the puzzles ever told you what they wanted you to do, or even what the rules were.
Dracula Unleashed went the complete opposite route, had no logic puzzles at all, and was really just a choose-your-own-adventure VHS tape on a postage stamp-sized screen. It wasn’t all that fun and was pretty much an awful soap opera filled with awful soap opera actors in awful soap opera makeup, but I sunk a ton of hours into it, just to pretend like I was amazed by how my COMPUTER was playing a MOVIE.
We were easily amused back in those days.
The second Sierra game to feature a lyrical song in the intro was also the second of any game to feature a lyrical song in the intro, the first being Conquests of the Longbow. This time, you followed a bouncing ball over the lyrics, just in case you weren’t able to hear them in your head along the obvious melody. It worked, though.
The game itself is really, really short, but it was probably Al Lowe’s best game. It still has some of his trademark puerile humor, like when the town is overcome by a noxious cloud of horse farts, but most of it is solid, clever dialog in a setting we’ve always seen too little of in gaming: the old west.
Saying too much about the plot would spoil the few surprises it has in store, but it’s still entirely playable today and is as fun as it ever was. My favorite part was when the game actually let me be a pharmacist, which is also how it worked in its copy protection. The manual had a list of ailments along with their appropriate cures, which you then had to prepare in Freddy’s little laboratory according to the instructions provided. It was one of the better uses of manual-as-copy-protection, and making all the little pills and elixirs for the townsfolk was a lot of fun. For some reason.
One of the last Sierra games that will show up on this list is this one, the first Gabriel Knight game. The series took a nosedive into crappy FMV followed by crappy 3D and never quite recovered from either, but the first game still holds up.
It’s devoid of most of the negative trappings of Sierra games, although by this time, they were making CD versions of most of their games, which meant they had voice overs usually done by whoever wasn’t busy working on categorizing their nose mucous according to booger viscosity that day. Gabriel Knight actually had real voice talent though, even if actors hadn’t quite figured out how to do VO for a game yet.
BUT…Tim Curry was an awful Gabriel Knight. I love the guy, but he didn’t sound anything at all like either someone from the Deep South or a New Orleans native. Here’s a tip, Hollywood and game devs: New Orleans natives don’t sound like they’re from Gone With the Wind. The New Orleans accent is a whole lot closer to a New England one than it is to the typical drawl-ridden caricature of the typical southern accent.
The game is filled with voodoo and mystery, and they even managed to get most of the locations right. Or at least sufficiently recognizable as background art. They remastered it recently, too. I’d recommend the original over the remaster, but hey. Paddle whatever floats your dinghy, kiddies.
I’ve never loved this game as much as everyone else seems to love this game. It was fun enough, but it always seemed like it was trying just a bit too hard to be different or whatever. I don’t know; it’s an intangible thing.
Maybe I just didn’t dig the sideshow vibe or the road trip aesthetic, but something about it just never really clicked with me. It was good enough for 1993, had some great art and animations, and I still played it from beginning to end and even chuckled at most of the jokes along the way – but if I ever had to rate my top ten adventure games of all time, it probably wouldn’t make the list.
I know. I’m the worst.
Taking place after the events of Ultima VII, UU2 was more of the same from Ultima Underworld…but a LOT more of it.
There were more characters, more locations, more puzzles, and even more world to discover and explore, thanks to a faceted Blackrock gem in Lord British’s basement. There were even the internal drama-plagued politics of British’s castle to manage, with things like preventing (or encouraging) a worker’s revolt and stuff.
It had a lot more going for it than UU1, but it lost some of the original’s charm along the way. I’m not sure if it had more to do with me getting older, or maybe I was just getting burned out on dungeon crawlers, or maybe the damn game was just too big – but I never finished it.
And I’ve never really wanted to, either.
I’m awful.
There’s a reason this game launched a genre, and that’s because it’s ridiculously fun. It’s tightly designed, has great enemies, satisfying weapons, smart levels and AI bad guys who can piss each other off until they spend more time trying to murder one another in the shotguns than they do aiming their death barrels at your face.
Doom improved on Wolfenstein in every way. It brought dynamic lighting to the table, for example, so you could run into a fully lit room with a lot of ammo and the big, shiny key you needed sitting on a pedestal, and just know that picking it up was going to turn out the lights and unleash hell. Literally.
But even more than its single player campaign of shooting monster demon muderbots in the face with shotguns was shooting your friends in their faces with shotguns, because Doom introduced multiplayer to the world, which changed everything.
LAN parties suddenly became a thing. You’d drag your giant PC over to a friend’s house, where you’d meet up with several other friends who were all dragging their giant PCs, too. Then, you’d spend an hour hooking everything up through either a crappy Ethernet hub or ridiculous BNC connections, and another hour getting all the computers talking to each other. But then – eventually – you would launch the game and meet your friends on the battlefield.
And it was glorious.
Pizza, soda, chips, friends and Doom were all any self-respecting geek needed over a weekend, and Deathmatches quickly became regular after-hours affairs at many a workplace. Doom was everywhere, and if you weren’t playing it in ’93, then you either knew someone who was or you hadn’t been born yet.
DoTT narrowly missed my #1 spot for this year. It probably would’ve made it to the top, if someone had bothered to allow the CD-ROM version to BUFFER THE COMMON SOUND EFFECTS. Or maybe at least install them to the hard drive.
I have no complaints about Day of the Tentacle as a game. As a game, I love it. It’s perfect. The art style showed what you could accomplish with great art direction and true mastery over Deluxe Paint. The writing was top shelf, and the voice acting was great. The puzzles were fun and funny.
But those damn sound effects…
See, I had a single-speed CD-ROM drive back in ’93, just like a lot of people. This meant it was painfully slow to seek out information from the shiny plastic Phantasm disc, which translated to incredibly annoying – and lengthy – pauses every time it had to stop whatever it was doing to go load up the sound effect of, say, purple tentacle’s suction cup sloshing along the ground. Every. Single. Time. It. Happened.
Buffering the sound files would’ve fixed that. Loading them onto the hard drive would’ve fixed it, too. But noooo. I had to go buy a double-speed drive JUST TO PLAY DAY OF THE TENTACLE.
Which I loved.
But that mistake cost it the gold.
X-Wing was a space combat simulator set in the Star Wars universe that allowed me to pretend I was in the Rebel Alliance which was more of less everything I ever wanted video games to be.
I had long debates with a couple of friends over whether Wing Commander was better than X-Wing, and in my mind, they always lost. Sure, WC had more cinematic flair, but it was an arcade game. X-Wing was a simulator, with power management and locking s-foils in attack positions and other crap.
I played the hell out of this game, much more than I played either Wing Commander 1 or 2. And I didn’t just play it, either. I pretended while I played it, which is something I’m rarely able to do in a game anymore. But while I was playing X-Wing, I could make believe I was actually inside that cockpit. I was really pew pewing my lasers at TIE fighters. I was really the best hope for the Rebel Alliance.
I really was Luke Freaking Skywalker, dammit!
I can already feel your scorn, so just stop it. I put System Shock at the bottom because I’m rating these games from the years when I actually played them, not through the magic space goggles of retroactive internet peer pressure.
The simple fact is that the original System Shock was kind of a mess. The virtual reality segments alone should’ve been enough to exclude it from my list altogether, but 1994 was kind of a slim year, so it made the cut. Barely.
When this game came out, it punished my PC – which was fine, in a way. Or expected, at least. This was an Origin game, after all. They loved to punish inferior PCs.
But more than that, it took the Ultima Underworld engine and made it overwhelmingly complex. The screen was crowded with the interface, the level of interactivity with the world was high (a good thing), but actually interacting with anything was cumbersome and clunky.
Still, it had potential. There was a spark there that I could see somewhere behind the crowded pixel vomit on my monitor, so I played it. And I played it some more. And then a little more, determined to find the diamond somewhere in all that rough.
I never did.
Yes, I put U8 above System Shock. Grab your pitchforks and ham sandwiches, Internet. You march at dawn!
I actually enjoyed Ultima VIII, as much as anyone could. Sure, a lot of the design decisions were stupid – and I do mean a LOT of them – but it was still an Ultima, and I still wanted to get at the story, despite the awfulness of pretty much everything else.
The graphics were really pretty, at least for the Avatar, NPCs, and various monsters. The world art wasn’t all that impressive, and everything seemed to be drawn on the wrong scale, but the animations were amazing. They were 3D before PCs could do (realtime) 3D, so they were pre-rendered and smooth as a baby’s buttered butt.
But the jumping. And the drowning. And the minimal dialogs. And the nearly unreadable font. And the ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE was terrible.
Still, the story wasn’t bad. I liked how it made the player take the paragon of virtue they’d been playing as since Ultima IV and turn him or her into a monster. I liked the super complex magic system. I liked a lot of things.
So it makes the list. Above System Shock. Because I actually completed it, and I enjoyed my experience on Pagan must more than my time with Shodan.
So shut up.
Tex.
Everything I like about this game can be summed up with Tex Colburn. He was a Japanese tourist turned cowboy turned mercenary, which more or less describes Jagged Alliance in a nutshell. The game had great turn-based combat wrapped in a package that never really took itself too seriously.
The characters weren’t just interchangeable stat sheets. They had faces and voices and personality, which is why Tex sticks out so strongly in my memory. He was crazy, over the top, and ridiculous, which was everything I loved about this game.
The sequels would eventually move away from that sense of zaniness as the crippling angst of the ’90s slowly crept into every facet of popular culture and infected absolutely everything. For gaming, that meant things would soon get more serious, darker, and grittier, as the industry clamored to inject “realism” into every damn thing they could.
I got to be a wizard smiting my enemies by throwing explosive fireballs at them from atop a magical flying carpet. What’s not to love about that?
I don’t remember ever finishing Magic Carpet, but I also don’t remember not finishing it, either. Its levels were pretty short and sweet, with clear objectives that could easily be completed in a single sitting, so I don’t remember if I did all of them, or just a lot of them.
But they were all fun. The magic spells get bigger and better as you progress, your magic carpet moves at warp speed, and the landscape deforms around you as you blow things up.
The only thing I didn’t care for was the…I don’t know, Jell-O quality to the world? It’s hard to describe, but it was always just kind of…wiggly. Gelatinous, even.
It was weird.
After spending years watching him do cool things in Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum on the demo PC of my local software store, I finally bought my first Tex Murphy game. Yes, it was filled with FMV – but it was self-aware FMV. It knew how awful it was, or at least it seemed to.
It also knew how terrible its puns were, how ridiculous many of its puzzles were, and it just sort of satirized the entire adventure genre while still managing to be a compelling game.
The best bits were the little investigatory sequences outside of NPC interactions and puzzle solving. Creeping around someone’s apartment and rummaging through their stuff was good, clean fun. This was probably the first game I was able to actually slide open drawers, which was pretty revolutionary. People forget.
But its biggest achievement was that it finally – FINALLY – left Access Software’s ridiculous “RealSound” system behind.
For those who don’t remember (or who weren’t around back in the early ’90s), RealSound was a clever little hack of the PC speaker that allowed it to convincingly convey digitized sound files. I say convincingly, but really it was just awful. It might’ve been okay if sound cards had never been invented, but they had and Access kept insisting that they hadn’t. The problem with RealSound was that every digital sound that came through the PC speaker was cocooned in this awful high-pitched squeal that was like fingernails on a chalkboard to my young and fleshy ear holes.
It’s why I refused to play any Access Software games until they sorted that mess out and stopped forcing it on players who had perfectly good sound cards sitting in their machines, ready to not assault their delicate senses with high-frequency death squawks.
Which is why Under a Killing Moon was my first Tex Murphy game.
The end.
I picked this game up on a whim one day from the local software store where I was working at the time, having graduated high school the year before. It was a fun enough college job, if I ignored most of my co-workers’ aggressive geekery. I mean, I was a huge nerd myself, but these guys always wanted to out-nerd each other in terrible, which just led to awful, awkward moments too horrible to describe. So I won’t.
As for Al-Qadim, I didn’t expect much. I just wanted something to play, it was there, so I bought it. And it turned out to be a lot of fun.
It was an action RPG before there really were action RPGs because Diablo hadn’t been invented yet. It wasn’t the clickfest that Blizzard’s game would become, but it wasn’t turn-based, super strategy, either. It was quick, light, and…fun.
The best way to describe Al-Qadim is to compare it to the Quest for Glory series. Where QFG inserted an RPG into an adventure game, Al-Qadim inserted an adventure game into an RPG.
You should try it.
Boy, did the guys in the software store LOVE this game. They wouldn’t shut up about it. It was this and, if I’m remembering correctly, some fighting game on the Genesis called Eternal something or other. I guess it came out around the same time as Arena, and it’s all they wanted to talk about. Well that, and going to the BattleTech center in nearby Houston. It was their dream.
Eventually, I caved and bought myself a copy of Arena and was instantly swept up in its world. Sure, it wasn’t very detailed, a lot of it seemed awfully cookie cutter, and if I ever hear that one public domain sound file of a creaking door opening ever again, I’ll probably murder someone in the pancreas – but it was still somehow captivating.
But the funny thing about Arena is that I remember absolutely nothing about most of it. I couldn’t tell you a thing about the story, or even describe a single sidequest. I don’t remember my character, or any distinctive locations. I don’t recall anything special about the combat or the magic system or anything.
The only memory that really stands out is walking into a tavern while it was snowing, and having a little box of flavor text pop up describing how I shook the snow from my boots and trembled from the chill as I walked into the warm glow of the inviting pub. Or something like that.
That’s what I remember from all my time with Area. That one thing.
Oh, and all the stupid riddles.
They were awful.
For some inexplicable reason probably involving Luke Skywalker, I didn’t really mind the FMV in WC3. It just seemed to be a natural fit, I guess. The series had always used its cinematic flair as its main selling point, so adding in some actors in cheap costumes just seemed like a natural progression.
The game was still your standard Wing Commander fare, only this time with rudimentary polygons and a whole lot less action ever going on at once, to avoid melting your PC. The detailed, if chunky, bitmapped ships of the past were gone in favor of super low poly-count models, but it all still worked. It was still a Wing Commander game.
Right up until it turned Luke Skywalker into Grand Moff Tarkin as he WIPED OUT AN ENTIRE PLANET at the end of the game.
A planet that, it turns out, was entirely devoid of life and cities and settlements and even vegetation because the engine just couldn’t be bothered with any of that business. Kilrah was really just a big, grey rock in space, and you had to drop a bomb on its thermal exhaust port to COMMIT MASS GENOCIDE of an entire civilization.
Way to be a dick, Chris Roberts.
My kid didn’t like it very much.
Doom II was more Doom.
More LAN parties.
More carnage.
More chainsaw.
The only thing disappointing about it was how lame the super shotgun reloading animation was. I usually opted to stay with the standard pump action, because that classic cha-chink was just a lot more satisfying.
TIE Fighter was, is, and will likely remain the BEST Star Wars game ever made. Or, at least the best one with starship combat in it.
I didn’t see how this game would be any better than X-Wing. Who wanted to play as part of the Empire? Who wanted to fly weak, shield-less TIE fighters around, just to get exploded by a Porkins in an X-Wing? Nobody, I reasoned.
Until I played it.
Not only was everything about X-Wing improved, from the graphics (now sporting spiffy gouraud shading and light texture work) to the flight model, the between-mission bits and all that jazz – but LucasArts actually made the story work.
They made flying for the Empire fun.
And they didn’t go stupid with it. The game expertly walked a delicate line between having the player do evil things without ever actually feeling evil, or that any of your actions were unjustified. It was a great bit of imperial propaganda, and it worked.
If you never played it, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life.
Go. Play it now.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. By ’95, LucasArts was already on its way out, even if it didn’t know it yet.
The Dig was supposed to be this amazing, legendary collaboration between LucasArts and ILM and Steven Spielberg to produce one of the most visually impressive, emotionally gripping game narratives ever created.
Instead, we got Myst with dialog trees and pixel art. And way too much of the ol’ Showing Off Of What We Rendered in unskippable showcase animations.
The story was neither exceptionally compelling nor emotionally gripping. The much-touted collaboration with ILM didn’t amount to much of anything we hadn’t already seen in a ton of other games by the time the much-delayed and overhyped The Dig finally crawled out from under whatever alien rock it was hiding beneath.
It took itself too seriously while blissfully unaware of its goofier parts. The characters were shallow and one-dimensional. Nothing about it was special in any way. At All.
It was a massive disappointment for me, but I’m still putting it on the list of the year’s ten best games because I don’t know why.
Probably because I’m still waiting for it to get better than it never will.
Origin would be right behind LucasArts soon enough, in their own fall from grace. But at least they were still taking risks. (So was LucasArts; just not with The Dig.)
BioForge was a crazy blend of survival horror, awful combat mechanics, and adventure game tropes. But it did have realtime, texture-mapped character models with skeletal animation, which was new. I still remember online debates about whether or not they were pre-rendered like the backgrounds.
People can be pretty stupid sometimes.
BioForge had a really good story, tons (and I do mean tons) of exposition to digest in the form of mountains of text, and an interesting interface whenever you had to operate anything with your hand. It was similar to an older game I didn’t put on this list called Captain Blood (which I think got a sequel titled Commander Blood), in that whenever your character needed to interact with, say, a terminal or his PDA, you did it by way of actually moving his big sausage-fingered mitten across the screen. Clumsily.
It’s a weird game and definitely not for everyone, but it’s worth trying.
However, if you’ve come for the fork, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Just an FYI.
This was one of the first games I ever bought more for its multiplayer than its single-player mode. In fact, I hardly remember anything about the single-player game other than some kind of red robot things you shot at a lot.
Descent was kind of like a first person shooter where your body was actually a spaceship flying through caves and stuff. It was extremely disorienting until you got the hang of it, and the game’s AI was nothing to write home about, but the multiplayer…oh, the multiplayer!
It took some doing if you wanted to play outside of a LAN party, though. You needed, if I remember correctly, Winsock and Kali. Or maybe just Kali. The idea was to turn TCP/IP traffic into IPX/SPX traffic so the game could understand it, which the two utilities took care of through your 9600 baud modem. Or a 14.4 if you were lucky.
A lot of games didn’t like this approach, but Descent worked remarkably well with the setup, so it was a great candidate for online multiplayer insanity.
And it was insane.
And also tons of fun.
Before I even knew who Harlan Ellison was, before I’d even read the story this game was based on, and years before I would ever exchange words with the man himself (who is one of the kindest, most gracious people on the planet as long as you don’t piss him off), I picked this game up on a whim. It had a cool title, the screenshots looked decent, and the blurb on the back of the box intrigued me.
I had no idea what I was in for.
The game is cruel, the antagonist AI is brutal and condescending and bitter in a way Shodan never was (voiced by Ellison himself, who always does an amazing job with narration). It’s hard to describe much of the game without ruining everything, but just know that it will mess with your head.
And you heart. And soul. And everything in between.
With any luck, it’ll cause you to go pick up one of Harlan’s anthologies. I’d recommend The Essential Ellison and, if you can find it, Edgeworks Vol. 3, which contains a collection of some of his best essays.
Trust me.
Dune 2 might’ve started the RTS revolution. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans continued it, but Command & Conquer made it something special.
You knew you were in for a treat when you were installing the game, which was normally an activity about as exciting as tying your shoes reaaaalllly slowly. But C&C (the game, not the Music Factory) did something different. It made the installer part of the experience. It had graphics and voice and made it all seem super HIGH TECHNICAL!
The game itself was pretty meh, though. I don’t remember anything about the story other than Tiberium was a big deal, and the harvesters were stupid. Oh, and grenade troopers were the shit.
Beyond that, it’s all a blur. But a fun, killing-my-dad-in-epic-battles kind of blur.
This was THE mech game in a completely uncrowded field of all the mech games that didn’t exist until after Mechwarrior II showed everyone how it was done.
Your mech was fully customizable to the point that made some die hard pen-and-paper BattleTech fans all itchy in their nether regions because this kind of laser can’t go there, or that kind of missile shouldn’t be that powerful or whatever, but no one cared.
We were too busy being thrilled by one of the most immersive combat sim experiences ever. You had to worry about heat dissipation (unless you were on a cold planet). You had to manage jump jets and weapon sets and firing orders. And your mech constantly talked to you in this cool sci-fi computer voice, keeping you abreast of everything that was going horribly wrong that was about to lead to you exploding all over the battlefield.
It was a magical time.
The next to last gasp of the dying LucasArts adventure game, Full Throttle was a tour de force of Tim Schafer’s lunatic dreams. And it was awesome.
Well, except for the stupid realtime bike-fighting sequences that should never have been there, but let’s not dwell on the negative.
The game had a rockin’ soundtrack, the BEST pixel art / Deluxe Paint animations ever created for an adventure game up to that point, and made great use of larger than life characters in both style and stature.
Shame about it being so damn short, though.
If you haven’t been able to tell from some of the other entries on this list, I was a little bit of an enormous Star Wars fan growing up. Dark Forces was Doom in space, which was weird because Doom was technically Doom in space, but it was in the kind of space that had marines and shotguns, whereas Dark Forces was the kind of space that had laser blasters and stormtroopers.
The map design was also different than Doom, or other FPSs of the time in that it made an effort to actually make some kind of sense, rather than just being a big maze filled with battle arenas for blowing things up. It had those, but they were wrapped in the illusion of real places, so it didn’t (usually) feel like you were running around a video game level.
It felt like you were blasting stormtroopers in real places.
Plus, it had a three dimensional, rotating point model of the Death Star. THAT YOU COULD WALK THROUGH.
It was fantastic.
Warcraft II perfected the RTS genre in a way that Dune 2, Command & Conquer, and even the first Warcraft hadn’t managed. It had a fun story that didn’t take itself too seriously, varied units and locations, and you could even fight sea battles over patches of oil.
Just like real life.
It was also a terrific multiplayer game. It didn’t care much about latency and the slow ping speeds of dial up modems, so you could play without too much worry that your buddy would wander up and kill you right in the face before you ever even saw him, just because his modem could squawk a little bit faster than yours.
Three daboos out of four zug zugs.
Yes, my top game of 1995 is one a lot of people have probably never even heard of because it came out in ’95 and wasn’t called Quake. But you know everything Quake did that id gets credit for inventing?
Future Shock did it first.
Full polygonal 3D environments and free, three-dimensional movement. Mouselook. Fully 3D models (with the exception of ammo pickups and weapons). Vast, open spaces and vehicles.
Wait. Quake didn’t even do those last two.
Terminator: Future Shock didn’t deliver the smooth, polished ballet of death that Quake would the following year, but what it did, it did well. To this day, no game has quite managed to capture the sense of verticality that Future Shock offered. It knew you were moving in three dimensions, and it exploited that.
Enemies would appear above or below you as often as they did at eye level. You’d have to navigate tiny catwalks up towering scaffolding, palms sweating as you looked down, hoping not to fall.
Plus, you got to shoot terminators. So, like. Bonus.
People only call Battlecruiser 3000AD an awful game because no one has invented a better word that defines the bad, terrible, ridiculous, horrible, broken, overhyped, underwhelming, buggy, broken mess that was Star Citizen.
Er, I mean Battlecruiser.
Sorry, but it’s hard not to confuse the two if you were around back in the ’90s and active online. The proposed feature sets of both games are remarkably similar, as are the egos and arrogance of their creators. Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts is a only more humble than Battlecruiser’s Derek Smart in the same way that one of these squares is a slightly different shade of green than the others.
I’m putting Battlecruiser into the bottom slot, but still consider it one of the best games of 1996 because of what it was supposed to be, and what I desperately wanted it to be. I tried really, really hard to find the positive in this game when it came out, because I identified with Derek Smart at the time. Back in ’96, I was also an arrogant loudmouth who was the best at everything, thought everyone else on the planet was a moron, and was constantly getting into online pissing matches with the world.
Which is basically still me today, but tempered by a couple of decades worth of failure and self-loathing.
I hope Star Citizen can buck the odds and be everything that Battlecruiser wasn’t, but I have serious doubts. While everyone is busy throwing money at his promises, people tend to forget that Chris Roberts doesn’t really have a very good track record.
The only games he developed of note while at Origin were the first few games in the Wing Commander series. WC had a great narrative with a branching storyline, but outside of that, it was pretty lackluster. It was a Hollywood tentpole movie that distracted you with really cool set pieces so you wouldn’t pay much attention to what wasn’t going on.
Wing Commander’s flight model was basic. Every dogfight became a war of just turning in tighter circles than your enemies, and by the time Roberts’ last entry in the series came along, the game was more about cheesy FMV than anything to do with what the player accomplished in a starfighter.
After he left Origin, he started working on Freelancer, which he touted as doing a lot of the same things Battlecruiser didn’t, and that Star Citizen is promising. What the game ultimately became was fun enough, but nowhere close to what was promised. And even then, Freelancer only ever finally materialized in any form once he left Digital Anvil – a company he founded that went belly up after two decent, if mediocre releases (the other being Starlancer).
After that, he thought he’d make some more movies and started a studio that failed until Kickstarter became a thing and he found a way to milk the nostalgia cow to fund his newest project.
Which is exactly like his last project…which didn’t deliver.
Time will tell – and I hope Star Citizen is as amazing as its enormous list of promised features and seemingly bottomless budget suggest – but I was around in 1996. I’ve heard these same promises before.
I’ve played Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Speaking of bug-ridden releases, the second game in The Elder Scrolls series was pretty awful, too. It was more of the same from Arena, but everything was a little more focused this time around. A little more polished. The narrative was a bit better, the world a little more dense, a little less spartan.
But it still felt hollow. Artificial.
Much of Daggerfall felt like a computer put it together, ticking off boxes of required parameters as it cobbled together random dungeon layouts laid on top of a procedurally designed overworld.
Which is exactly what it was.
I’m not sure how much – if really, any – of Daggerfall was hand crafted by human designers. I’m sure some aspects of it were, but none of it felt that way. Nothing about the game felt “real” in any sense. It was all just random (or procedural, or procedurally randomized), and it lacked any sort of the you-are-there sense that, say, the Ultima Underworld games managed to capture.
It’s still easy to sink dozens of hours into the thing, though. Which is what I did, and why it’s on this list.
Originally titled Circle of Blood here in the states, the first game in the Broken Sword series was a terrific return to what the industry had already labelled a dead genre back in ’96: the point-and-click adventure. It’s a genre that has experienced many phantom deaths over the years, but that keeps coming back like either some kind of noble Lazarus figure, or a tattered old whack-a-mole in the corner of some dirty traveling carnival. Depending on your point of view.
Personally, I love the genre – and Broken Sword hit all the right notes. There was murder, an overarching conspiracy, great art and animation, intriguing characters, etc…
I played this game from start to finish, and couldn’t wait for more. It wasn’t the best game of ’96 by any means, but it was a really, really good one.
Another generally beloved game stuck pretty far down on my list is this little crescendo to dying misogyny, and I’m probably not going to make many friends by saying that. Or by putting it in the #7 spot for this year.
I’m sorry, but Duke Nukem 3D was not a very good game. The shareware version was fine – kind of great, even – but after that, things went downhill fast. The levels were poorly designed mazes, the ripped off catchphrases grew stale, and everything about the game just got boring. Or plain bad.
People argue all the time that Duke was an homage to the over the top action heroes of ’80s action movies – and maybe they’re right. But I was around back when the game came out. I was very active online, interacting with other gamers and developers, following this trend or that one, and I have to tell you…anyone who thinks that the character of Duke Nukem was anything other than the absolutely sincere, most flattering version of himself that George Broussard sees whenever he looks in the mirror is fooling themselves.
Plus, Levelord was a creepy ass dude.
The only originality in the game came from its inventive weapons – which made multiplayer a blast, even if everyone always limited games to the shareware maps. The engine was impressive for its level of interactivity and destructability, but it’d take the skilled hands of Any Other Developer to fully realize its potential (more on that next year).
So, yeah. Duke3d is fun, but it’s not great. It threw its best ideas at players in the shareware version, which probably should’ve just been the full release.
Less is usually – and this is especially true with a character like Duke – more.
I’m a huge Discworld fan, and a great admirer of Sir Terry Pratchett. I think he’s one of the greatest voices of our time, and will go down in history as the British version of Mark Twain. (Which is how you have to describe Pratchett to Americans who’ve never heard of him.)
The first Discworld game didn’t make my list because it wasn’t really very good. It wasn’t bad or anything, but it wasn’t at all memorable, and the interface made it a chore to get through. Its sequel, on the other hand, is one of the better adventure games of the ’90s – which is saying something, when you look at some of the other gems from the decade.
Discworld 2 went the way of cel animation, which was the downfall for a lot of other games that tried it. Fortunately, this game pulled it off and managed to convey the humor of the novels in game format for the first time. I’ve never really been a big Rincewind fan, but playing him here was fun. Interacting with other characters was fun. Everything was…fun.
The story was a mashup of Reaper Man and Moving Pictures, if you’re following along with your Pratchett books at home. There are a lot of nods to other novels in the series, but you’ll definitely recognize RM and MP as you play.
Which is something you should totally go do. Right now.
Back in ’96, I was away at college in a strange town without many friends except for the staff at the nearby Hasting’s, which was an entertainment store that sold everything from comic books and movies to video games and collectibles. It also rented games, which was nice.
One day, I walked into the store and bought my very first 3D accelerator, along with a shiny new 3D-accelerated game. For testing purposes, you understand.
The card was a 3DFX Voodoo. The game was Tomb Raider.
The experience was amazing.
The dithered colors, chunky textures, and low framerates of the past were…well, a thing of the past. Textures were sharp, colors were crisp, and the framerate was buttery smooth. Everything just looked better, played better, and ran smoother than it ever had before.
The game itself was pretty lackluster and nothing I thought was too fascinating outside of the weird way you could make Lara do a split coming out of a handstand from dangling over the edge of a wall.
Which was pretty fascinating, at the time.
Ah, memories.
The birth of the action RPG. The clicking simulator. The shallow, empty, almost narrative-free, nearly stat-less roleplaying game that never had any right to be good arrived in 1996.
And it was brilliant.
Nothing at all about Diablo sounds appealing. You run around a mostly empty town so you can dive down into one randomly generated dungeon to spend hours clicking your mouse button like a coked-up lab rat hammering the reward level in fruitless pursuit of its next fix.
But it worked.
For whatever intangible, crazy reason, it worked. And the multiplayer was even better, whether it actually made the game any more compelling or just because misery loves company, it was tons of fun.
Hours. Upon hours. Clicking. Click, click, click…
What more is there to say about SimCity 2000 than that it’s a very good city management sim? It was orders of magnitude more complex and compelling than SimCity 1 had been back in ’89, and would remain the perfect game in the series until SimCity 4 came along in 2003.
Everything SimCity did, SimCity 2000 did better. Or actually did at all, because SimCity 1 was pretty damn basic. In fact, a lot of what SimCity 2000 does is what I imagined SimCity 1 was doing (that it totally wasn’t) when I played it years earlier. Back in the ’80s, you kind of had to insert your own imagination into the games you were playing, in order to fill in the gaps left by the developers and the technology available at the time.
I think that’s one of the reasons classic games were so good, actually…
But never mind any of that now. It’s 1996 and SimCity 2000 does all that pesky imagining for you.
What a time to be alive.
If Civilization was a brilliant game, then Civ 2 was its smarter, prettier, funnier, more interesting cousin who never got invited to Civ 1’s parties, but who somehow just started showing up anyway and upstaging everyone there.
I’ll never know how many hours I logged in Civilization 2 because I can’t count that high.
It’s a time sink of a game; it’s a black hole into which one pours every waking moment into either actively playing it or thinking about playing it, or planning how you’re going to think about it the next time you play it.
It’s infinitely customizable, infinitely replayable, and infinitely satisfying.
It’s digital crack.
Quake remains the best FPS ever made, and I’ll have words with anyone who thinks differently.
It doesn’t have much of a story, there are no characters to speak of, and the maps are abstract and meaningless. There is no point to anything you do in the game, apart from the satisfaction you get from killing things and winning.
Which is why it’s so good.
Among all the other standard “innovations” to the genre that Quake doesn’t have include, but are not limited to:
Quake is the essence of the first person shooter, distilled and concentrated into its purest form. It’s a ballet of death, and it is exquisite.
Running down corridors, constantly in motion, constantly swiveling your view, shooting a volley from your nailgun at a distant enemy before rocket jumping up to an otherwise inaccessible platform, spinning on your way up to shoot another rocket down at your pursuer before righting yourself as you land and lob a grenade around the corner to catch the guy running up the stairs to frag you.
It was – and still is – a thrilling, almost zen-like experience.
I still play Quake regularly today, as it’s one of my mood games. Which is not at all weird or anything, right? I mean, surely you have mood games, too.
Mine are:
Don’t talk to me when I’m Quaking.
You wouldn’t like me I’m Quaking.
I never really liked Fallout. There, I said it.
Feels good.
There’s nothing really wrong with Fallout, I guess. The box was really cool, which is what enticed me to buy the game in the first place, so the marketing department gets a big thumbs up. That’s something.
But the game itself? Meh. I’ve never understood what other people saw (and still see) in this game. It had horrible graphics, even for the time – and not in a technological way. The art design – outside of the Fallout boy and the manual, really – was just muddy and brown and ugly. Nothing about the wasteland of Fallout 1 was remotely interesting. It was just the same thing, over and over.
The combat was also ridiculous, with companions that would murder you in the face as often as they managed to hit an actual enemy, and the whole thing was driven by a random number generator so absurd that you could have the best gear and still manage to be mortally wounded by a cockroach.
The story was its saving grace, I guess. But I wouldn’t really know. I played it a lot, trying to figure out what everyone was making such a fuss over, but I never finished the damn thing.
And I don’t intend to. So don’t paw at me with your petty little guilt.
This crazy little game from Microsoft – back when they made games – tried to be a blend of Civilization and Warcraft II, but never managed to be either. Instead, it became its own animal which carved its own unique niche in the RTS genre.
The campaigns were kind of stupid and pointless, but the multiplayer was fantastic. I couldn’t even come close to telling you how many hours I poured into this game, playing epic campaigns against my own father. He was really good at AoE (but was awful at Warcraft II), so he enjoyed having a fighting chance against me.
This even matching of our skills led to several stalemates along the way, the most memorable of which was one game where we literally exhausted all the resources of the map while managing to annihilate both of our armies. We spent the last hour of the game trying to hunt down our remaining peasants so we could have them fight to the last man with hammers and pitchforks.
Until he managed to find THE LAST TREE on the planet, and was able to use it to craft a spear or something, which made short work of my last couple of useless villagers.
Einstein said it best, when describing that epic match: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Smart guy.
I’ll keep this one short and sweet: the game was great, the FMV was awful.
Really, you’d think being made by LucasArts would give the upper hand to a Star Wars game featuring full motion video. I mean, the Lucasfilm Archives were literally right next door. It’s not as if they had to just cobble together fan made costumes or anything.
But they did.
And all of it was bad. The acting, the lighting, the direction, the costumes, the makeup, the special effects – all of it was terrible.
It kept me from ever finishing the game for years. YEARS!
And that’s all I have to say about that.
In the skills hands of any developer who wasn’t 3D Realms, the Build engine was capable of producing good games, with this one being the best of them. Blood has catchy one-liners and the same homage to B-movies as Duke Nukem 3D, but it wasn’t stupid about it. Because it wasn’t fueled by George Broussard’s wish fulfillment fantasies, Blood actually managed to be original and clever without just ripping off everything that had come before it.
It was a low budget horror movie come to life, with you as the star. It was dark and gritty in the way of all things ’90s, but it didn’t fall into the black pit of angst like so many other titles of the decade. It was funny, fun, self-aware, and difficult.
It’s still very playable today, despite there not being any source ports available for it.
Just remember how I said it was hard. It’s not 1997 anymore, kids. Adjust your difficulty levels accordingly.
Ever wonder what would happen if you took those CGI guys in that Dire Straits video from the ’80s and stuck them in a video game set in the ’70s? No? Well, someone did.
Which is how Interstate ’76 was born.
It’s a combat driving sim set in an alternate ’70s America where you drive around and shoot things and wreck things and blow up things. The soundtrack is funky. The characters are funky. The funk is funky.
It’s a weird game, and probably not for everyone. But if you can manage to get it working properly on modern hardware (even the GOG release has issues), you’ll be in for a unique experience that has never been replicated, even by its sequel.
Which kinda sucked, by the way.
Back in ’97, id Software took everything that made Quake amazing, looked at it for a minute, thought about life while considering the futility of man, and threw all of it into the garbage can.
And then they made Quake II.
In every way technically superior to Quake, it was vastly inferior in all the ways that actually mattered. It injected a ridiculous and stupid “story” into the franchise, then – probably as an over-correction to criticisms regarding Quake’s schizophrenic level design – tried to make all of its maps interconnected, with backtracking and multiple objectives and just a bunch of lame crap nobody wanted.
We wanted more Quake. id tried to give it to us later, by putting more Quake into Quake 3 – but by then, it was too late. The damage was done. So then they tried to give more Quake 2 in Quake 4, which was probably the worst id game id ever didn’t make. That one came to us by way of Raven Software, who completely missed the point and developed the world’s most unnecessary and unwanted sequel. And then somehow made it even more boring and awful than anyone could have predicted.
I still played a lot of Quake 2, though. And it’s grown on me over the years – but I can’t help but wonder what the game would’ve looked like if Romero hadn’t left after Quake, and id hadn’t begun its slow and steady decline into irrelevance.
It took years – decades, even – but someone finally realized that playing the bad guy could be fun. And boy, was it ever fun.
Dungeon Keeper charged the player with taking on the role of the evil bad guy at the end of every RPG plot. It relished being evil in a good, clean, campy sort of way that all those goody-two-shoes heroes could never hope to understand.
This was a game that not only let you literally slap your own minions, but actively encouraged it as being motivational for the little bastards. It had you abduct good guys, then convert them to evil in your torture chambers – which was really pretty forward-thinking of Bullfrog, seeing as how the U.S. wouldn’t figure that out until years later, after waterboarding became everyone’s favorite party game at blacksite prisons.
You could abandon enemies in your cemetery, and they’d arise as skeletons. You could create warlocks and vampires, and then give everyone a big casino to play in to let off some steam by way of giving you back some of their salaries when they lost. And you could rig the games.
Its sequel only got better, but more on that later. For now…
IT IS PAYDAY.
A severely graphically underpowered latecomer to the FPS scene, Outlaws was overlooked by a lot of people who just couldn’t go back to 2.5D, sprite-based gaming. Which is sad, because they missed out on the best Clint Eastwood simulator ever made.
Probably the only Clint Eastwood simulator ever made, but still. It’s a fun game.
Crank the difficulty up to the maximum, and get ready to be murdered in one or two hits – FOR REALISM. It makes the game a lot more fun. Trust me.
Or just keep it on easy and blast your way through the levels like an unstoppable death machine on a quest to the next cutscene.
I hope you plant better than you shoot.
The last great Monkey Island game was actually the first Monkey Island game without Ron Gilbert. However, enough of the old LucasArts staff were still around to make sure that it didn’t turn out awful. (That wouldn’t happen until the next game.)
Decidedly different in tone (not to mention art style) than the previous two games, it stands on its own as a unique entry in the series. In some ways, it’s superior to even Monkey Island 2 – but only in flashes, really. Like when your crew mutinies via song.
The rhyming insult sword fighting was pretty lame, though. And the ship combat was objectively awful. But most of the characters and jokes still worked, and Guybrush finally got a voice, which was nice. Dominic Armato perfectly captured the voice I had for him in my head, which almost never happens.
That said, there’s something to non-voiced adventure games that you just can’t replicate with a full cast. Some jokes – some narrative styles (namely, Ron Gilbert’s) – just work better as text. Some methods of writing dialog only really work when read, rather than spoken.
Which is just one of the reasons I’m so excited about Thimbleweed Park.
Yes, I know MUDs and BBS DOORS had been around for ages, but Ultima Online was the first graphical MMO to catch on. And it was amazing.
Until it wasn’t.
Eventually patched with enough Band-Aids to cover a small continent until the original game was all but unrecognizable, the early days of Ultima Online were something special. I was one of the many people who signed up for the first beta, and I was hooked from that moment on. (Until it started to suck, anyway.)
In a way no other game to date has ever managed to recapture (although one came close, but more on that next year), Ultima Online really felt like a second life. Britannia was a new world to not only explore, but to live and work in. I spent hours upon hours mining and working on my blacksmithing skills to the point that I started to wonder how good I’d be at making swords in real life, if I’d only devoted a fraction of my time to actually learning how to be a blacksmith. I’d probably have a killer beard by now, at least. And one of those cool leather apron things.
Sadly, the game eventually devolved into the min/maxer paradise something like WoW would later manage to exploit to its full potential. People stopped caring so much about living a virtual life, and started focusing more on just being the biggest PvP badass, more obnoxious than the last.
Origin tried patching the game to fix different exploits while expanding the PvP nature of the game, until one day it just wasn’t fun anymore.
But it took a good while before any of that happened. For much of ’97, I was a happy resident of Britannia, content to forge crappy pieces of armor on the outskirts of town before trying to sell them at the ping-crippling bank in Britain.
VENDOR! BUY! BANK! GUARDS!
So fleshy
Oh, god. This again. HEYA!
Look, I don’t like this game. I’ve never liked this game. I bought it when it came out, then spent the next 15 years trying to like this game. I even recently went back and forced myself to play through it from beginning to end, which was a misery so exquisite that I documented my (hilarious) pain every step of the way.
It still amazes me that, to this day, people hold up Baldur’s Gate as some kind of shining example of great storytelling in a game. Yeah, maybe if you played this when you were twelve and thought that one episode of Power Rangers was emotionally powerful, but there’s absolutely nothing special about BG’s story. Go kill the big bad guy. The end.
Sure, there’s a little more to it and there are some kinda/sorta interesting sidequests that you’ll do for your companions just so they’ll stop their INCESSANT CRYWHINING, but none of them are very special. If you want a version of Baldur’s Gate that’s actually good, go pick up Pillars of Eternity. If you want something unique and thought provoking, pick up any Ultima from 4-7.
I’m only including this game on my list for the massive amount of time and energy I sunk into the damn thing, trying – desperately – to understand what was so amazing about it. I never did.
Also, shut up, Imoen.
I enjoyed Starcraft, but not in the way that a zillion internationally competitive professional gamers did. It was Warcraft II in space, which wasn’t a bad thing. I liked Warcraft II, but Starcraft never really clicked with me. It wasn’t boring or anything, but I guess I just didn’t really dig the sci-fi setting.
I don’t actually remember much about the game itself, other than that I played it and thought it was fun enough. The multiplayer was enjoyable, and it gave us the term Zerg Rush, which gamers still use today, so that was something, I guess.
Strangely enough, I would really get into its sequel years later. I’m not sure why that one grabbed me when Starcraft didn’t, but maybe I just didn’t have my head in the game back in ’98. Or maybe the oversaturation of the genre just had me burned out at the time. I dunno.
It’s a good game, and worth playing. But never go head to head against a Korean if you do.
That’s just good advice, right there.
I still have no idea what this game had to do with Descent. I’m sure it was explained at some point, but I’m reasonably certain it just came down to the marketing department trying to create a franchise that never really happened.
Descent: Freespace one of the last, great space combat sims, and it was fantastic. The only thing better than Freespace was its sequel, which is still being played and improved upon to this day, thanks to a great community.
The story in this one is nothing to get excited about, but the dogfights were amazing. The graphics were great, the game was smooth and fast and fun. Everything was just top shelf, all the way. Plus, no crappy FMV anywhere. Bonus!
If you want to play it today, make sure to grab FS2Open and a copy of Freespace 2, so you can play the original in the new and improved engine the community has been working on for years.
I’m probably not going to make many friends by putting Thief so far down on this list, but there were better games in ’98. I’m sorry, but there just were.
Thief was great fun and brought excellent stealth-based gameplay to the FPS genre, but it wasn’t great. Thief II was, but we’re not there yet. Right now, we’re still in ’98 and Thief is still trying to figure itself out while also competing against some landmark titles. Because 1998 was a pretty great year for gaming.
All of the things that Looking Glass would eventually perfect in the sequel were there in the original, but they just didn’t really come together well enough to put Thief in the top 5 games from ’98. It’s in the top 10, though, so please don’t murder me with a water arrow to the knee or anything.
I apologize.
This one makes me sad.
Years before Unreal was released, I was super involved in tracking its development. It promised to be the FPS I’d been dreaming of for years, so I found a community online and joined in. I hung out in IRC and got to know most of the developers, wrote articles for the game’s top fan site, and met a lot of people I’m still friends with today. I got to play early builds of the game as it was coming along, since I was trustworthy enough that a few of the devs would send them my way as long as I promised not to tell. (Since almost everyone that was at Epic at that time is gone now, I figure the statute of limitations on my silence has run out.)
Unreal held a ton of promise, and was brimming with potential.
Then it came out, and it wasn’t very special. Which made me sad in my feelings hole.
Some of the maps were brilliant – Bluff Eversmoking will forever be one of my favorite levels in any game ever – but the game itself ended up being more of a technology demo than anything else. The Unreal engine could do some amazing things, but the kinaesthetics of the combat just felt…off. Floaty, even.
It’s hard to describe.
The one super shiny spot in the whole game (for me) comes from an enemy type called the Krall. They have a big spear they’ll hit you with that launches you high into the air, which I thought would be a brilliant thing to have happen in a FPS. Which is why I campaigned to the dev team to put something like that in the game, even though my idea was to have them actually impale you first (which actually made it into the throw animation). At any rate, my “flinging beasties” made it into the final game, even though Bleszinski would later swear it was his idea from the beginning and that they’d always been there. (Except I knew that they hadn’t, because I’d played all those early builds.) It’s not like I was going to sue Epic for “stealing” the dumb idea I begged them to put in the game in the first place, but I guess you can never be too careful.
Fortunately for Epic, the Unreal engine would eventually go on to eclipse id’s offerings for licensing to other developers, and the 2000s would come to be absolutely brimming with Unreal-powered games.
So everything worked out.
Back before every online multiplayer FPS became either Call of Duty or Battlefield, or a clone of Call of Duty or Battlfield, there was Starseige: Tribes. And it was wonderful.
I sunk oodles of time into the game, and I don’t even know how much a single oodle is. It’s probably a lot, though. Because I played the absolute hell out of this game.
It had all your standard game modes, which were nothing special. Capture the flag was probably the most popular, but it was how Tribes went about everything that made it amazing.
There were vehicles to pilot – including transports for your team. There were bases to maintain, areas to protect, and defenses to build. There were multiple character types that radically changed the way you played, and what tools and weapons were available to you. There were even jetpacks. JETPACKS!
The weapons were almost universally awful, but that’s what made them great. No gun was very accurate – and the most common weapon fired a fairly unpredictable disc that took forever to make it to a target. You had to really practice with it to become any good, but once you’d mastered it, you became deadly.
Oh, and there was the skiing.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, too bad. Go google it or something, because it was awesome.
I know what you’re thinking. How is Half-Life not my #1 game of ’98? Well, it’s pretty simple, really.
I loved the game. It was immersive, had a unique way of actively presenting its narrative, played out in maps that felt very “real” and made sense, etc… It also had terrific AI (for the marines) that would work together to try and flank you or lead you into an ambush. Everything about the game was terrific.
But there were other games I liked more in 1998, that I still go back to today on a regular basis. Games that made more of a lasting impact on me, and have stood the test of time. But most importantly, they were games I put a lot of time in back when they came out. They impressed me by doing something very new, very different, or very, very well.
I loved Half-Life. I just loved a few other games more.
Having developed a reputation over the years as one of the worst games ever made, including Trespasser in my #3 spot might seem like a weird choice. And maybe it is. I dunno. I can never tell, really. I’m a weird dude.
To get the obvious out of the way, I’ll acknowledge up front that Trespasser failed to deliver on a lot of its promises, which wasn’t helped at all by the fake screenshots they used to market the game that showed off dynamic shadowing from tree leaves on the backs of bump-mapped dinosaurs wandering the jungle. None of that was in the game.
And it was buggy and strange and goofy.
But it was also way ahead of its time, which is something I recognized even then.
Trespasser was the first major FPS to have a fully-realized physics engine, which no one had ever seen before. I used to spend time in the game just dropping things down stairs to watch them bounce and roll realistically to the ground. The sound engine was materials-based, and used something they called Digital Foley (I think), which would blend sounds on the fly, so that when you hit a wood plank against a tree trunk, it sounded differently than when you hit it against a metal post.
The much-maligned “rubber arm” that was the game’s main method of interaction with the world was, I admit, a silly mess. It took time to get the hang of, and even once you were really good with it, waving your hand around like a fleshy arm tentacle still looked pretty stupid.
The dinosaurs were also stupid – even the raptors. The AI was crap, even though the dinos would attack each other. Sometimes. They also weren’t animated in any traditional sense. The game used inverse kinematics to move them on the fly, which was supposed to allow them to navigate complex terrain and react realistically to wounds. But mostly, it just made them limp around like drunk reptilian idiots.
So why is this in my top 3 for ’98? Simple.
I LOVE THE GAME.
For all its many faults, the game is incredibly immersive. Once you let yourself get into the game, you are in its world. You’re creeping through Site B, dodging dinosaurs and interacting with the environment in very tangible ways. It’s tense, exciting, and rewarding.
It’s a great game. You just have to give it a chance.
I promise I’m not trying to be hipster cool with some of these more obscure games. I’ve just been an avid gamer for a very long time, so I’ve played a lot of shit that you probably haven’t. That’s not me trying to be cool or anything; it usually just came down to being bored and picking up a new game some random Saturday because I didn’t have anything else to play.
Which is how I found Heart of Darkness. Better than Another World (also by this game’s designer) or Flashback (not by this game’s designer, although a lot of people think it was, for some reason), or even Oddworld, Heart of Darkness is the pinnacle of the cinematic puzzle platformer.
You play a kid whose dog gets kidnapped by some evil dark shadow wizard dude (technically by a purple Q-Bert with a mucous control problem that mistakes the dog for you and take it to his master), and its up to you to get him back. You start the game by watching a really badly animated pre-rendered cutscene that involves you getting in the transdimensional rocketship you just happen to have lying around in your treehouse, and you fly away to save the pooch.
The in-game graphics are actually much, much better than the pre-rendered cinematics, with excellent animation and brilliant pixel art. It’s probably the best pixel-based animation I’ve ever seen, to this day.
The game is imaginative, challenging yet forgiving, and is a pleasure to play. I’m also pretty sure Heart of Darkness was the very last cinematic platformer, which was a short-lived genre with only a handful of games to its credit, but I really liked it. The only game of recent memory that comes somewhat close to the style is Shadow Complex, which is more Metroid than Oddworld.
I wish GOG could get their hands on this game, because tracking down a copy is a pain if you don’t already own it on CD. But it’s totally worth picking up, if you can find one.
This one shouldn’t come as a shock if you’ve been following along with my list up to this point. I’m a huge adventure game fan, and this was the last, great adventure game of the ’90s, and one of the best ever made. Period.
I’m not even going to tell you why this game is so good. It was remastered recently in a great way that’s now the preferred way to play the game. If you’ve never played Grim Fandango, I suggest you stop reading this right now. Go away, grab a copy of the remaster, and enjoy.
YOU ARE WELCOME.
I sometimes think I’m the only person who ever played this game, and it’s not hard to understand why. During a time when games like Noah’s Ark 3D and Captain Bible were on store shelves, a game with “Angel” in the title probably got overlooked by everyone who didn’t enjoy horrible religious games.
Which is a shame, because Requiem is religious in the same way that The Prophecy was a heartwarming tale about the power of prayer. You play as an angel named Malachi in a dystopian future where other angels (called The Fallen, naturally) have taken over Earth and enslaved humanity because dudes just weren’t righteous enough or whatever. It’s sort of a sci-fi heretical bit of first person shooting fun, and it’s a surprisingly good game.
Plus, you can shoot lightning from your palm and kill your enemies with plagues of locusts. Oh, and you get to turn people into pillars of salt, too. Tell me what other FPS lets you do that.
I fell in love with this game right from the start. It was like Bullfrog’s old Theme Park, but this one was actually really good. (Not that Theme Park was bad, but it was pretty basic.)
Designing coasters and placing rides and shops was only part of the fun, though. The real joy from the game came from screwing with your guests by sucking every last penny from their wallets in the most devious ways possible. Want to sell more drinks? Build a french fry stand. Then, jack up the prices on sodas next to it because salty fries make people thirsty. Is it raining? Quickly! Triple the price of umbrellas at every umbrella stand.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was deceptively simple, yet brilliantly complex. Mastering the interconnectedness of the game’s different systems was the key to becoming a true theme park tycoon, which took time and experimentation.
Or you could just create coasters that would murder ever single rider stupid enough to trust you not to kill them.
Whichever.
Just like Dungeon Keeper, but better. Dungeon Keeper 2 featured an improved engine, better graphics, and just more being deliciously evil.
Of course, I’m probably in the minority on this one. So no big shock there. But the general consensus among Internet People is that DK2 is vastly inferior to DK1. I have no idea why they think this way though, because they usually just go on about how the first game had the better “atmosphere” or something.
A more cynical person might take this to mean that they played the first game when they were young and more impressionable, so it made more of an impression on their squishy brain jelly. But maybe they’re right. I honestly wouldn’t know, because I love both of the games – I just love DK2 a little bit more.
Maybe it’s because I like the “dumbed down” gameplay the haters like to deride, but I’ve never noticed any drastic changes that made the sequel any easier than the original. In a lot of ways, it actually gets significantly more difficult.
Then again, I could just be stupid.
Yes, I played and enjoyed Ultima IX. I know a lot of people didn’t. Heck, most people didn’t – but its reputation for being awful is usually just in retrospect, in that same misguided way that People Who Weren’t There genuinely think E.T. was the worst game ever made. (It wasn’t.)
U9 is certainly not without its flaws. It’s got a lot of them. But it gets a lot right, too. And it’s actually a pretty fun game, if you can get past the snobbery.
But I’ve already written at length about my thoughts concerning this over-despised diamond in the rough, so I won’t rehash those arguments here.
Just trust me that it’s not as bad as people say.
Or don’t trust me, and just go read this.
Yet another resurgence in the “dead” point and click adventure genre, The Longest Journey was a masterpiece. Lengthy, difficult (sometimes to the point of absurdity…I’m looking at you, rubber ducky puzzle), with a terrific narrative and great characters, this game had it all.
It also understood what a lot of adventure games seem to forget: that, while the Big Reward for playing an adventure game is getting to the end and experiencing the story, the little rewards that keep you motivated to keep playing come in the form of New Art. The Longest Journey had tons of locations, all distinct and varied in dramatic ways. You were always discovering new places to see and new people to talk to, almost every time you solved a puzzle.
Then, it took things even further by offering two different worlds: the dystopian future where the game begins, and a medieval fantasy kingdom where it eventually leads. It mixed things up, kept everything fresh, and was great fun from beginning to end.
It wouldn’t get a sequel until years later, which would turn out to be a really good game in its own right, but The Longest Journey was the proverbial lightening in a bottle. I don’t think we’ll ever see its kind again.
I suck at this game. And yes, I used the present tense there because I still suck at this game. I sucked at this game in 1999, I sucked at it every time I’ve tried to play it since 1999, and I still suck at it today. Even then new remaster is too hard for me, which is just ridiculous. I feel like an idiot.
Yet, there’s something strangely compelling about Homeworld that always draws me back in. I’d love to play it while binge-watching Battlestar Galactica again, but the bastards took it off of Netflix and I don’t know if it’s ever coming back. But the “going home” and “last of humanity” vibe that Homeworld captures just seem like it’d be a perfect fit for a sci-fi series that does the exact same thing.
We need to talk about that damn asteroid mission, though. Or the other one with the alien base on the far side of the sector with a zillion miles of radioactive death dust between it and you. Or how, if you screw yourself in Mission 3, you might not feel it until Mission 9, but by then it’s too late, so you might as well start over and TRY AGAIN NEXT YEAR.
Story of my life.
Ah, Unreal Tournament. Sure, the weapons still felt floaty, but the Flak Cannon was super sweet. The maps were all tightly designed for multiplayer madness, too. CliffyB’s “Curse” and Myscha’s “Deck 16” were my two favorites, and I spent countless hours murdering my friends and co-workers in them. Good times.
The story was stupid; basically, it was just Mortal Kombat in space and the big bad guy was a robot (or maybe that was UT2003? or 2004? Hell, I lost track.), but nobody played UT for the single player story. All that business was just prep work for the real show, which was exploding your friends with a fully loaded 8ball gun, or tossing a well-placed flak grenade around the corner.
Unreal Tournament managed to recapture a bit of the magic of the original Quake, which is something id would also try to do when they released Quake 3 a month later. But that game had jump pads, which were just stupid.
I love this game way more than should be legal. Unfortunately, it somehow managed to be both ahead of its time and behind the times simultaneously, like it had one foot in the past and the other in the future. It was ostensibly a survival horror game – a genre people were already tiring of – with all the standard trappings: 3D characters over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, hunting monsters out to destroy humanity. It had all that, sure, but it had a whole lot more.
It was the first game I can remember with cloth simulation, which means The Stranger’s coat billowed in the breeze and reacted to the wind. Any wind. Seriously, the thing would flap around like a panicked woodland creature if anyone so much as breathed in its direction. But more than the rudimentary coat physics, the game had brilliant lighting.
Nocturne wasn’t just 3D characters over 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, because those backgrounds – while pre-rendered, still had physical geometry reflected in the game world. (Which you could see when you used the night vision goggles and went into 1st person mode.) This allowed the game to have something for light to interact with, so everything would cast realistic shadows – and boy, did it ever work. Nocturne – to this day – has some of the best use of lighting and gorgeous shadow effects of any game I’ve ever seen.
The super cool look of the laser sights (er, I mean the ectoplasmic targeting system) along with the flashlight beam through fog was just icing on an already cool cake.
Nocturne also had a great narrative, and was a sort of prohibition-era X-Files. You play as The Stranger, the top field agent in a secret government organization known as Spookhouse, which was started by Teddy Roosevelt after he encountered a monster on a hunting trip. They’re charged with protecting the world from the forces of darkness, which leads the player through ancient castles to a small Texas town on the back of a train, to fighting the undead mafia from out of a speakeasy in Chicago.
Terminal Reality would eventually develop a Notta Sequel in the Bloodrayne series, but it just wasn’t the same. And we won’t even talk about the Uwu Boll movies.
I went back and forth with whether to put Freespace 2 into my #1 spot for 1999, or give it to another equally amazing game. Both games deserve the highest honors I can’t give them because I’m just some nobody writing a stupid blog on the internet, but in the end, Freespace 2 just wasn’t my game of the year for ’99.
Not that it didn’t have every right to be, though.
I still play this game, and it’s still the best looking space combat sim to date, thanks to a little thing called FS2Open and the brilliant community of modders and developers that have kept the franchise alive and kicking all these years. The game looks better now than it ever did, and it’ll look just as good ten years from now, as long as people keep working on it.
Which I’m sure they will, since people have already been working on it for 16 years now. I have no reason to think they’ll suddenly stop any time soon.
If you’ve never played the game, you owe it to yourself to grab a joystick, head over to GOG.com to buy a copy, then download FS2Open and experience what is, hands-down, the best space sim ever made.
That’s still being made.
Every glimmer of potential I saw in System Shock that wasn’t fully realized back in ’94 was finally perfected in System Shock 2. Sure, the game was ugly even by 1999 standards, but the graphics really don’t matter in this game. They’re serviceable and get the point across, and that’s about it. What saves the game is its atmosphere. It’s so well realized that you forget how blocky the character models are, or how stiffly everything moves as soon as you’ve been playing for five minutes.
This was the game that truly started the Shock “series” that would be continued through the Bioshock franchise, while bleeding into everything from Deus Ex to the Thief games and everything in between.
The story is pretty standard sci-fi fare and I’m not going to spoil any of it for you here, but it’s not what the story is about that grabs you. Because, like with any good story, what matters is how it’s told.
And System Shock 2 is told brilliantly. The player has immediate agency in the world, there’s an omnipresent sense of tension and foreboding dread, it feels like time is never on your side. There’s action and retreat and careful planning. There’s stealth and hacking and…well, you get the idea. There’s a lot of stuff to do.
Shame about the weapon degradation, though. Nobody has ever liked it when games pull that crap.
I know Planescape came out in 1999, but I bought all three of these games in 2000, and all three of them get the bottom slot on my list. Baldur’s Gate II managed to improve on its lackluster, overrated predecessor (but not by much), I’ve never been able to get into Planescape Torment despite spending hours upon hours upon hours of my life trying to, and Icewind Dale was…kind of fun.
I think I liked Icewind Dale because it dropped most of the heavy-handed and almost universally awful narrative and dialog of the Baldur’s Gate series to focus on the one thing those two games did well: the combat. Still, even that was hampered by the ridiculous D&D ruleset, so you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…the Infinity Engine. I guess.
I know Planescape Torment is good. I believe everyone who says it is. I know its writing is vastly superior to any of the other Infinity Engine games. I know all of this, but for whatever reason, I just can’t get into it. I get bored with it after way too long trying to not be bored with it, and eventually give up. Then, I’ll give it another try the following year, just in case I’ve, I dunno, grown or something. As a person, I mean.
This has been going on for 16 years.
I still don’t get it.
For some reason, whenever Jack Thompson was running around like a millennial Chicken Little and yelling about “murder simulators” – he never once mentioned this game, which was odd because that’s exactly what Hitman is. A murder simulator.
Ever wanted to be a cool assassin, silently taking out targets without leaving a trace? Well, good. Because you can do that in Hitman.
Or you can run around and murder everyone in sight, if that’s more your style. Take off and nuke the planet, sort of thing. It’s the only way to be sure.
The series would take a few iterations to fully come into its own (before eventually losing the plot entirely and devolving into the generic dick-waggling nonsense that categorizes present day AAA titles), but the first entry still occupies a warm spot in my cold, black heart.
I never did like all the clone business, though. It got in the way of my murder simulating.
This is an awful little game. It’s an action platformer and is entirely competent at what it does – and I liked it a lot when I was a horned up twenty-something with little regard for societal norms or gender equality – but, in retrospect, it was pretty bad.
The game itself was good, mind you. It had nice platforming, with decent combat mixed in. But good lord, everything else was just dripping with either blatant misogyny or sexual frustration. Or both. (It’s usually both.)
Granted, it’s a game under the Heavy Metal brand, so what it is shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. But still, going from the start of the game fully clothed to barely wearing a thong and nipple strap by the end as your clothes slowly get ripped off is kind of ridiculous.
Oh, and of course you play as an extremely busty female with SUPER ACCURATE boob physics and an extremely shiny butt. But that’s not all. Giant alien mosquito queens attack you with their six fully rendered mammaries flapping in the breeze, and by the later levels, full on H.R. Geiger machine porn comes into play.
You’ve never seen machinery so phallic. If you ever decided to play this one, trust me when I say that you’ll never look at piston the same way again.
The third and final action platformer this year was Mister Fancypants’ Alice. After cutting his teeth at id software on classic titles like Doom and Quake, American McGee figured that he could make himself into his own brand, so he just started throwing his name onto everything he could.
American McGee’s Alice takes place after the events of Everyone Else’s Alice, which has led American McGee’s Alice to be locked up in an asylum where she’s, I dunno, in a coma or something. What distinguishes American McGee’s Alice from Other Alices is how he pretty much just vomited Tim Burton all over everything and called it a day.
American McGee’s Alice is more or less Wednesday Addams, who has to trek back into Wonderland to track down American McGee’s White Rabbit while fighting American McGee’s Evil Cards and hanging out with American McGee’s Chesire Cat on her quest to stop American McGee’s Queen of Hearts.
This takes her on a journey through American McGee’s Tim Burton’s Wonderland, where she hops on mushrooms and does freaky things with a knife until she wins the game.
The End.
One of the first fully 3D RTS games I remember playing was this gem from Massive Entertainment (which would later become Ubisoft Massive and not ever make anything too spectacular again until Far Cry 3). Apart from the 3D thing, its biggest claim to fame was doing away with most of the standard conventions of the genre to focus solely on tactical command.
No base building. No resource harvesting. No tech tree climbing. Just pure, tactical fun.
The story is also really engaging, especially for an RTS game. Until Ground Control, no one had really figured out how to pull off injecting a narrative into an RTS, although Command & Conquer tried really hard. Bless its heart.
It wasn’t until Warcraft III came along a couple of years later that anyone managed to do a better job of creating compelling reasons to continue playing an RTS that didn’t involve just blowing everything up. In Ground Control, you quickly become invested in the story and what’s going on with the characters, so you keep playing to see it through to the end.
And then you do it all over again, from the other guy’s perspective.
This was the first PC adaptation of my favorite angst-ridden, no-one-understands-me-but-I’m-actually-super-awesome-and-just-have-to-hide-it-because-hey-look-I’m-in-my-20s-and-the-world-doesn’t-make-any-sense-anymore-but-I-can-drink-and-have-casual-sex-now-so-I’ll-just-focus-on-that-as-if-no-one-else-in-the-world-has-ever-been-through-this-before-me pen and paper RPG series. As such, Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption did a pretty good job of capturing the essence of everything I just described via ridiculous hyphenation.
The story is predictable fare for the Vampire crowd, and spans a few centuries from the Crusades to the present day. Although, to be honest, the game kind of falls apart once you’re in the modern world with guns and everything. It not only just feels a little off, but your companions are horrible with firearms. They’ll mow each other down without blinking, which just causes them to compulsively suck down blood packs like they were candy, just so they can stay alive a little longer to shoot back at your other companions who shot at them in the first place, then the whole filthy cycle repeats itself.
But when it’s good, the game is a lot of fun. It’s a bit like a more sophisticated Diablo, with a decent story, multiple characters, and full 3D.
Oh, and the marble floor in the Prince’s castle was just AMAZING to look at, back in 2000.
So there’s that.
Completely outdone in every way by its sequel, the original NOLF still stands as one of the best games of 2000. It relied a little too much on cheesecake for its heroin in this first entry, but by the sequel, she wasn’t just a hot chick in a shower scene who could also shoot bad guys. She was a fully realized (well, as much as one could be in 2002) character who just happened to be a spy who just happened to be a woman.
But back in 2000, she was a WOMAN who just happened to be a spy. Which is totally different in subtle, but important ways. Not like that mattered much to me back when I played it originally and just thought it was a crappy Austin Powers knock-off.
I was wrong. The only thing bad about NOLF was the LithTech engine, which still hadn’t managed to figure out proper kinaesthetics yet. The animations were a little janky, the models were pretty rough, and the guns just felt…off, in some weird way.
But it made up for it in the story, which gradually breathed more life into Cate Archer than the beginnings of the game would suggest. The gameplay itself was hit or miss, with occasional spot-on moments blending gadgets and gunplay, to complete misses with forced stealth sections and often unclear objectives.
It’s still a fun game, and if you can put up with a few of the worse missions, it’s well worth your time. Or you can skip ahead to the vastly superior sequel and just tell everyone you’ve been a fan for years.
No one will know.
Remember Nocturne, one of my top games from last year? Well here it is again, with the closest it ever got to a sequel.
Back in 2000, The Blair Witch was a huge thing. Love it or hate it, it was a phenomenon – and three PC games were developed to capitalize on its popularity. Two of them were stupid and horrible, and should be forgotten to the desert of time. But one of them – the first one – was actually really, really good.
All three games used the Nocturne engine, but only Volume 1: Rustin Parr was developed by Terminal Reality, who managed to tie the license into their own IP, thereby making Nocturne a sort of unconnected prequel to Blair Witch. And then this game, which I guess would be a sequel to that prequel, was still a prequel in its own right.
Taking place decades before the events of the movie, the game explores the aftermath of the Rustin Parr incident, which played a big part in the film’s backstory. Elspeth Holliday, a minor character from Nocturne, takes the starring role in Rustin Parr, and heads out to Burkittsville Maryland to explore the Black Hills while investigating the Blair Witch’s role in Parr’s murder spree.
There are plenty of jump scares in the game, but where it achieves true success is in the atmosphere. The woods are as foreboding as any haunted woodland area could possibly be. It’s filled with odd sounds and spooky happenings, including invisible children’s feet kicking up a pile of leaves as they run by in the background, giggling.
I’m not going to ruin anything by going into any more detail than that, because you really should track down a copy and play the game yourself. It’s more of an adventure game than survival horror, and while some of it can be pretty clunky at times, the end result is a complete package of creepiness that shouldn’t be missed.
Thief II figured out what the series was supposed to be about: a thief. The first game suffered a bit from being a little schizophrenic in its approach, probably because no one had ever created anything like it before, and the development team wasn’t sure which ideas would stick. So they just threw a lot of crap at the wall and scooped up whichever bits dribbled down the slowest.
As a result of taking what they learned from the first game, Thief II is a much more focused experience. It’s more refined and polished and tighter than its predecessor, with a greater emphasis on what made that game work while almost completely abandoning everything that didn’t.
It also took a few cues from System Shock 2 (as did the #1 game on my list this year), and ended up tying everything together into a cohesive masterpiece.
No other game has ever pulled off being a Medieval Thief like Thief II. Not the first game in the series, not the third, and definitely not the fourth.
Play it.
If you know anything at all about PC gaming, you saw this one coming.
Deus Ex is the perfect game, but it was also lightening in a bottle. Attempts to recapture it have proved fruitless, with varying degrees of success. I actually enjoyed Deus Ex 2, but most people despised it for a number of reasons, some entirely valid, some not so much. Human Revolution got a lot more right than DX2, but also got plenty wrong. And it was super yellow, for some reason.
If you’re not familiar with the original, I don’t know how you look at yourself in the mirror without crying. It’s got grand conspiracies, ultra cool sci-fi guys in trenchcoats, nanotechnology, and – most importantly – the complete illusion of choice.
Every level boils down to one of only a few approaches the player can take to complete it, but it does such a great job at feeling like you could do anything you want, it doesn’t matter. Stealth, combat, negotiation, hacking: they’re all there at your disposal, but which one you’ll be able to take will depend on how you’ve built your character, which makes repeated playing a rewarding must.
One thing Deus Ex did that I don’t think it gets enough credit for – and definitely something that hasn’t been implemented in any other game trying to recreate the Deus Ex magic – was how artfully it blended player skill with character skill.
The sniper rifle is the best example of this. If you’re a sufficiently talented player, you can use it effectively without every putting any skill points into it. The game shows this by having the the sight wobble all over the damn place in unpredictable ways, but if you’re quick enough, you can still pop off a perfect headshot when the crosshairs wobble in just the right way. Or, if you’re not very good at wobble sniping, you can invest some points in the skill and your rifle will become as steady as a rock sitting on a bigger rock that’s sitting in a pit of bedrock.
I don’t think I need to gush any longer about Deus Ex. If you haven’t played it by now, you’re probably never going to, no matter what I say. Which would be a shame, because you’ll never be able to fully appreciate what Ion Storm accomplished back in 2000.
One last thing, though. Warren Spector usually gets all the credit for Deus Ex’s success, while Harvey Smith gets entirely blamed for its sequel’s failures. This is unfair for a lot of reasons, but mostly because Smith was as integral to the design of DX as Spector was, and the blame for DX2’s design decisions should be focused more on the changing market than anything else. Yes, it was a victim of so-called “consolification” – but as you’ll soon see as I get deeper into the new millennium, this was just the way things were going.
Cross platform titles quickly became the standard after Deus Ex 2. It just had the misfortune of being one of the first. (Smith would later make up for DX2 with Dishonored, which is probably the best Deus Ex game that isn’t a Deus Ex game.)
This was probably the most difficult list to put together, because 2001 was a pretty rotten year for PC gaming. I don’t know if it was the collective shock of September 11, or maybe every developer on the planet just assumed Y2K was going to melt everyone’s PC so why bother making new games, but for whatever reason, the year kinda sucked.
For some reason, I always get this game confused with Omikron: The Nomad Soul. I have no idea why, because Oni and Omikron came out two years apart and are nothing alike, but I guess one starting with On and the other with Om is enough to fry the delicate circuitry inside my fragile braincase.
While Omikron was David Cage’s first game back when he was still making games with things like actual gameplay rather than QTE-powered B-movies or whatever, Oni is a third-person action-adventure cyberpunk beat ’em up. And it’s pretty good.
I wasn’t completely burned out on anime back in 2001, so the art style still seemed kind of fresh. These days, it seems like every artist under 30 only learned how to draw manga characters, so the style is absolutely everywhere. Everything looks the same, whether it’s an emotionally moving RPG or a quirky dating simulator involving inanimate objects growing penises and asking salt shakers to the prom. I’m totally over the style at this point, but what can you do? That’s what I get for getting old, I guess.
Anyway, Oni had (for the time) a cool, semi-unique setting in that it was basically an anime movie brought to a PC game. Shogo tried to do the same thing a few years earlier, but it was clunky and horrible. (I know a lot of people liked it, but the old LithTech engine really bugged me, for some reason.)
Oni focuses mostly on melee combat that’s very polished and feels great, which is good because the rest of the game feels pretty awful. Guns are fairly useless, since aiming is wonky and ammunition is so rare it might as well have been manufactured from the crystallized tears of chronically depressed moon unicorns, so you rarely use them. Enemies use them though, and with pinpoint accuracy from miles away, which sometimes makes it very difficult to get close enough to them to kick punch their spleens.
The story is fun enough and intriguing, the cyberpunk vibe is strong (which is something we got a lot of after The Matrix dropped in ’99), and the game on the whole feels very polished. The environments are pretty spartan and the map design falls victim to the Everything-Is-A-Square aesthetic that defined ’90s shooters, but if you can look past the rough bits, Oni is well worth your time.
Destructible environments!
The big selling point for Red Faction was its proprietary GeoMod technology, which allowed for fully destructible environments in the game. Casual destruction was nothing new for FPSs though, but GeoMod wasn’t limited to just destroying “actors” (objects and such) in the game world; rather, it was capable of allowing the player to destroy the actual geometry that defined each map. Do you need to get through a door, but don’t have a key? No problem! Just shoot a rocket and blow a hole in the wall.
Which would’ve made GeoMod amazing, if it had actually done any of that. In reality, the only things you could destroy were pre-configured to allow destructibility, so if the game wanted to force you into gated progress via keycards, then that’s what you had to do.
In certain situations, GeoMod seemed pretty amazing, though. But they were rare in a game that was otherwise filled with all the standard tropes of the genre. It was a neat bit of tech when it worked – or, more accurately, when it was designed to work – but at the end of the day, Red Faction turned out to be a very standard FPS.
It’s not bad or anything. Some of it is good fun, but if you go in expecting the fully destructible environments as advertised, get ready to be disappointed.
Saying that Max Payne drew heavily from John Woo movies and The Matrix is a bit like saying a fetus draws heavily from its parents DNA. Simply put, Max Payne would not exist without them. Sure, the story of The Matrix might not be not at all similar to the hard-boiled cop drama of Max Payne, but the gameplay is all Neo, all the time. Hell, they even called the game’s main feature Bullet Time (slow motion dodges), which was what the Wachowskis called the technique when they “invented” it.
That doesn’t make it any less cool, though. Even if it does get pretty ridiculous really quickly.
The only way to trigger the Bullet Time effect – which the game basically forces you to use all the time – is to initiate a dodge move. Max will jump backward to land on his ass, forward to land on his stomach, or to the side to slide onto the floor. It’s all very cool and impressive the first 800 times you do it, but by the end of the game you start to realize this dude can’t go 5 seconds without launching himself into a dramatic flop to the ground.
It’s fun, but more than a little silly.
Unfortunately, while the gameplay is decent, the story is horrible. Well, maybe not horrible, but wholly cliched and told through ham-fisted dialog so on the nose and ridiculous that just thinking about it makes me wince. Which, now that I think, is probably why Max has that constipated expression on his face through 95% of the game.
The first attempt to reboot id’s Wolfenstein 3D franchise was an entirely competent, if totally mediocre shooter. It doesn’t really do anything wrong, but nothing it does right is particularly memorable.
You fight your way out of the titular castle filled with Nazis, then do some stuff, then fight your way back into the castle and kill the big bad guy. There are mad scientists and ancient relics, along with mystical junk like the undead and oh god, I’m bored just talking about it. The shooting is solid, and the standard FPS gameplay loop is still as satisfying as it ever was, but everything else about this game is a dialtone.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein had decent graphics for the time, so that’s something I guess. I enjoyed it as much as I could during a bleak year when almost nothing worth playing came out, but in retrospect, nothing about it was remotely special or interesting in any way.
It would take a couple more years before anything about this Wolfenstein succeeded in being something special, but I’ll get to that when I make it to my top ten games of 2003.
Oh, hey. Check it out! It’s yet another resurrection of an extinct genre that’s been declared dead more times than the damn Highlander. Runaway was notable for its excellent art and animation, which took pre-rendered characters and stuck them into hand drawn rooms with a cel-shaded aesthetic. And it all worked pretty well.
The puzzles were fun, and the game constantly rewards the player with new art, which is nice. The story is decent and interesting enough to keep you playing, although much of the humor falls flat. I don’t blame the designers, though. Most of the time, it’s an obvious failure of translation, since the original game was developed in Spain.
I’m not sure why international developers don’t spend more time and effort on proper localization. I mean, it’s fine to translate a game’s dialog and everything, but a simple translation is never going to capture the intent of the language. Good localization takes into account native speech patterns, common grammar, and colloquialisms. But that almost never happens.
Usually – and I suspect this was the case with Runaway, as well – a game just gets a simple literal translation and that’s it. In a best case scenario, the dialog and narrative might be written by someone who speaks multiple languages, but that’s as good as it gets. However, if developers would just spend the extra time to take that one more step and send the script to a native speaker to doctor a bit and tailor it to the natural language of the region, then jokes wouldn’t fall flat. Dialog intended to be emotionally moving wouldn’t come off as clunky and weird. Things would just work as they were intended (and probably do, if you speak the game’s native language), and everything would be fine.
But that almost never happens, so we end up with games like Runaway. Which, while still an entirely competent and decent enough game, falls short of being anything great simply because of poor localization.
Empire Earth is best described as Age of Empires 3D, or maybe as Age of Empires meets Ground Control. Whichever.
There’s really not much more to say about EE than that. It doesn’t do anything remarkable other than letting you progress from the stone age all the way to a sci-fi future with ray guns and probably hoverboards and self-drying jackets or whatver. It doesn’t do anything particularly amazing, and rarely does anything terribly wrong.
It’s not as polished as AoE, and not as focused as GC, but for what it is – a developer’s first attempt at bringing the historical RTS into the world of 3D, it’s not bad at all.
There are certainly better games of a similar nature out there, but this was 2001. Pickings were slim.
Clunky combat and abysmal localization are about the only things wrong with this version of Ultima IX.
To many gamers, the Gothic series picked up where Ultima left off – or, rather, where Ultima never got to go because EA led the series into the Stygian Abyss and threw away the key. And, in most respects, they’re absolutely right.
Gothic drops the player into a highly interactive world simulation that gamers hadn’t seen since Ultima VII, only it does it in all three of the big Ds. Sure, the animations are a little janky and the combat can be rage inducing, but everything else about the game just screams Ultima. In a good way.
If you like classic RPGs and are looking for something that’s not too old, but not too new, you can’t go wrong with Gothic. Give it a whirl. Tell Diego I sent you.
It’s a shame about the dialog, though. It’s downright painful.
Ah, Tribes 2. The best iteration of the series, this one got everything right.
More or less just a graphical upgrade from the first game, Tribes 2 also featured improved net code and server browsing, better character management, and increased support for the mod community.
My favorite way to play this game was on a server with – and I could be remembering the wrong name here, so please don’t disc-blast me in the face if I am – the Renegades mod installed. After playing on one of those servers, it was impossible to go back to vanilla Tribes 2.
Renegades added tons of features to the game, mostly in the form of base building and defensive enhancements, and it was glorious. I had more fun running around placing various turrets and keeping everything repaired than I did with assaulting the enemy base and capturing flags.
If you’re a modern gamer with no point of reference, you can imagine Tribes 2 + Renegades as Team Fortress 2. It’s basically the same game, but with more jetpacks and less ridiculous DLC.
This one almost made my top spot this year, but it lost by hair. Or a parsec. I really don’t understand the difference.
Surpassed only by Freespace 2, Edge of Chaos is the second best space combat sim ever made. Also, it’s unlike any other space combat sim ever made.
The thing that most separates the Independence War games from the space sim pack is the use of inertia. Most space combat sims are basically just WWII dogfights without gravity, which is fine. That’s a lot of fun, and I love it. But when you throw full inertia into the mix, things get MUCH more difficult. And interesting.
If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you know how combat works in this series. You fly in one direction with your main thrusters, while using manuevering jets to turn and fire on enemies. You’ll keep flying in one direction until you do another burn in the opposite direction to slow your ship. They space physics in Independence War (both 1 and 2) are top shelf.
I prefer the sequel to the original by a fairly large degree, which is why the first one didn’t make it onto my list back in 1997. Edge of Chaos has the better engine, better graphics, better flight model, and – most importantly – a much better story. The game starts you out as a kid who has to disappear after his dad gets murdered. Then, an old AI pops up and directs you safely to your granny’s old smuggling operation, where you’ll find your ship and learn to become an intergalacitc space cowboy grown-up. Or smuggler. Freedom fighter. Whatever.
It’s a fantastic game with a steep learning curve, but well worth investing a little time in.
I love horror games. And horror movies. Books. TV shows. Comics. I just dig the genre, so when Clive Barker lent his name to an Unreal-powered shooter, I was immediately on board.
Part Clive Barker, part Lovecraft, the game is all FPS at its core, which was a little disappointing. However, the story helps make up for the fact that you’re basically playing Any Shooter But With Sometimes Magic, and the whole package ends up being a lot more than the sum of its parts.
The game isn’t particularly scary or anything. There are no real jumps or unsettling atmospheric setpieces to wander through, but it nails the Fun/Creepy vibe of, say, a skewed version of the Addams Family. I don’t think this is what the game was going for or anything, as it’s fairly obvious it’s desperate for you to take it seriously and be afraid, but it’s just too campy for that.
Take it for what it is rather than how I think it was intended to be, and you’ll have a great time with Undying. It’s kind of like Buffy, if Buffy were an Irish dude in the 1920s.
Just try it.
I never completed Morrowind, but I did play a lot of Morrowind. I just didn’t particularly enjoy enough of Morrowind to see it through to the end of Morrowind. But, since everyone else kept going on about how amazing Morrowind was, I tried to find the fun in Morrowind.
I failed.
It was decent enough to make it into my top ten for the year, but it gets the bottom slot for a couple of reasons. First, the world was beautiful, but completely static. It was a set to wander around it, with virtually every damn thing either nailed down or glued to the floor. I enjoy world simulation in my RPGs as much as I do hacking and slashing, and Morrowind completely failed on that point.
It was also just trying way too hard to be different. Sure, the land of giant mushrooms and floating insectoid stage coaches was kind of cool, but nothing about the game seemed to be anchored in any kind of familiararity, which I think is vital to fantasy worldbuilding. It’s really easy to go too far, which is what Morrowind did.
The character models were also butt ugly, which actually turned out to be foreshadowing for every other game Bethesda would ever make.
Four “Speak quickly, Outlanders” out of ten.
The exact opposite of Morrowind going too far in trying to be different and strange, Neverwinter Nights was happy to stick to the all too familiar tropes of the fantasy RPG genre, and was pretty much a dialtone because of it.
It was also mired in the terrible algebra of pen-and-paper D&D, so any immersion it might’ve had was quickly broken whenever pages of math would pop up every time you tried to hit something with a stick.
The story was lame, the characters uninteresting, and everything about it was just…boring.
BUT, it had an amazing editor. I spent more time creating my own little single-player campaigns to run around in than I did with the actual game itself. It was like being alone in my closet again, reading D&D sourcebooks and pretending I had friends to play with. Only this time I did, even if did have to make them myself, like some kind of Forever Alone Dr. Frankenstein.
Community mods and the eventual expansions saved the game, and ensured it a spot in my top ten.
Back before the Battlefield series turned into a frat boy dick measuring contest or a safe space for female gamers to play in without fear of being hit on every five seconds by the aforementioned frat boys and all the other sexually frustrated penis-holders of the Internet (ok, that part is a lie), Battlefield 1942 was a breath of fresh air.
It wasn’t the zen-like (what less imaginitive people might call braindead) experienece of Deathmatch, it wasn’t the base-building CTF joy of Tribes, and it wasn’t a strategy game. It was kind of blend of all these things, and it was great.
Of course, everyone really just played the Wake Island map from the demo over and over again, even after the full game came out. Something about it was just perfect, and I lost many a sleepless night to epic battles over control points. Or whatever Battlefield called them.
The only problem with the game was people who spawned and insta-stole a vehicle or plane I HAD BEEN PATIENTLY WAITING ON. Those guys were jerks.
A lot of people didn’t really like Mafia, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. They complained that the cars were too slow, or that the game wasn’t big enough, or the world didn’t feel Grand Theft Auto enough – and they were right.
Which probably explains why I loved it so much.
From crusing down city streets and keeping an eye on my speed so I didn’t get pulled over, to blaring period music from my radio like some kind of 1920s hipster, I loved every minute of the game. It wasn’t the Prohibition-era GTA people expected, but it was still a ton of fun.
The story was classic gangland drama, the sense of place was well realized, and you got to be a mobster without having to worry about pesky things like actually going to jail or sleeping with the fishes.
One of my favorite Star Trek games, Bridge Commander put you in the captain’s chair of a starship and turned you loose onto the galaxy. Or at least onto the parts of the galaxy that the linear story took you to, but it was good enough for me.
You can play Bridge Commander one of two ways: Either manually controlling the ship in excellent, fully 3D capital ship combat, or you could leave it up to the AI while you shouted orders at your crew. I tended to favor the latter, but would take direct control whenever my crew just wasn’t quite up to getting the job down before we got exploded by Romulans or whatever.
Shaking back and forth in your chair like a spastic monkey whenever your ship gets hit is entirely optional, but highly recommended.
As with most Star Trek games, it’s almost impossible to find today due the licensing hell that defines the franchise. But if you can manage to track down a copy, go grab the Maximum Warp community mod. It adds some nice touches to the game, and will keep you shouting ENGAGE! at your screen for hours on end.
Like a giant nerd.
The sequel to the excellent but flawed No One Lives Forever corrected almost every problem the first game had. Cate Archer became a more fully realized character, with the fact that she was a woman being made a secondary or even tertiary concern. The in-game characters would comment on her being a female super spy, sure, but in a self-aware way that belittled the mysoginy that still plagues the gaming industry today.
The graphics were greatly improved, and for the first time, the LithTech engine finally started showing a little progress toward nailing down the kineaesthetics of FPS combat. The weapons still felt a little off, but Monolith was almost there. (They’d hit their stride soon with F.E.A.R., which was an excellent game in all the ways except the one it was trying the hardest to be. But more on that when we get to 2005.)
The game is smart, funny, and full of excellent setpieces. My favorite series of events take place in a trailer park as it’s being hit by a tornado. The lead-in to when the tornado appears, along with its aftermath was a thing of beauty.
And I’ll never forget the high-speed tricycle chase with a mime and a fistful of bananas.
Good times.
Star Wars: Dark Forces III: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was the best entry in the overly subtitled series when it came out. Aside from running on the Quake 3 engine for vastly improved graphics, JK2 finally nailed lightsaber combat in a way no one had seen before.
You could switch between Strong, Normal, and Speed stances, each of which brought along a different moveset to include with your Jedi acrobats. The number of styles coupled with the acrobatics and speed of battle made multiplayer lightsaber combat a ridiculous, frenetic mess of whirling dervishes with deadly laser swords. It looked chaotic and random if you didn’t know what you were watching, but once you mastered the different moves, you knew exactly what you were doing.
As for the single-player side of things, the FMV was mercifully gone, replaced by in-game cinematics. The story was decent enough, but nothing spectacular – and it took far too long to get your lightsaber. Even when you finally got to where your lightsaber was, you still had to jump through a bunch of stupid tutorial hoops to get it.
But once you did, every other weapon became a distant memory.
While using the right Force powers – either Light or Dark – and a lightsaber, Kyle Katarn became a virtually unstoppable killing machine. My favorite go-to power was Speed, which slowed everything down but me. The world became a blur as I weaved in and out of stormtroopers and dodged blaster bolts on a slice-and-dice campaign of virtual carnage.
Ah, memories.
Still, even with all the improvements JK2 made to the series, the single-player level designs could still be maddeningly complex and frustrating. But then again, you could walk around with your lightsaber out, and it’d leave a glowing trail of burned wall everywhere it touched.
Which was a lot cooler than it sounds.
The first “spiritual successor” to the Ultima Underworld series, this game took everything that was great about the Looking Glass games and brought it all into the modern world of polygonal 3D. (It was actually developed to be Ultima Underworld III, but Arkane Studios couldn’t pry the license from the cold, dead hands of Electronic Arts.)
It had more interactivity than the UU games, voiced characters, and a deeper magic system. It took the world simulation of Ultima 7 and blended it with the first person dungeon crawling of Ultima Underworld, then removed all the Ultima stuff and called it Arx Fatalis.
The basic idea is that the whole world moved underground ages ago after some kind of unimportant calamity I never paid much attention to, so you have humans and goblins and troll, etc… living together in one giant, sprawling series of caves and subterranean fortresses. Each faction is vying for control, and you can interact with all of them in whichever way you see fit.
Notoriously buggy at launch, AF has since been patched and is ready to go. It’s a wonderful little trip through a Totally Not Ultima Underworld underground world, and you should give it a try.
Plus, you can taint his cookie dough and give the Goblin King diarreah.
So there’s that.
One of the best titles to come out of Irrational Games was this little gem (along with its sequel). For some inexplicable reason, developers have always struggled with making superhero games, so we don’t really have all that many. (And the ones we do have kinda suck.)
But Freedom Force doesn’t.
The game puts you in command of the Notta Avengers (or the Notta Justice League, if you’re a filthy DC-loving mudblood), and charges you with saving the world from the forces of evil. Naturally.
There’s an enormous number of hereos in the base game – ranging from versions of Marvel’s characters as well as Irrational’s take on DC heroes – and all of it is wrapped up in the Golden Age aesthetic of comic books.
Which is to say it’s campy as hell.
This put some people off of the game who were expecting an edgy, modern take on the superhero genre, but I loved it. If you got what they were doing, then you understood how much they nailed it. And the campiness suddenly became kind of the whole point.
With extensive mod support as well as in-game character creation, you can find just about any hero you want on the the web. Want to add Booster Gold to your team? He’s out there, somewhere. Just download his files and stick ’em in the game. How about Batman? Well, pick your favorite version. He’s out there, too.
The game itself is a realtime, pausable strategy sort of thing, along the lines of a hyperfocused Baldur’s Gate, but without all the stupid D&D rules and terrible writing. The system is very simple to use, but due to the number of heroes and the different combinations of powers at your disposal, the actual gameplay can get pretty complex.
Don’t play it on Hard your first time through.
Before Warcraft III came out, everyone was worried that Blizzard had lost the plot. Adding hero characters to an RTS? What were they thinking? And adopting a cartoonish art style? Come on, Blizzard! Get it together!
Fortunately, Blizzard didn’t listen to the empassioned outcries of its fans and just did whatever the hell it wanted to, which was a good thing because Warcraft III is probably the best RTS ever made. The hero characters didn’t break the game; they added to it. The art style was amazing. The gameplay was refined and polished and tweaked to balanced perfection.
If they’d only stopped there, Warcraft III would’ve still been a great game. But then they added the story and the cutscenes, and everything came together in this wonderful bit of synergistic madness that defines the game and the Warcraft universe.
Everything people love about World of Warcraft came from Warcraft III. The lore from War1 and War2 are there, but the aesthetic, the major characters, the tone of the universe, and everything else about WoW is pure Warcraft III.
Which is kind of a shame, really. Because I don’t think we’ll ever get a Warcraft IV now, since WoW pretty much became the sequel no one asked for but that everyone seems to have wanted.
Except for me. I still want my Warcraft IV.
Sadface.
I remember this game coming out of nowhere back in 2003. The TRON reboot wouldn’t happen until 2010, and TRON itself came out way back in 1982, so no one was thinking about the franchise in 2003. TRON 2.0 just sort of appeared one day, with no real reason for having been called into existence. It was weird.
It was also pretty fun. The internet was still new enough to be a novelty, but old enough that people were used to it by then, so whereas the original TRON movie dealt mainly with PCs and mainframes, the TRON 2.0 game focused more on networking and email and the plague of viruses.
They even included an entire lightcycle mini game, which is always welcome. The game itself was a fairly typical FPS, which wasn’t really helped along very much from being powered by the LithTech engine. But where other games suffered from the weird, disconnected effects the engine gave to weapons, TRON 2.0 managed to sidestep the issue by making all the weapons suck except for one.
The disc.
Just like in the movie, you carry around a disc on your back that you can use as both shield and weapon, and it’s really the only thing you’ll ever need in the game, at least until you get to one of the levels where the developers realize you’re probably having too much fun and take it away from you. Probably some designer’s nephew worked on the Rod Primitive, and he didn’t want him to feel left out.
There’s also a fun RPG-lite aspect to the game, where you can level up (which changes your character’s version number) and decide which subroutines (bonuses and buffs, basically) to load into the limited space you have available. You can pick up new subroutines all the time, but they might need to be ported to your system or cleaned of virus corruption before they can be installed.
It was a strange, but fun little game.
This game was a nightmare. A simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation, B-17: The Mighty 8th was kind of like Inception, but with incredibly detailed instrument panels and an instruction manual thicker than a fat baby’s corpulent thigh.
Once you managed to get in the air, the B-17 itself actually controlled pretty well. I guess the developers figured everyone would spend so long just trying to figure out how to start the damn engines that people would lose patience pretty quickly if it was actually hard to fly. Getting off the ground took well over two dozen individual steps involving fiddling with this knob over here and flipping that switch over there, and god help you if you didn’t get the sequence exactly right, or you’d never make it off the runway.
I look at B-17 as more of a bomber sim than a flight sim. You can hop between ten different stations, where each crew member is doing his own thing. If you want to be the bombardier on a mission, then let the AI fly while you rain death upon the ground walkers. Feel more like pretending you’re Luke Skywalker shooting down TIE fighters from one of the Millennium Falcon’s turrets? Grab a spot and start shootin’, Tex.
It’s a very deep, very rewarding simulation and you should totally give it a try.
Just RTFM first.
Gothic 2 took everything that worked about Gothic 1 and made it bigger and better. Then, it took everything that didn’t work in Gothic 1 and made it bigger and worse, because screw you, that’s why.
The series’ developers took a hardline stance that the wonky combat in their games was intentional, and player’s damn well better just get used to it, if you know what’s good for you. Sure, you can get murdered by a wolf that repeatedly stun-locks you so much that you can never even manage to hit it with a single stick before it’s munching on the bloody remains of your battered corpse, but hey. Them’s the breaks, kids.
If you could manage to get through the combat and different aspect of the interface that I can’t recall specifically right now but that I remember having annoyed the piss out of me back in 2003, there’s a very deep, very Ultima-like game to discover.
The world simulation is very strong in Gothic 2, so much so that I remember starting a family feud between two farming brothers because I stashed a frying pan in one of the brother’s rooms. When the other brother discovered (on his own, by walking into the room) HIS frying pan had been stolen, he freaking bolted out the door, ran out into the field where his brother was working, then proceeded to murder the crap out of him with a pitchfork.
I’m not sure if I’m remembering all the details correctly in that little story, and I was never sure if it was scripted or not, but the end result was the same.
It was awesome.
The first time Chris Roberts pitched Star Citizen, it was called Freelancer and crowd funding wasn’t a thing yet. As a result, he was stuck working with a publisher who demanded unreasonable things like meeting milestones and producing an actual game within a well-defined budget and stuff. I know. Crazy, right?
Over time, most of the promises Roberts made regarding Freelancer would be scrapped, he’d get all huffy about it, then take his toys and go home by way of leaving the company he founded, and then the game would eventually come out.
A shadow of what was promised, Freelancer actually turned out to be a pretty fun game when taken in short spurts. It was very linear and progressed along well defined narrative rails, but the mouse-driven combat no one was sure about ended up feeling very natural and smooth.
I completed the game and enjoyed the standard sci-fi story well enough, but the repetitive nature of everything you did crept in fairly early on and never let up. You just do the same things over and over again until you unlock another story mission, wherein you do the same things you’ve been doing but now there’s a cutscene at the end, and then you repeat the whole process for hours until you win the game.
It’s fun, but only in small doses.
The best way to describe Star Wars: Galaxies is by calling it Ultima Online in space. Or Star Wars UO. Whichever.
The early days of SWG were a lot like the early days of UO. There was a big, functioning economy with an emphasis on player crafting to drive it, and the crafting itself was highly detailed and very complex. There was adventuring, too. And player housing, and planets to explore with landmarks to discover, etc…
If UO felt like living an alternate life in medieval times, then SWG felt like living an alternate life as an extra in a Star Wars movie. Professions outside of combat were viable and encouraged. Whole cities sprung up organically, with some even having elected officials like mayors and such – all emerging from the player base itself, rather than driven by the rules and design limitations of the game.
Sadly, just like with UO, a bunch of annoying asshats ruined everything for everyone by griefing the hell out of the system in their madcap pursuit of making the game more about DPS and min-maxing PvP builds, so patches and band-aids were applied until the game was completely unrecognizable as a second life inside the Star Wars universe.
It got so bad, the developers eventually just said screw it, basically gave everyone Jedi powers and then walked away while the world burned.
Not long after, the servers went offline for good.
I never liked Myst. I kind of hated it, in fact. So why I bought Uru will forever be a mystery to me. Maybe it was on sale? I dunno. I was still in my twenties, so maybe I was drunk. Who knows?
Point is, I bought the damn game – and I loved it.
I’m not sure if it was the switch to realtime 3D, or if I’d always wanted to like Myst but just never understood it before, but whatever the reason, Uru hooked me. It was originally designed to have this whole social, multiplayer aspect integrated into every part of it, but that never really took off, and the cost of developing it nearly destroyed the company. But I didn’t much care about playing with other people, anyway.
By 2003, I was beginning to tire of multiplayer gaming and trying to have fun with random Internet People, so I was happy to work my way through the strangely immersive world of logic puzzles and cryptic books all by my lonesome.
I said I was starting to tire of multiplayer games, but I wasn’t completely turned off by them yet. This little freebie came along out of the blue, and all my online friends started playing it. So, yielding to the power of peer pressure like a kid who hadn’t grown up listening to Nancy Reagan’s dire warnings about such things, I jumped on the bandwagon and joined in.
Enemy Territory became my go-to multiplayer game for most of the year. It had great gameplay, interesting modes, and the different character types meant you could play in vastly different ways depending on your mood.
Except that everyone always wanted to be an engineer. Whole teams of engineers. It was madness.
I’m a soldat!
The game that was never as bad as people say it was might not have been a super duper sequel to one of the greatest games ever made, but it was competent enough to be part of the series. I enjoyed it, at least.
I think what people hated the most was down to it being one of the first AAA cross-platform titles. To get the game working well on both a controller and the hardware of the original Xbox, concessions had to be made, which the annoying PC Master Race assholes always took as some kind of great insult to their people or whatever. As for myself, I just shrugged, loaded up the game, and made my own fun.
Universal ammo was a good idea, even though people hated it at the time. The streamlining of the augmentations was a good idea, even though people hated it at the time. In face, most of the things Deus Ex did would eventually become accepted elements of standard FPS design that people love today, but that they hated then. Sometimes, people can be pretty stupid all the times.
The only real hit the game took by being cross-platform was in the size of its maps – and this is where all the angry Internet People are right. They were freaking tiny as hell.
The miniature size of the levels meant that a lot of the illusion of freedom from the first game was lost, even if all the same “freedom” was still there. It was just, by necessity, more obvious. You can creep in this one air duct to do stealth, you can hack this one door to go an alternate route, you can say this one thing to this one character in the area to try and talk your way through, etc…
Most all of the same gameplay choices were still present in DX2 as were in DX1, only this time the elusive illusion of freedom was missing. It was freedom that had never really been there to begin with, but the original did such a good job of hiding that fact that the sequel just stood out like a sore thumb.
But it’s still a Deus Ex game. It’s still fun. And you shouldn’t listen to other people.
The best game in the Dark Forces series wasn’t actually part of the Dark Forces series. Except that it was, but it didn’t want to admit it because doing so would turn the full title of the game into a colon-saturated, marketing nightmare. Star Wars: Dark Forces IV: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, you know.
The single player story was fun and extremely condensed into very tightly designed, self-contained levels. There was much less wandering around aimlessly, trying to figure out what the game wanted you to do when all you wanted to do was murder stormtroopers with lightsabers. Jedi Academy knew what players wanted, and it gave it to them.
Which, because it’s the Internet, pissed a lot of people off, for some reason.
At the time, people griped about Jedi Academy because you didn’t play as Kyle Katarn, the levels didn’t progress linearly, and the story wasn’t epic enough or whatever. But nobody cares what angry Internet People think, so let’s move on.
The best thing Jedi Academy did was to absolutely nail the lightsaber combat so well that the multiplayer mode is worth the price of admission alone. From fully customizable characters and lightsabers, to crazy acrobatic moves at super speeds, multiplayer matches were where Jedi Academy truly shined.
There has never been better melee combat in an FPS (even though it became a 3rd person game for lightsaber fights, because trying to control your flippy, spastic self as while doing somersaults and backflips and super jumps in first person was a sure fire recipe for migraine-inducing unpleasantness).
I don’t like KOTOR today as much as I did in 2003, because back then, Bioware hadn’t just been recycling the same plot elements in every damn game they made. At the time, KOTOR was essentially Neverwinter Nights in a Star Wars costume, which was good enough for me. The characters were, for the most part, engaging. The dialog wasn’t totally awful (except for whoever thought it was a good idea for every alien to say “Moolay-rah” ever other damn word), and the combat was good, turn-based fun. (Or real-time, if you played on Easy and didn’t care about anything other than the story.)
It took me ages to finally get into the game, though. The first planet goes on for days, and nothing much interesting happens until you finally get off the rock and snag your first lightsaber. But it took hours to get to that point. There were hours upon hours of slogging through tedious battles, lengthy and pointless conversations, and there was absolutely no end to running around the tiny worldmap over and over again, back and forth between this location and that location, all of which looked exactly the same. Seriously, it was so awful that people have made mods specifically to remove the whole first part of the game. It’s just that bad.
That opening world was enough to make me hate the game and stop playing it until one day when I had nothing better to do than to force myself through it. Once I did, the game opened up a bit and I finally caught a glimpse of what everyone was talking about that made KOTOR so special.
The big plot twist was awesome, too. Which is one of the reasons I remember liking KOTOR a lot more in 2003 than I do now, after Bioware has repeated the same damn twist over and over. Or a variation on it, at least. I’ll never understand how this studio is so beloved by so many people. My wife is a big fan of Dragon Age, which is inexplicable to me. I found it to be a boring, shoebox RPG with a ridiculous “dark fantasy” world and one-note characters. But hey, everyone likes different things, so if you’re a Bioware fan, more power to you.
I mean, I like Trespasser, after all.
So what the hell do I know?
Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Doom 3 is not a Doom game. It’s neither fast paced nor colorful, there’s no sense of thrill, no adrenaline rush of rocking metal MIDI music, no satisfying cha-chink of a shotgun. It’s just not that kind of game.
That doesn’t mean it’s not good, though.
Back in 2004, I once again found myself the odd man out in an ocean of people who hated a game I enjoyed. They griped about everything I just mentioned, but they loved – absolutely loved – to drone on about how dumb it was that most of the guns didn’t have flashlights.
Because I guess “realism” is super important when you’re fighting cybernetic hell demons on Mars.
I liked the slower pace and the thicker atmosphere, and I dug the tension that not having a flashlight taped to a gun provided. Doom 3 wasn’t an action game, but it wasn’t really a survival horror game, either. It was somewhere between the two, in its own weird, stylish little place.
And it looked amazing.
It’s an RTS in Tolkien dress-up. What more do you really need to know? Back in 2005, Lord of the Rings mania was still in full swing because Peter Jackson hadn’t stretched The Hobbit over too much film like butter scraped over too much bread yet, and everyone was riding high off the success of The Return of the King.
The Battle for Middle-Earth was light on the base building, and heavy on the army clashing. I’d like to say it was heavy on tactics, but that would be a lie. It isn’t a tactical game. It’s a build-up-a-bigger-army-and-crush-your-opponent-through-canon-fodder type of game.
Unless you have the Rohirim, because cavalry beats just about anything.
The game got extra points from me for its super awesome, Hildebrant-like overworld map. That thing was gorgeous, and I wanted to hang it on my wall.
This is a really odd game that I don’t even remember why I bought, but it sticks out in my mind for all the stuff it did right. It’s a turn-based tactical game, with RPG and adventure elements, all wrapped up in a WWII storyline.
What made S2 stand apart was its quirky charm, which reminded me a lot of Jagged Alliance, if Jagged Alliance had taken itself seriously – but just didn’t know that no one else would. The dialog was awful, the voice acting was worse, and the story was goofy.
But it was fully 3D. It had ragdoll physics, destructible environments, and a super tight focus on doing what it did better than anything else: out X-Com’ing X-Com.
I was never a big X-Com fan, but after playing S2, I could at least understand why people liked it so much.
S2 was better, though.
The Total War games are weird. I kind of half hate, half love them, mostly because the strategic campaigns are always slow and tedious and I suck at them. But the tactical battles? LOVE.
The Rome entry in the series is probably my favorite, just because of how straightforward the combat and unit types are, which is nice for my slow, sloth-like brain to take in. I’ve played other games in the series, and the only other ones that have ever really grabbed me were the Medieval entries.
I guess I just don’t dig firearms and cannons and crap. Or maybe they just make things too difficult. I dunno.
But few things are better than binge watching the full series of HBO’s Rome (which, I know, wouldn’t come out until 2005), then grabbing some artisan bread and a little olive oil before settling down to a nice big game of murder in the name of the Empire.
Yet another WWII game, this one was an even weirder beast than S2. I guess it was kind of an RTS, but not really. It was a bit of a third-person action game, but that isn’t quite right, either. Maybe it was a RTASAGT? (Real Time Action Strategy Arcade Game Thing).
At any rate, it was an isometric RTS that allowed you to take direct control over any unit (kind of like how you could possess minions in the Dungeon Keeper games, although Soldiers doesn’t switch to first person). You could command your troops to go here or there and to do this or that, then take direct control of one of your tanks to jump into the fight alongside your men.
It was weird and engaging and great. The environments were also fully destructible, which meant that you really got a feel for how much damage even a small skirmish could do to a quaint little village. Once a battle was over, very little was left of the buildings and scenery other than rubble, dust, and giant tank tracks in the mud.
A proper sequel to Quake that was never a sequel to Quake, Painkiller did its best to evoke an earlier era of FPS games, before things like regenerating health and shields and two-weapon carry limits became the norm and ruined everything. And, for the most part, it succeeded.
Painkiller was part Quake / part Doom.
It was Quake in the sense of its fully 3D environments and its Gothic aesthetic, and it was Doom in its approach to enemy encounters. It liked to throw hordes of baddies at you all at once, which was something gamers hadn’t seen for a long time when Painkiller came out. (Not counting the Serious Sam games, of course. But who does, really?)
The story was even more at home in the ’90s than the mid 2000s, with its angst-ridden, leather-jacket wearing, pseudo-religious angry angel demon retribution payback revenge whatever story. Honestly, I stopped paying attention after the first cutscene, because why bother?
I just wanted to murder things.
Don’t judge me.
Take everything good about KOTOR, then remove all the Bioware from it and you have KOTOR 2. Except what made KOTOR 2 so special wasn’t just how much Bioware wasn’t in it, but what all that Bioware had been replaced with. Namely, Obsidian.
The guys at Obisidian tend to take an established property that held promise it never quite realized, then they make a sequel to it that far surpasses the original in every way. However, where Obsidian truly shines is in their writing. Nuanced stories, well-defined (or intentionally ambiguous) characters, excellent dialog – all these things are what Obsidian brings to the table when they make a sequel better than someone else’s original.
The first time I saw this was with KOTOR2. The next time I’d see it would be with Fallout: New Vegas, but more on that when we get to 2010…
The only real problem with KOTOR2 was how rushed and unfinished it was, and how amazingly buggy the final release build ended up being. It would take a lot of patches – including some from the community – before the game was ready for prime time, which is the only reason the original release of KOTOR2 isn’t higher up on my list.
I’m ranking the games I played in 2005 as they were in 2005, and Knights of the Old Republic needed a couple more years in the oven.
Take most everything I said about Deus Ex 2 and apply it to Thief 3, because the fan reactions – and mine – to both games were nearly identical.
Accusations of being “dumb down” and “consolified” were leveled at both games, but Thief suffered a little more unfairly than DX2, in my opinion. Thief’s levels weren’t nearly as small as DX2’s, and even when they were, they usually meshed better with a larger whole. Thief’s focus on stealth also did away with the problem of perceived freedom that the Deus Ex series continues to struggle with, but that didn’t really matter to people who were ready to hate this game well before it ever came out.
People tend to double down on that kind of longterm loathing when a game finally comes out, rather than admit they were wrong.
I know I’ll probably be shot for this, but I actually think Deadly Shadows was the best entry in the series, just ahead of Thief 2. It has a stronger atmosphere, some excellent sound design, and is the most immersive game in the series.
Plus, it has the Shalebridge Cradle.
If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never played the game. And you’re missing out on one of the best levels ever, in any game.
Half-Life 2 took forever to finally make it out, but when it eventually did, it blew everything else away. It just nailed everything. Graphics, tech, characters, voices, physics, music, story – everything it did, it did better than any FPS before it. Well, better than any FPS in the style of Half-Life, that is.
‘Cause it sure wasn’t Quake.
I don’t think there’s much I need to say about Half-Life 2 that everyone doesn’t already know, except maybe to explain why it’s #2 on my list instead of #1.
It’s pretty simple, actually. While HL2 did absolutely everything right (except for that annoying stuttering sound problem it seemed to always have), it was still a FPS. It threw in some physics puzzles, but I’d already seen those way back in ’98 with Trespasser. HL2 just did them better. Which is what defines Half-Life 2: it just did everything better, but it didn’t do anything I hadn’t seen plenty of times before.
Which is why it slipped to #2, because the #1 spot this year went to a game that, while using the same engine as HL2, managed to create something new and greater than the sum of its parts.
The best Deus Ex game that wasn’t Deus Ex (until Dishonored happens in 2012, anyway), Vampire: Bloodlines was not only the best vampire game of 2005, it was the best damn game of the past several years. In any category.
Why? Because shut up and I’ll tell you.
To begin with, it was a first person RPG in the true sense of the word. You didn’t just create a stat sheet to hold numbers to plug into your ridiculous THAC0 equations; you created an actual character. And then you used it to play a role in a story, which is what RPGs should be, but rarely are.
Once you had your character ready (which, depending on how you created your him or her, could dramatically alter how you played the game), you were plopped down into a brand new world of darkness to explore and get used to, just as your character was the night it became a vampire.
Remember that illusion of freedom Deus Ex did so well? Bloodlines managed to do it, too. There are multiple ways to complete any quest, and the choices you made not only during character creation, but also the ones you make throughout the game will determine which options are valid. Nothing will close down because you don’t have this skill or that stat, but some options will just be a whole lot harder to pull off than others, depending on your character.
The story is good, the dialog is great, the gameplay is tight and fresh – and there’s absolutely nothing at all wrong with the game. Even when it was new and buggy as hell, you could tell that the diamond underneath all that rough was going to be worth digging out.
Today, with the various mods and community patches having addressed most major issues Bloodlines might’ve had when it was released, you really have no excuse for not having played it.
Plus, it has the Grand Ocean House Hotel.
If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never played the game. And you’re missing out on one of the best levels ever, in any game. Including Thief: Deadly Shadows.
If you’re surprised that a second Myst game made one of my top tens, don’t be. By the mid-2000s, cross-platform releases were becoming the standard mode of release for AAA games, which meant I played a lot them on a console because PC upgrades are expensive and despite my sincerest efforts, I have never been able to actually poop money.
For the next few years, my lists will get a little weird, because I’m only adding games that I played on my PC at the time – which means either PC exclusives, or games my machine was able to run decently when they came out. The end result of all this is that I played a lot of console games in the mid-2000s, as my PC aged and became less and less able to keep up with the big titles of the day.
Which explains why another Myst game is here.
But in its defense, I actually did enjoy Myst V. It did away with the series’ previous devotion to crappy FMV, and also kept the realtime movement of Uru – which made it playable for me in a way none of the other Myst games are, because I hate first person slideshow “gameplay”. I was also used to Myst’s formula of puzzles after playing Uru, so I wasn’t as lost as I might’ve otherwise been.
Go to some place new, figure out how to turn on the power, fiddle with levers or some shit, and boom. You’re done. Consult a walkthrough. Move on.
I played this on my console at first, before abandoning it for the PC version because I’d heard the console release was “censored” – and it was, but not in any meaningful way. Some crude polygonal nudity was cut out, which I guess was done for the sex-shamed American audience, but really was kind of a service to mankind in general.
The sex scenes were awkward and painful, with frightening clipping issues that could seriously traumatize kids who might grow up thinking sex happens when one person’s leg phase-shifts into another person’s thigh. As for the nudity? Meh. Draw a triangle and color it in the flesh tone of your choice, then put a little dot in the middle. Congratulations! You’ve just drawn a 2005 video game boob.
The game itself was interesting and different, and I enjoyed it right up until the story just said screw this noise and went home. It’s hard to explain the disconnect between the early parts of the game which celebrate the mundane in fascinating ways (just walking around your apartment doing normal, stupid things is strangely compelling), and the second half of the game that gets rid of all that business and focuses on mid-air Dragonball Z kick punching via quicktime events.
It’s weird.
This game had an extremely long development cycle – stretching all the way back to 1999 – with a lot of steady hype coming out of Headfirst Productions along the way. By all accounts, the game was going to be awesome when it was eventually released in 2005. Amazing graphics, a physics system, sanity effects, tons of interactivity within the environment, smart AI, co-op, etc…
Of course, the game we finally ended up getting after six long years of waiting had none of that.
Changing publishers midstream probably didn’t help much, especially after the game was picked up by Bethesda who, at this point, had actively started avoiding innovative gameplay at all costs, like some kinda of phobic vampire to garlic bread. With most of its promised features stripped, Dark Corners of the Earth was shoved out the door early and unfinished.
But it was still fun. Somehow.
Maybe it was the setting, which Headfirst nailed. Lovecraftian horror is always welcome, especially back in 2005 before it penetrated the mainstream and Cthulhu bobbleheads started popping up at gas stations. The game is more or less a retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which seems to be a go-to story for people wanting to make a game or movie around the mythos. Personally, fish people annoy me, but hey. A cult’s gotta do what a cult’s gotta do, amirite?
While most of the features were gone, the skeleton of the game remained intact, and glimpses of what could have been were everywhere – most notably during a tense escape sequence, where you’re pushing things in front of doors to try and block your pursuers as you scramble through rooms and out windows.
Then there are the stealth sections.
Which I’m not going to talk about, because my Mama always told me, if you can’t say anything nice…
One of the few “serious” adventure games I’ve ever actually enjoyed, Still Life is a sequel to an earlier game I didn’t like very much called Post Mortem. But I guess the developers realized most people didn’t like the first game, so they decided to just pretend it never happened. Therefore, even though Still Life sometimes throws you into the roll of the protagonist from Post Mortem via flashbacks, experience with the first game is not remotely necessary.
I’m not sure what it was about Still Life that grabbed me, but it was probably the murder mystery angle. Without giving anything away, the story involves you working as a detective in the NYPD, trying to track down an elusive serial killer while flashing back to the experiences of the protagonist from the first game, who was tracking down another serial killer with the same bizarre M.O. decades earlier.
It’s got a rich story, and the puzzles are fun. Sadly, the dialog is almost universally awful and the voice acting is ridiculous, but by the mid-2000s, you had to take what you could get with adventure games.
If gaming were framed in a drug metaphor, then Deus Ex would be that first hit off the pipe for some woebegone soul lying in the dingy light of an 1800s opium den. It was wonderful and amazing, and every game after it is just chasing the dragon of that first glorious hit.
Which is why Deus Ex just keeps popping up on my list. Everyone keeps trying to recapture whatever magic dust that game had, but no one ever seems to get as close as that first time.
Even when the game is a direct sequel in the franchise, like Snowblind.
“What?” I hear you cry. Hang on, I’ll explain.
Project: Snowblind was intended to be a multiplayer-focused game in the the Deus Ex franchise, which probably seemed like a good idea to some asshole in a boardroom at the time. Take one of the most immersive and well executed single-player games that defines the pinnacle of achievement in narrative-based interactive gameplay, then get rid of all that and turn it into a multiplayer pew-pew shooter. It’s brilliant!
Somewhere along the line, I guess someone came to their senses (or was fired) and the Deus Ex connection was dropped. Officially, anyway. Unofficially, the soul of DX had already been infused into the game to the point where it was impossible to cut out, so they didn’t. They just wrapped a different story around it that sidestepped direct references to the Deus Ex universe, and called it a day.
And it was fun.
The best way to describe Project: Snowblind is to call it an impatient man’s Deus Ex, even though stealth is still kinda/sorta in the game, if you want to bother with it. But the shooting is so tight and fun, and the pacing of the game so well executed from that angle, that you’d be missing out on most of what the game has to offer.
The FPS gameplay in Deus Ex always kind of sucked. The shooting was probably the weakest part of the game, really. In Snowblind, it’s the other way around. The shooting feels right, it’s satisfying, and the game never gets too bogged down with story or exploration. It knows you just want to kill things, and it wants you to have fun killing the things you kill, so it gets out of your way and lets you start killing them.
The nanoaugmentations (a direct carry-over from DX) are useful and easy to call upon, with everything from ballistic armor, to a nano-powered riot shield, and x-ray vision at your disposal. Each augment feels solid and strong, and by the end of the game, you are as an empowered god, ready to smite your foes with the swift hand of nano-fueled justice.
After years of producing shooters that never quite felt right, Monolith finally nailed it with F.E.A.R. – which I’m just going to type as FEAR from now on, because acronyms are stupid. Especially when they stand for First Encounter Assault Recon, which is a paranormal law enforcement agency the game actually wants you to take seriously.
FEAR desperately wants to be a horror game, which is the one area where it fails spectacularly. It’s neither scary nor suspenseful, and all of the horror elements come off as trite imitations of superior material that itself was never very good to begin win.
But the shooting. The shooting is where FEAR shines, which is a 180 degree shift for Monolith, whose previous FPS titles normally excelled at everything but the shooting.
The weapons feel great, the environments feel real, and the enemy AI is spectacular. When its working at its best, the AI will impress you with how it coordinates different enemies to surround you, flank you, drive you into an ambush, etc… It’s still some of the best AI in any shooter to date, and well worth the price of admission.
World War II is the proverbial well from which all game developers seem to go back to when they run out of ideas. Which is fine, because it normally works, even if that means we have more WWII games in the world than just about anything else, including unused AOL discs.
The Brothers in Arms series really wants to be an interactive version of HBO’s Band of Brothers. Even the title cards between missions look like the ones from the series. The grim, philosophical voice overs, the witty banter between troops, the gritty realism of having a grenade explode too close to your headface are all there. And, for the most part, they work.
Where the game truly shines, however, is in its blend of FPS action and squad-based tactical combat. It accomplishes this through a clever and simple to use one-button mechanic for deploying soldiers to specific locations, and telling them what to do once they get there.
Of course, most encounters boil down to having some guys lay down suppressing fire while some other guys run around to fire on the enemy’s flank. And by most encounters, I mean every single one. You’d think it would get old after a while, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t.
Securing your objectives and moving on the next mission feels solid and rewarding, and by the end of the game, you leave with a clear sense of progression and accomplishment.
The first of two Irrational titles in my top three for this year, Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich takes the superhero squad from the first game and adds Nazis. And that’s pretty much it.
There’s time travel involved and internal strife within the team along with plenty of connections back to the first game, but really it’s just more of the same. But with Nazis.
Because of the proverbial WWII well.
And it works. Because it almost always works – especially when you get to melt fascist faces with fireballs from your fists.
It’s campy and funny and glorious.
Go play it.
I love this game. Love, love, love. SWAT 3 was the first game in the series to go first-person, but it was clunky and cumbersome and generally not all that great. It was fine for its time, but it wasn’t until Irrational got their hands on the franchise that it truly found its footing.
You play as the leader of a SWAT team, and you go around doing SWAT things like serving warrants and busting serial killers. Each mission starts with a briefing and (usually) an accompanying 9-1-1 call, then you outfit your team, pick an entry point, and it’s off to the races.
The interface for commanding your team is handled through an elegant right-click menu system that is fast, functional, and easy to use. Of course, getting the hang of smoothly issuing commands while moving through an environment trying not to get killed takes some time.
Once you get your head around it though, the game really opens up for multiple playthroughs of each level. The idea is to be as non-lethal as possible, which is pretty easy on the first few missions, but gets progressively more difficult as you move through the later levels when enemies start wearing body armor and gas masks like great big jerkfaces.
You have to adjust your tactics and equipment for each mission, which you can play over and over again thanks to random enemy and civilian placement. It’s never the same twice, and the lethality of the weapons means that one door you opened last time that was safe might end you with one bullet from a bad guy’s gun this time. And, since there are no quick saves, every mission becomes a tense, nail-biting affair as you try to accomplish your objectives while saving as many lives as possible. Including the bad guys.
I originally played Double Fine’s first game on my Xbox, but I loved it so much that I bought the PC version and played it all over again. You’ve surely heard of Psychonauts by now, so I shouldn’t really need to go into the details. But shut up, because I’m about to anyway.
You play as a kid who runs away from the circus to sneak off to a psychic summer camp and learn how to invade people’s minds in order to solve their psychological problems by way of third person platforming. Which is all somehow even weirder than it sounds.
The platforming itself can be a little floaty at times, but it doesn’t matter because it’s really just there to move you through the interesting, imaginative environments that make up each person’s brain. One level might have you tromping around the mind of a carnage-obsessed general, another puts you in the 1950s conspiratorial mind of a paranoid milkman, while others throw you into a black velvet painting, a levitating discotheque, or in the middle of a tabletop board game.
Every mind is wholly unique, with nothing recycled between them. The story is witty, the dialog is sharp and hilarious, the voice acting is spectacular, and everything about the game is just…perfect.
Well, except maybe for the Meat Circus. But I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.
Back when Telltale was still trying to figure out how to modernize the point and click adventure genre before they just said screw it, gave up, and started churning out licensed choose-your-own-adventure books with sometimes walking, they really did try to make games. The problem was nobody wanted modernized point and click adventures, and Telltale never quite managed to nail down the magic of the genre. Which probably explains why they just stopped trying.
The first series of Sam & Max episodes was competent, but it was nothing spectacular nor particularly memorable in any way. The writing was as good as it ever was, the art was great, the animation fine, but some intangible something was missing. I think maybe it was the timing. In a comedy, timing is everything – which isn’t always compatible with a somewhat sluggish game engine that never feels like it’s very confident with itself, like the nerdy girl in every high school movie who could easily be the most popular kid in the cafeteria if only she’d take off her glasses.
For whatever reason, nothing ever really came together with the series. I played the first one and a bit of the second season, but lost interest somewhere along the way. The best episode was one where Sam & Max hop into virtual reality, which worked partly because it was just plain funny, and also as a throwback to when the original game did the same thing back in 1993.
I like Sam & Max as characters. I loved the comic strip you’d get inside most promotional material from LucasArts, and playing Find The Hidden Max inside different LucasArts titles was always a fun minigame. I even watched the short-lived animated series (bet you didn’t even know there was such a thing), and Steve Purcell is awesome. But for whatever reason, the franchise has never really worked for me in game form.
I’m probably just broken.
If your favorite parts of old adventure games involved the occasionally ridiculous puzzle, then Secret Files: Tunguska is the game for you. The puzzles here are absurd, and not just every now and then. They’re always absurd. Taping a cell phone to a cat to eavesdrop on a conversation is one of the most straightforward and sensible puzzles in the entire game, if that gives you some idea of how crazy things get.
The weird thing is that the wonky, Rube Goldberg meets MacGyver style puzzles actually add to Tunguska’s charm. They’re set against a desperately serious story, filled with conspiracy and intrigue and a fistful of cliches, and the contrast between all that and the super silly puzzles just works on some unconcious level or something. I don’t know, I’m not a psychiatrist.
It’s a very pretty game, and it’s the first point and clicker I can remember that had a system that highlights all the interactive elements in a scene, which is a super nice feature for an adventure game to have so you don’t have to hunt down pixels when you’re already doing things like getting a key out of a fishtank by using a magnet you get from a little girl after you give her batteries for her camera and fix her bike’s flat tire with a rubber glove and some glue.
Even though the cries of the adventure genre being dead have never really been true, 2006 was probably the year it was relying the most heavily on life support.
I’ve played a lot of Neverwinter Nights 2, but I never get very far. The story is just painfully cliche and boring. The writing is dull, the D&D mechanics annoying, and really just everything about the game is mediocre. Except that it’s really pretty, I guess.
So, like any self-respecting shallow jerk, I keep trying to like the game. It’s attractive, other people seem to dig it, and I want to be where the cool kids are. But then I have to play through that stupid harvest festival or whatever it was again, and I lose my will to live.
I hear the expansions add some good content, but I’ve never tried any of it. I guess I should, but something about skipping through the start of a game always feels off to me. Like, I wouldn’t start watching Breaking Bad in the middle of season three or anything, so why should I do that with a game?
Although, to be fair, Walter White never made me endure an excruciating hour of Renfest tutorials, either.
Yet another game on my list with a Looking Glass pedigree, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was created by Arkane Studios, whose previous game, Arx Fatalis, made my list back in 2002. (And their next game will show up when we get to 2012.) The Looking Glass bit comes into play by way of Floodgate Entertainment, which was made up by a bunch of former LG folks.
Dark Messiah, I guess of Might and Magic although I wouldn’t know because the story is completely boring and I never liked the Might and Magic series anyway, is a game that isn’t quite sure what it’s supposed to be. One way to look at it is as a Source engine-powered version of the Hexen games with a little Thief sprinkled in for flavor. But the other way – probably the better way – to look at it is as a prototype for Dishonored.
There are multiple ways to build out your character, multiple ways to proceed through each map, and there’s even a rope arrow that you’ll use all the time. There are magic spells, melee combat, and ranged attacks, but it’s the melee kills where you’ll feel the most connection to the (vastly superior) Dishonored.
Dark Messiah isn’t a bad game, but it’s all over the place. There are brilliant moments that will make you feel like a powerful badass or a clever little bastard, but there are just as many (or more) moments when you’ll absolutely hate the game and curse everyone involved in its creation.
It’s terribly unbalanced, especially once you make it through the game’s midpoint when you stop getting significantly more powerful but the enemies don’t, and certain builds become increasingly hard to play as the game goes on. It can be frustrating at times and downright maddening at others, but when the game hits the mark, it really hits it.
If you like Hexen or Heretic, or Deus Ex or Thief, you’ll find something to like in Dark Messiah. You’ll just also find a lot to hate, too.
Yes, I’m putting an expansion pack on my top ten games of the year. Some people might cry foul at this, since an expansion isn’t a proper game, but these are foolish people who will probably have no problem with me adding another expansion pack a little higher up on the list, because they don’t consider it an expansion when it clearly is. Whatever. People are weird.
Everything I loved about SWAT 4 comes back in the expansion pack, only this time instead of disconnected SWAT calls, every mission progresses through a cohesive storyline, which is nice. If you care about that sort of thing in a game like SWAT 4, anyway.
With the expansion pack adding 7 new missions to the base game’s 13, it brings to total up to 20 missions of brilliant, squad-based tactical FPS goodness, and I don’t care what anyone says. The Stetchkov Syndicate has some great, challenging missions and it stands as its own game.
This is especially true since I’m only covering games I played on my PC and it’s 2006. The industry shift toward cross-platform titles and my aging PC at the time conspired against me when I started putting together my list, so you’ll just have to take what I can give you. I only played so many PC games in 2006, so I’m adding what I add.
Deal with it.
A weird little game that I wish had become a proper series but am also kinda glad it never did because they’d just muck it up with modern AAA aesthetics and crap, Rogue Trooper is a quick romp through a bizarre world that is just good, simple fun.
You play as – surprise – a genetically engineered trooper named Rogue who, through circumstances not entirely unforseen through the clever use of foreshadowing nomenclature, goes rogue after all his buddies get killed and he has to put their mindbrains inside his clothes and shit.
What? Yeah.
Whenever one of the GI troopers dies, you have 60 seconds to remove his “biochip” and slot it into something, like a gun, a backpack, or even your helmet. Once slotted, the troopers live on inside whatever you stuck them in, and lend a bit of AI control to whatever it is they’ve become. Your gun suddenly helps out with auto-aiming, or you can place it down as a turret. Your backpack can manufacture upgrades and ammo, and your helmet learns how to hack things and fly sci-fi helicopters and stuff.
It’s weird and it’s short, but it’s tightly focused, well designed, and great fun to play.
I’m not sure why all the genetically engineered troopers are blue, though. And I have no idea why all the blue dudes run around shirtless while all the blue girls get to wear sports bras, or why every single one of them has a white mohawk at birth, but I’ve been playing games a long time. I learned to stop questioning some things years ago.
Hey, look. It’s a WWII game! Something new and different!
Company of Heroes was gorgeous back in 2006, and nearly melted my PC even with scaled down graphics settings, but the gameplay was a fresh and innovative take on the RTS genre. Well, it was fresh and innovative for me, anyway. But I’d grown tired of RTSs by the time Company of Heroes came out, so some other title in the genre might’ve already done all the things it did, but who cares. I didn’t know about them at the time, and this is my list so you can just hush it.
There’s light base building in CoH, but your resources come from captured control points that you can gain or lose throughout the course of a mission. This shifts the focus more on aggressive defense and inch-by-inch gains, and brings tactical strategic combat into the mix.
I use tactical and strategic in the same sentence, because that’s really what the game tries to do. There’s more strategy involved than tactical commands, but the control you have over your units coupled with their significance in each setting means tactical use of them as part of an overal strategic plan is important.
Which is all, like, super serious and crap.
Probably my favorite entry in the Hitman series, Blood Money managed to distill the essence of what makes the franchise great and concentrated it into a tightly focused series of missions that range from assassinating the seedy former manager of an abandoned theme park, to stomping through the crowds of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras while hunting down people in ridiculous bird costumes.
There’s really nothing new about Blood Money. It doesn’t radically change the franchise or try anything daring or risky, but what it does do, it does better than the series ever has. Fulfilling your objectives is always satisfying, and managing to achieve a Silent Assassin rating for any mission on the hardest difficulty is an incredibly difficult and rewarding experience.
After the success of Blood Money’s focused approach on getting all the good parts of the franchise just right, the next game in the series decided nobody much liked the best game in the series, so they turned it into an testosterone-fueled game with grimdark action, a steamy shower scene, and sexy killer nuns in latex.
Sigh.
Remember when I said a second expansion pack was going to make this year’s list? Well, here you go. Half-Life 2: Episode One is the first of three-but-really-two-because-we’re-never-getting-the-third-one-so-suck-it-up-buttercup add-on episodes for Half-Life 2. I bet nobody’s going to gripe about this expansion being on the list, because it’s Half-Life and people love a good double standard. Jerks.
Episode One focused heavily on the relationship between Alyx Vance and Gordon “No Lips” Freeman, and felt a lot like I was playing a co-op game with an AI partner because I’m awful and nobody wants to play with me. Which was fine by me, because I’m kind of awful and nobody really wants to play with me.
Taken together, Episode One and Two are arguably better than the entirety of Half-Life 2 itself, but I can’t take them together yet because this is 2006 and Episode Two hasn’t come out.
Taken on its own, Episode One is a brief but enjoyable trek through City 17 as you try to escape before some Science Event happens and everything explodes or whatever. The focus is on working together with Alyx, who was woefully underutilized in the base game, and the approach works really well.
Still could’ve used more Dog, though.
The sequel to one of the best adventure games of all time didn’t disappoint by the shift to 3D and away from the point-and-click mechanics of The Longest Journey. Sure, there were some clunky bits, and the introduction of combat was a ridiculous choice, but the story was still there. The characters – especially the new protagonist Zoë, as well as the return of April Ryan from the first game – were just as memorable and engaging as they ever were in the original, and the settings just as interesting and unique.
It’s a very sad game, too. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy running through everything to the point that, even when things are going well for the characters, there’s always this sense that everyone knows that their happiness is tenuous, at best. I’m not sure if Ragnar Tørnquist was actually going for the sort of ambigious, elusive feeling of nihlism that the game gives off, but kudos to him if he was. Because it does exactly that.
The whole game feels like a metaphor for lost innocence, really. The awkward and depressing transition from childhood wonder to depressing adult pragmaticality is conveyed not only through Zoë’s character arc, but through off hand, on-the-nose interactions, like when she has to cannibalize parts from her childhood stuffed animal. It’s a heartbreaking game, and a powerful one – if you’re in the mindset to take it in.
But it’s also an adventure game from 2006 that’s making the transition to 3D and trying to break through to a mainstream audience. That means there are plenty of missteps along the way, and your reaction to the game could be much different than mine. But for me, it was my game of the year.
What can I say? It pushed my buttons.
One of my last dips into the tepid waters of the MMO world, The Lord of the Rings Online kind of reminded me of Ultima Online, but not enough to keep me playing very long. I remember it having a very detailed and interesting crafting system that was nice, and running around The Shire was a nerdy joy that warmed my cold, dark heart. But beyond that? Meh. MMO.
In its defense, it was a game more focused on story than most other MMOs, but it was a story I already knew, and any deviations from the established narrative – however slight – just felt off.
If I were to go back and play an MMO today, I’d probably give LotR: Online another shot, but I’m not likely to do that. Massively multiplayer games tend to be absolutely filled with Internet People, so I like to avoid them whenever I can.
Would you like to play a game?
The most effective Wargames simulator this side of a VR-enabled Matthew Broderick, DEFCON is a bleak, disturbing look at mutually assured destruction, but in a super fun and stylish sort of way. Lots of blues. Very high technical.
There’s not much to the game, but that’s more to do with elegance than simplicity. There’s plenty of strategy involved to emerge victorious, but the whole point of the game is that there are no winners in a game of global thermonuclear war.
It’s a game every single Presidential candidate should have to play before going on stage at a debate to talk about how badass they’re going to be with the lives of other people’s children.
My PC could barely handle S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which has to be one of the most ridiculous acronyms I’ve ever heard. Supposedly, it stands for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers, but I had to dig that up on the internet just now, because it was never made clear in the game so I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m just calling it Stalker, though.
Like I said, my PC could barely run this monstrosity of a game, even though the graphical returns were meager at best. I don’t know much about programming and suchlike, but I always felt like Stalker didn’t really care about scalability or running on older machines, or even newer machines. When it came out, it was notoriously demanding, even on top of the line rigs.
As a result, I never got very far in the game because I’d either get annoyed at getting a crappy framerate at the lowest detail settings, or I’d get frustrated with dying all the time. Maybe it was both.
I never quite got Stalker, although I really loved its atmosphere. It absolutely nailed the tone it was going for, and the much-touted guy playing his guitar around a fire was as effective as everyone says it was. It was bleak and depressing, and if only my machine had been able to run it better, I probably would’ve been more willing to overlook its rough edges and dive into its depressing world.
An absolute gem when it came out, Team Fortress 2 was a Pixar movie come to life, if Pixar movies involved people on a Red Team killing people on a Blue Team for reasons never properly explained. The gameplay was fast, the character types well incorporated (even if everyone just wanted to be Engineers), and the art style phenomenal.
It’s just a shame Valve eventually made it Free to Play and completely ruined the game with add-ons and DLC and unlockable nonsense. I tried to get back into TF2 not long ago, and what I found was a jumbled mess of a game, so overcome with stupid add-on crap that the simple elegance of the original game had been entirely lost.
But hey, some dude who killed me was wearing a pretty cool hat.
So there’s that.
One of the very few Bioware games I actually like (the other being Knights of the old Republic) is, just as it was with KOTOR, entirely down to setting. Whereas one hooked me with Star Wars, Jade Empire snagged me with its mythical interpretation of ancient China. I loved it.
I also enjoyed the one aspect of the game tons of people hated, so no real surprises there. I thought the combat was very well done, in a realtime rock-paper-scissors style that allowed for some truly epic Kung Fu battles with genuine strategy involved. Of course, you had to play on the hardest difficulty level for any of that to surface, and even then it was still way too forgiving, but I liked it all the same.
The overall story was the Basic Bioware Plot, but the side and character quests made up for most of the main quest’s predictability. As did the setting, and the beautiful aesthetic the game offered. Everything just felt sufficiently mystical, bathed in faint glows and awash in colors that ended up making it feel more like playing inside a painting than anything else.
Like chocolate and peanut butter, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft are two flavors that go surprisingly well together. The Lovecraftian elements take a while to get going, but once they do, the game hits its stride as Holmes and Watson are pulled hip deep into the waters of the Cthulhu mythos.
It was the first title in Frogworks’ series to feature full 3D gameplay, which took the game in a new, more exploratory direction that the previous point-and-click titles weren’t really capable of. It misses the mark several times along the way, but it hits more often than it doesn’t.
There’s a really stupid chase through an area that passes itself off as New Orleans for people who have never been there, and it doesn’t really work. The chase, I mean. I don’t really care it NOLA is depicted accurately or not. The first Gabriel Knight game got it mostly right, but missed a few key points. I don’t hold anything against The Awakened for getting it wrong, although there’s one puzzle where you can’t get to where you need to be because of a lingering swarm of giant mosquitoes.
Which is about as accurate description of the Deep South as anyone could ever hope for, I guess.
Episode Two was the best part of the entire Half-Life saga that probably won’t ever be resolved until Valve licenses the property to a company who doesn’t own a massive online storefront and still cares about making games. Until that happens, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.
The interaction between Alyx and the player is the best it’s ever been, once you get through the boring bits at the beginning of the episode when Alyx needs to be saved by Male Power Fantasy #37. Once that’s done, the game really picks up and becomes a great single-player co-op experience.
The final battle at the end of the episode is lengthy and memorable, without ever devolving to the point of a boss fight. It was satisfyingly frantic and ultimately rewarding. The ending cliffhanger was a real bummer, though.
Ah, well. Maybe one day.
I mean, nobody thought Duke Nukem Forever would ever come out, either.
I did not finish The Witcher in 2007, but what I was able to play before I got to an area that very nearly melted my PC was an excellent return to form for the RPG genre. It was kinda/sorta/not really grimdark without being absurd (*cough* Dragon Age *cough*), and felt very grounded in “reality” – insomuch as there can exist a reality wherein a mutant white-haired assassin murders monsters, anyway.
The initial release was a little rocky, but CD Projekt RED released an Enhanced Edition the following year which not only corrected most of the problems, but also added a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really necessary, but that contributed greatly to the quality of the overall product. This dedication to making the best game possible, as well as showing a devotion and commitment to its customers would come to define CD Projekt RED as the years went on, but more on that later.
I wouldn’t finish The Witcher until I upgraded my machine a few years later, but it’s still getting a spot in my top three for 2007 because it not only completely captured me for the time I was able to spend with it, but it exposed me to a brand new type of fantasy world I hadn’t really considered before. It was a gritty fantasy, with one foot in myth and the other planted firmly in the depressing swamp of reality.
Game of Thrones did it, too, which I hadn’t heard of it yet, either. But after playing The Witcher, I went looking.
I came very close to giving this year’s top slot to Penumbra: Overture, but in the end I opted for a game that was arguably more original and clever than anything I’d seen in years. Which isn’t to diminish everything original and clever about Penumbra, because it did a lot of really cool stuff, as well.
Part first-person adventure game, part survival horror, and part physics simulator, Penumbra hit all the right buttons with me. From keeping me fully immersed in the environment by having me actually interact with every object in physical ways (e.g. to turn a valve, most games would have you hold down a button; Penumbra makes you grab and actually turn it with your mouse), to the suspense of not knowing what was around the next corner, Penumbra captivated me.
It was a fine first entry in an excellent series, and the folks behind it would eventually go on to create the gold standard for first-person horror gaming, but I’ll get to that in 2010.
If I were making a Top Ten Games of 2007 list, Bioshock would probably be here. But it’s not, because this isn’t a top games list. It’s a list of the top 10 games I played on my PC the years they came out, and I did not play Bioshock on my PC. I played it on my Xbox 360. Like some kind of animal.
(This will happen more and more, as this list moves through the late 2000s. Sorry.)
I did play Portal on PC though, and it was amazing. Apart from the brilliant puzzle solving in the game, the narrative wrapped around everything was what really sold me. The dialog was sharp and witty, and the whole package was subversive and brilliant.
It was funny, sometimes creepy, and always entertaining. The fact that Valve effectively turned a first person shooter into a puzzle game, then into an adventure game, and finally into a subversive tragic comedy was something I’d never seen before in a game, and wouldn’t see again until Portal 2, when they took it even further.
It’s my PC game of the year for being the most original, most inventive, and most effective use of gaming as a unique storytelling platform than I’d ever seen before.
And it was fun, too.
This year’s list was probably the hardest to put together. Life was coming at me pretty hard in 2008, so it was a crappy year for me. I played a few good games, but mostly I stayed in my living room and played them on a console with a carton of chocolate ice cream and a bucket to catch my own tears by my side. I didn’t play much on the PC, and what I did play was generally awful.
This game was generally awful. It’s a point and click horror game with a lot of pointing and clicking, very little horror, and tons of ridiculous character animations. Very, very slow and ridiculous character animations. Even the protagonist’s walk cycle is mess. Every time you click to move anywhere, his body just starts sliding across the ground for a couple of steps before his legs realize they’re supposed to be doing something.
The good part of the game comes from the little town where all the lack of action happens. It’s made up of enhanced real world photos, and everything is presented in black and white, with small splashes of color for emphasis every now and then. This isn’t anything new, but where The Lost Crown succeeds is in never feeling like it’s going for the cheap artsy aesthetic. It just kind of…works.
Shame about the rest of the game, though.
This game was also generally awful. Ostensibly a detective game, it’s mostly just an inventory-based point and click puzzler with no real redeeming qualities apart from the fact that it looks nice and the characters don’t look like they were animated by a particularly serious robot.
You do solve crime, though. Along with doing things like trying to give a bottle of whiskey to a bum who doesn’t like whiskey, so naturally you have to switch the label on it so he thinks it’s scotch, so naturally you have to find a way to peel the label off by plugging up a sink with a drain stopper you find in a bathroom where you can’t use the sink, so naturally you take the stopper to a kitchen sink where it fits perfectly and allows you to soak the bottle until you can peel the label off the scotch and stick in on the whiskey bottle so the alcoholic bum will accept FREE ALCOHOL since he’s a liquor snob.
Which seems like an awful lot of trouble for an FBI agent to go through, especially when it’s 2008 and we’ve got seven years of the Patriot Act working in our favor to rendition the hell out of this guy until he cracks down at gitmo or whatever. Waterboard him with bourbon. I dunno.
Why are so many detective games not really detective games? They’re always detective-themed games, where you mostly do something else and only kinda/sorta do some detective work every now and then. If games had rules like food does with the FDA, then we’d have a bunch of Detective Flavored games like we have lots of cheap Chocolate Flavored candy with little to no actual chocolate in it.
This game was generally nothing special. It starts out as a promising point and click adventure with an interesting story involving several people snapping and going on homicidal rampages, but it quickly spirals down into the depths of repetitive nonsense and annoyingly unskippable crap.
The worst part of the game is the entire central mechanic upon which it relies. You have to talk to characters to get them to have a flashback so you can figure out why they went all cray-cray and started killing people all day-day. What this translates to in the game, however, is just listening to the same damn dialog over and over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s like that song that never freaking ended on that Shari Lewis show with the puppets. But worse.
This game was generally mediocre. It’s not as bad as its reputation, but it’s not really very good, either. The whole problem with rebooting Alone in the Dark (and they just keep trying, bless their little hearts), is that the first game was never really that good to begin with. It was impressive for its time, yes. It birthed the survival-horror genre, yes. But it was triangle man fighting triangle tentacle, and the controls and inventory and everything else about the game were all pretty bad.
But the first game hooked players because it had atmosphere. It had to have atmosphere, because it sure as hell didn’t have much else going for it. But every time they try to reboot the series, they ignore atmosphere and try to shove some crappy AAA nonsense in to take its place.
With this one, it was supposed to be advanced item interaction that was all super impressive in the carefully scripted demos leading up to release, but that all fell apart once us gamers got our hands on it and realized that everything pretty much came down to using sticky tape on crap and making flamethrowers out of hairspray bottles.
By my count, we just had our third failed attempt at a reboot, with the latest going in the bizarre direction of making an ALONE in the Dark game multiplayer co-op. Because of course that makes sense.
This game was generally disappointing. Crafted by a bunch of ex-LucasArts veterans, this point and click adventure should’ve been great. But it wasn’t.
It’s not bad. It has its moments. It’s cute. But it just doesn’t execute any one thing particularly well. The jokes fall flat more often than not, the animations aren’t bad, but they’re limited, and the locations aren’t very varied.
I’d hoped A Vampyre Story would bring back the point and click comedy and revive the lost LucasArts charm, but I’d have to wait until Thimbleweed Park did that in 2016.
Which it had better do, or I’m going to mail vials filled with my tears of disappointment directly to Ron Gilbert until he makes me laugh again.
This game was generally inoffensive. It was basically a fun mobile game before there were really any mobile games, so it had no idea it was on the wrong platform. It’s a decent diversion from doing things like playing fun games, but it’s not much more than that.
For those of you who don’t know what World of Goo is all about, it’s basically down to building wobbly towers out of gelatinous goop until they fall down and you realize you’ll never beat the high score you got that one time when you were just randomly clicking things while catching up on the first half of the final season of Battlestar Galactica and wondering just what the hell happened to Starbuck, anyway.
Other than that, there’s not much else to the game. It’s cute and it’s fun in small doses, but it’s nothing all that special or interesting. And yet it’s #5 on this year’s list.
Go figure.
This game is generally not too bad. It’s repetitive as all hell, but it takes a while before that sets in and everyone gets bored so they just start setting each other on fire.
It’s a multiplayer co-op game where you fight off a zombie horde as your try to reach objectives. It’s fun. It encourages team play and cooperation, and even patience and understanding as you refrain from murdering the crap out of that idiot who ignited a gas can while we were all trapped inside a tiny closet.
The only real problem with Left 4 Dead is that it always plays out the same way. The scenarios don’t really matter, because it’s always run here, shoot these things, go there. Repeat.
The only time things get moderately exciting is when a giant Tank zombie comes out in the totally-unscripted and dynamically “directed” way that happens at the exact same point near the end of every damn scenario. Then, either everybody dies and the game is over, or one jerk manages to hide out near the boat while everyone else dies and then it’s game over, except for the one dude who ignored everyone else and lived because we all want to think the guy who lives in a horror movie is the noble hero who sacrifices and leads, but really it’s all down to whichever sniveling weasel managed to hide the best.
Which kind of explains evolution, really.
This game was generally decent. It’s more Sherlock Holmes, which is usually a good thing. There’s more Creepy Watson. There’s more Victorian London – a lot more of it, actually. The game seems to pride itself on how exactingly, painfully British it is, even going so far as to have entire swaths of the game built around British history as if I’m supposed to be intimately acquainted with whatever the hell happened in Trafalgar Square back in some historical period I never learned about because I was born in the filthy colonies.
There’s plenty of detecting to be done, but the big problem with the Sherlock Holmes games is just how annoying all of it is. If I want to measure someone’s boot print, just let me click the measuring tape and then click the print. Don’t make me drag the tape across it like some kind of crime scene Bob Vila, because half the time I don’t do it right and Sherlock just says some bullshit to me like a condescending asshole and I have to do it all over again.
The best parts of the game are when you get to fiddle around in Sherlock’s mini-laboratory to figure out what chemicals are in this bit of evidence, or where that bit of clay comes from.
Also, I’m prettty sure it’s where he makes his drugs.
This game was generally good. It’s more Brothers in Arms, which means it’s more Trying To Be Band of Brothers and Flanking All The Things, but it still works and it’s still fun.
Hell’s Highway is the best looking game in the series, since the first two were made on older tech. Hell’s Highway was all next gen before that gen became last gen, which means it mostly looks the same as the other two game in the series, but shinier. I remember a lot of pre-release hype on the cutting-edge visuals of this one, but by the time it eventually came out after multiple delays, it didn’t look all that spectacular.
It’s fun, though. And it looks as good as it needs to in order to get the job done, which consists of yelling at these dudes to lay down suppressing fire while yelling at these other dudes to follow me as we move around behind the Germans.
The protagonist is also having some kind of bizarre, melodramatic existential breakdown throughout the whole game or something, but since none of that really had anything to do with flanking maneuvers, I didn’t pay much attention.
This game was generally great. It’s more Penumbra, which means more physics puzzles and things going bump in the darkness.
The main thing Black Plague did differently was realizing how much the first Penumbra’s combat sucked, so it pretty much got rid of it. The focus in Black Plague is on avoiding bad guys and hiding, which is what the guys over at Frictional Games would eventually specialize in by the time they got around to making the hiding simulator called Amnesia.
Black Plague was originally going to be the conclusion of the two-part series, but then they went and added a third game that was really just an expansion pack that I didn’t care much about because I remember it taking place largely in some kind of dream world or fantasy world or I don’t know what world, but there were a lot of stone walls and a maze and screw it.
If you play it, just end the series here before things go to crap.
Last month, I was a mess. I was in a flat spin and spiraling my way into a deep, deep depression. I was even doing things like listening to country music, which is a good way to tell just how awful things are. It moves along a sliding scale, starting with Dolly Parton and ending somewhere around Kenny Rogers, which – if you’re listening to anything other than The Gambler – is when you know you’re nearing rock bottom.
Personally, I started by absentmindedly humming Hard Candy Christmas and worked my way down to listening to Kentucky Homemade Christmas in a parking lot while choking back tears and wondering where it all went wrong.
Christmas can be awful.
Later that day, I posted this: Trey’s Christmas Fund. It was a shot-in-the-dark, last ditch effort to try and appeal to the all seeing goat of the Internet for a small sip of the milk of human kindness. Which I guess in this metaphor would actually be goat’s milk, which I’ve always thought was kind of gross for some reason, so maybe let’s just go with human milk. Except that’s actually worse, because that has to mean breast milk and oh god what the hell is the milk of human kindness, anyway? I can’t imagine it’s anything not gross.
But that’s not the point.
Screw the Elf on the Shelf. We got a Dwarf in a Drawer!
The point is, I was desperate to give my kid – the objectively best kid on ever on the planet – some kind of a Christmas that didn’t involve me turning tricks outside a Dollar Tree for enough money to buy a couple of things inside a Dollar Tree. He’s an amazing, wonderful nine-year-old boy, with a heart as big as Texas and a smile larger than…wait. I’m slipping into metaphor again, which kinda freaked me out a minute ago. Let’s just say he’s awesome and deserves way more than I could ever give him, even if I were a rich man. (Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.)
So I wrote the post. Then I posted the post. Then people read the posted post, and then the most amazing thing happened: it worked. People began sending me money.
Almost immediately, I started getting little dingle-ding-ping notifications from PayPal. People were helping. ME. Or, rather, they were helping Trey – who, let’s face it, is a much more likable guy than I’ll ever be.
For the next few weeks, that little notification kept going off. $5 here, $25 there, $2, $7… – each notification was someone out there who gave a crap. Some came from people I know, some didn’t. Some people surprised me, some didn’t. But every last cent that came in went not only a long way toward saving Christmas for my little boy, but it saved me, too. Restored my faith in humanity, sort of thing. Without getting too sappy about it, you understand.
I’d planned on writing a personal thank you to each person who helped out, but then again, I only expected a few people to help out. I never imagined there would be so many people out there who would care at all about the problems of some little family in some little no name Texas town. Anything I could try to write as a personal thank you would quickly turn into a form letter somewhere around the I don’t even know what number, because I lost count of how many email notifications I was getting.
That isn’t to say that we struck it rich with your donations or anything. Most of them were very modest contributions that added up to us being able to give Trey a modest Christmas (slightly above really, thanks to a couple of really good sales and Amazon lightning deals). But there were a lot of them. Every single dollar helped, and all the small contributions quickly added up to larger presents, but I still have the post-Christmas crash to deal with, same as everyone else.
The traditional post-Christmas coma.
Except I’m not just confronted with eating Beanie Weenies every night in January to make up for what I spent in December. I’m not more broke than I was a month ago – I’m the same broke. Because you can only ever really be just so broke. I don’t have credit cards, but I also don’t have money to pay the mortgage, and the bank is breathing down my neck. Foreclosure looms. I’m going to have to start juggling which utility works this month, and which one we can do without until next month. I still don’t know how we’re going to pay Trey’s school tuition for the rest of the year. Basically, everything is just as crappy as it ever was – but at least we gave Trey a good Christmas.
At least he still doesn’t know anything is wrong. At least he went to bed on the 24th still believing in Christmas Magic, and woke up on Christmas Day to see it realized. And, at the very least, I still have that memory to hold onto while I continue fighting to keep the rest of our world from crumbling around us.
And you guys made that happen.
I don’t know if I could’ve made it through this Christmas without what all of you did for us. I don’t know if I could’ve watched him walk into the living room Christmas morning, to see his face as reality came crashing over him like a horrible tidal wave. He still believes good always triumphs over evil, that love wins out over hate, that good people are out there in the world doing good things, and that he’s one of them.
And you know what? I think maybe he’s right.
Despite every horrible thing that has happened this year, after what happened this Christmas, I’m a little less cynical. A little less jaded. A little less defeated.
Because good does triumph. Love does win. And good people are out there in the world, doing good things. You magnificent bastards are proof of that, which is just one more thing I’m grateful for.
You grew this Grinch’s heart this year.
All three sizes. And then some.
In my last post, I wrote about how amazing the GOG.com community is, and about how GOG’s Twitch Stream Team helped me get through a rotten Thanksgiving. They were great, as usual, but another – and infinitely more terrifying – holiday is coming up: Christmas.
And I don’t have any money.
Which is where Twitch comes in!
UPDATE: You did it! You saved Christmas! Click here for a small token of my thanks.
If you don’t know what Twitch is, it’s a streaming service that lets people watch other people playing video games. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. There’s a chat channel attached to the stream, so you get to interact with a bunch of great people while usually laughing at the antics of the streamer. It’s a good time. TRUST ME.
But what does Twitch have to do with me not having any money for Christmas? I’m glad you asked!
You might recall that, after finishing my horror novella back in October, I added a Donation page to this site. Many some a few groovy people donated, and helped me pay a couple of bills. That was great and all, but I have more bills coming up – and, more importantly, I have Christmas coming up. And no money to buy the best kid on the planet any presents.
I was laid off back in May, after my position was outsourced. I made it through two rounds of layoff before a middle manager I like to call Hillbilly Voldemort was inexplicably promoted to upper management, who then proceeded to use the layoffs as an excuse to get rid of everyone he didn’t like. So that was fun.
So now I’m a 40 year old systems administrator with decades of experience, and I can’t find a job. I live in the swamplands of Southeast Texas, in a city that God forgot called Beaumont. It’s a petrochemical town, which means there are tons of jobs if you’re a refinery worker, but not so much if you’re in IT. Around here, computers are how the devil gets inside you.
We have the World’s Largest WORKING Fire Hydrant, though. So there’s that.
Moving isn’t an option either, unless the job is absolutely perfect. My stepson, Trey – the aforementioned BEST KID EVER – needs to see his dad, so moving would only complicate his visitation schedule. I’d rather avoid that by finding remote work again (which is what I did at my last job), but I haven’t had any luck so far. (But feel free to check out my resume and hire me!)
Now Christmas is coming up right after my unemployment ran out, and things are pretty desperate. I need help. And, while I’m not above charity, I would rather do something to earn a little money for the holiday.
Which is where Twitch comes in.
I’m going try doing a little fundraiser for Trey’s Christmas by performing a marathon stream of a full play-through of Baldur’s Gate. Which, if you know my history with that game, should be hilarious.
I’ve set up a tip system for the Twitch channel, which will make donating super easy during the stream. However, if you hate video games and would rather just send me a few clams the old fashioned way, you can just head over to my Donate page and take it from there.
Clearly, I’m a professional book cover artist.
As a way of thanking you for your support, everyone who donates – either on my site here, or over Twitch – will receive a DRM-free eBook of my horror novella. (Which you can also read for free here.)
The Baldur’s Gate stream will start this Saturday, December 5, at 10:00 A.M. CST, and will probably run all weekend. (Baldur’s Gate is a loooooong game.)
I’ll also be doing practice streams all week long, starting at 6:00 P.M. CST every night this week, so you don’t have to wait for the marathon stream this weekend to swing by and send me a tip. I might even do some surprise streams, if I’m feeling really wacky. So jump on in and watch me flail around with no idea what I’m doing, while I get a handle on streaming. Mock my ineptitude! Good times.
Whenever the stream is active, you can go watch it by clicking here. I’ll also add an embed of the stream to this post, just below this paragraph. While I’m not streaming, you’ll just see a graphic letting you know what I’ll be streaming next, and when.
Before you go, let me tell you a little about Trey. He came into my life nearly eight years ago, after he’d just turned two. I’d just been through a terrible divorce, and his mother, Brittany, was going through the same thing when we met. We were friends first, with the potential for more always on the table, but I didn’t get to meet Trey until we were serious. He didn’t need more upheaval in his life, if we weren’t going to work out.
But we did. And I’ll never forget the first night I met him. I went over to Brittany’s apartment, we ate dinner, and then turned on Charlotte’s Web. By the end of the movie, Trey was in my lap and I was done. Instant, unbreakable bond.
Brittany and I were married around a year later, and have been a happy family ever since. Meeting my wife and son changed my life. I was heading down a rocky path, and they literally saved me from doom. I owe them everything, and now I can give them nothing. I feel absolutely worthless.
As for what makes Trey so special, read this from my last post:
About a month ago, he earned $10 from his Math teacher at school for having the best grade in his class on a test. When I picked him up from school and he told me about it, he said he wanted to donate his prize to charity. He’s nine years old, that $10 was all the money he had in the world – and he wanted to give it away.
He is amazing.
So he did. I took him to get a money order since he doesn’t have a checking account because he’s 9, and he sent his life fortune to the UNHCR, to help Syrian refugees. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s influence, which just goes to show how important Good People are.) While adults are still busy arguing over whether to extend basic human decency to those in need, my kid just went ahead and did it. Because he’s a better man than most of the grown-ups I know.
Then he took it a step further, while composing his letter to Santa Claus:
“I know I’ve been really good this year and you might have a lot of presents for me, but I don’t really need anything. I already have a great life, so please give my presents to kids whose lives aren’t so great right now. Like maybe the kids in Syria who need them more than I do. If you really want to bring me something, just surprise me. I’ll be happy about that.”
He really is the best kid ever – and yes, he still believes in Santa. He believes hard, too – which is going to make this year all the more painful, when I can’t buy him anything. Is there any worse way for such a great kid to find out the bitter truth than an empty tree on Christmas morning?
So please, if you have any scrap of generosity left in the dark cockles of your cold, black heart, send a little of it my way. Help me make my kid’s Christmas better than it could ever be without your support. Help me not feel like a worthless failure.
Just…help. Ok?
*sniff*
I’m no good at self-promotion, so I’ll only be sharing this on my own social media outlets. If you can’t help out with a donation, maybe you could share this post? The more people who show up to the stream, the better my chances of finding enough kind hearts to make my kid’s Christmas not suck. So put it on your Facebook. Tweet it to your followers. Share it on message boards, in forums, and chat groups. Pass the URL around at Bingo night. I dunno. Whatever works!
UPDATE: You did it! You saved Christmas!
Thank you!
I don’t have the words to express how amazed and awe-struck I am by the selfless generosity of so many of you. Your kind donations have given me the means to give Trey the Christmas he deserves. It will be a modest Christmas, but it will be Christmas – and all of it is because all of you. And you’re all wonderful and amazing.
One thing, though. Many of you who donated did so almost apologetically, including notes like, “I’m sorry it’s not much, but I hope it helps.”
WHICH IS CRAZY. Of course it helps!
Any dollars is better than no dollars, so every last cent has mattered. Each dime, every nickel, and all the pennies have mattered.
You matter.
I still have bills left unpaid, I’m behind on his school tuition, and I don’t even want to talk about the mortgage – but none of that matters right now. Every last cent of the money you’ve given has gone toward giving Trey the best Christmas morning I can possibly give him, and it will be a morning he remembers. He asked for nothing and expects nothing, but he deserves the world.
And you guys have helped me give as much of it to him as I can.
I’ll be sending out emails to all of you very soon (or possibly after Christmas, because things are kind of crazy) with the eBook and a special video just for you guys, detailing everything you made happen. I want to share the joy on his face with everyone who made it possible, but that will have to wait until Christmas has happened. I’ll probably even write a longer post thanking each of you, once I’m able to work through all these Feels enough to be able to Words again.
I hate waiting, though. So I whipped up this small token of my gratitude to tide you ‘over until I can do something better. Like I said, I don’t have the words right now. But that’s why god invented Warren Zevon…
It’s Thanksgiving. I’m still unemployed, so I’m a little more broke today than I was yesterday. I’m sick, my wife is sick, and our kid is at his dad’s for the holiday. When he gets home, I’ll go buy a Christmas tree with money I don’t have that I can’t afford to put any presents under, and that’s probably how he’ll find out the truth about Santa Claus.
Life bites.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
I started the day off bleak and miserable, so I decided to do what I always do when depression’s razor claws dig deep into the tender bits of my fleshier regions: I retreated into nostalgia.
Which is what this whole Life Bytes series is about, really. Wistfully looking back on yesterday, when things made sense and the world seemed kind of fair. Games were black and white – you were a good guy fighting bad guys, or sometimes you were a bad guy and that was okay, too. There were clear boundaries. You just had to stay within them, and everything was fine.
This naive thought process extended beyond the games, too. When I was a kid growing up in the ’80s, anything was possible. (More on that here.) By the time the grunge-tinted ’90s rolled around, I graduated high school, started college, and became an obnoxious 20-something. And life was still good.
I still believed in all the same things, even if I grew a little less innocent with each passing year. I still thought hard work would be rewarded with something other than just more work. I still believed in the American dream. I still bought into the idea that you could be anything you wanted, if you just worked hard enough. So that’s what I did. I worked. A lot.
Which leads us into the new century. When everything went to hell.
My last entry covered Ultima IX, which was released in 1999. I haven’t posted a new entry since then, because I didn’t want to get into the 2000s. The turn of the century, for me, marks an unhappy time in my life. Shortly after the nation was forever changed by the September 11th attacks in 2001, I began my own little medieval times: my Dark Ages, if you will. The whole period represents nothing more to me than wasted potential, missed opportunity, and lost innocence.
This is coming.
I don’t like to think about those years, much less write about them. But if I’m going to continue this series, I guess I kind of have to.
But not today.
Today, I need one more dip into the soothing waters of nostalgia before the 2000s come along and pee in the pool. I need…GOG.
For a nostalgia-obsessed freakazoid like myself, there is nothing better than GOG.com. In the past, it was just a great place to buy good old games and some amazing new ones at a great price and DRM-free. But sometime last year, I found the GOG.com Twitch channel, and I discovered how amazing the GOG community is.
The stream team is great, the chat regulars are amazing, and no one tolerates jerkfaces. That’s not to say that there’s any specific anti-jerkface policy or anything – and the moderators rarely flex any enforcement muscle. Rather, it’s just that a sort of self-policing thing organically happens in the chat, where annoying Internet People feel unwelcome as long as they’re being annoying Internet People.
It’s kind of like spraying a petri dish with antibacterial juice and then watching as nothing awful grows in it.
People are nice to each other. Decent. It’s as welcoming a community as the one Jenny Lawson has built around TheBloggess, only it includes video games. If Jenny was a gamer, she’d stream for GOG.com. Truth.
For example, shortly after I woke up this morning feeling awful and depressed, I tweeted about not being able to afford to buy any presents to put under the Christmas tree this year, and about how my son deserves better than me. (I feel absolutely worthless.)
Almost immediately, I started getting messages from GOGers. They sent me kind words of support and compassion, of understanding and encouragement. Unprovoked, unsolicited kindness: the GOG community defined.
I’m still going to stress about Christmas, even though my kid isn’t expecting any presents this year – not because he understands how much money we don’t have right now, but because he is amazing and wonderful.
About a month ago, he earned $10 from his Math teacher at school for having the best grade in his class on a test. When I picked him up from school and he told me about it, he said he wanted to donate his prize to charity. He’s nine years old, that $10 was all the money he had in the world – and he wanted to give it away.
He is amazing.
So he did. I took him to get a money order since he doesn’t have a checking account because he’s 9, and he sent his life fortune to the UNHCR, to help Syrian refugees. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s influence, which just goes to show how important Good People are.) While adults are still busy arguing over whether to extend basic human decency to those in need, my kid just went ahead and did it. Because he’s a better man than most of the grown-ups I know.
Then he took it a step further, while composing his letter to Santa Claus:
“I know I’ve been really good this year and you might have a lot of presents for me, but I don’t really need anything. I already have a great life, so please give my presents to kids whose lives aren’t so great right now. Like maybe the kids in Syria who need them more than I do. If you really want to bring me something, just surprise me. I’ll be happy about that.”
He really is the best kid ever – and yes, he still believes in Santa. He believes hard, too – which is going to make this year all the more painful, when I can’t buy him anything. Is there any worse way for such a great kid to find out the bitter truth than an empty tree on Christmas morning?
He’s smart, too.
I’ll get back to writing the next real chapter in this series soon enough, but today I need my GOG friends. As I said, I’m sick and broke, so there will be no Thanksgiving feast with friends and family today. There’s just me, my equally sick wife, and our dogs. And Netflix. Obviously.
But there’s also GOG.com, and the stream team. And the chat. And the games.
Life might suck right now – and I’ll be just as broke and unemployed tomorrow as I am today – but for now, I can laugh and smile with friends I’ve never met. I can crack lame jokes, watch fun games being enjoyed, and generally not feel like I’m a Dickensian street urchin standing outside life’s bakery with my face pressed up against the window.
Thanks, guys.
I wrote this slightly creepy, family-appropriate story around 15 to 20 years ago, and dug it out of mothballs to read to my kid tonight after trick-or-treating.
I thought it might be fun to share it here too, for All Hallow’s Read. You know, just in case any of you might want to read it to your own kids tonight. Get them in the spooky spirit. (If you’d prefer a much scarier story for grown-ups, try this.)
Happy Halloween!
A few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, three friends and myself began to concoct one of our usual mythic dreams of adventure. I grew up in either a large town or a small city, depending on your economic point of view. Almost the entire city-town was a suburb. We had a downtown, but there was hardly anything there other than city hall and the jailhouse. We had an indoor shopping mall, which was rather small but still the central vein of commerce for the area. Although such things never bothered me much as a child, I now sometimes wonder where anyone made any of the money they spent at the mall. The rest of the city-town was houses. Houses and woods. There were lots of woods.
My house sat in a neat suburb in the west end of town. The west end was, apparently, where the rich people lived. I never thought of my family as rich, though…which I suppose was more or less accurate, and became evident not even a year after the event I’m about to describe, when our landlord politely evicted us from our home a few days before Christmas. A few months prior, in the prime of autumn, is when my birthday occurred and the scheming began.
There was a section of woods near my house, beyond some oil fields, which was reached via an old shale road. It was forbidden by the parents of the neighborhood that any child should venture beyond the small patch of woodland before the road, which was really just a facade to hide the oil fields. I suppose the fear was that one of us would undoubtedly, and rather stupidly, attempt to inspect one of the insect-like oil pumps and be caught and mangled in its machinations. Whatever the parental logic, it was a commandment sent from on high to us children – and we dared not break it. Well, most of us dared not. All save one.
His name was John Westgate, but we all called him Bird for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. He was a terribly sick little boy, severely undeveloped for his age, and constantly on medication of some variation or another. He’d had open-heart surgery shortly after his birth, to correct some defect which none of us could pronounce except for Bird and his parents. He was one of the first babies the procedure was used on, which was a fact he reminded us of constantly. His mother worried over him without end, as one would expect, and rarely let him out to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. This method of parenting created a rather strange child that was more introverted at age ten than most adults I’ve met as I’ve gone through life.
On the rare days when he was feeling healthy and able, or when his mother wasn’t looking, Bird would come out to play with us. We’d taken to calling him Bird earlier, during the summer, when another neighborhood kid got a BB Gun for his birthday.
There were scores of birds in our neighborhood, which was odd considering the severe and curious lack of trees in the area. In the entire neighborhood, excluding the woods of course, there were maybe seven trees. There were a lot of saplings, but only seven trees. However, we had power lines galore and the birds seemed rather fond of them. One afternoon that summer, myself and Andy, Bird, and a kid named Charlie all met in a vacant lot a few houses down from my house. Here, power lines crisscrossed and it was a favorite resting spot for the birds. Andy was first, since it was his gun, and after loading a palm full of BB’s into the rifle, he pumped it up until it took both he and Charlie pushing together to close the plunger. Andy carefully took aim, spouted off some hunter-in-the-woods Errol Flynn nonsense, and squeezed the trigger. The shot apparently missed enough to not startle the birds in the slightest. Next up was Charlie, who missed as well. I was next, but for some reason that I can’t recall at the moment, I passed the gun to John. Andy pumped it for him, since he lacked the strength for anything beyond three pumps, and handed the rifle back to John. He took aim, very carefully and very quietly. He pulled the trigger slowly, and a bird fell from the wire as hundreds of feathers began flapping madly above us through a deafening squawk of panic. We all screamed in excitement and ran to where the bird fell. Andy was the fastest runner, so he got there first. “Guys! This is awesome!” he shouted. Charlie and I ran up behind him and looked down. The bird was there, slowly moving itself a bit. There was no blood, though, and the BB hadn’t broken the skin. “Aw, it’s just stunned,” came from Charlie. Just before John caught up to the rest of us, I started prodding the little thing with my foot. As John walked up, it began to try to stand and squawked a bit. It was a pitifully tiny sound, and it made it just as he got to the scene and looked down.
“Man, this sucks,” said Andy as he kicked some dirt beside the bird.
“I don’t know,” said Charlie. “It might be dying.”
I jumped in, offering brilliant kid logic. “It’s not dying, moron. It’s just stunned. If it was hurt, there’d be blood.”
Just then, John got on his knees and reached out for the bird. Andy shot his hand out in front of him as John reached for the confused creature. He shouted, “Don’t touch it! You’ll get rabies!”
Charlie, always handy with a random fact, chimed in. “Birds don’t carry rabies. You might get mites, though. Get it? Might get mites?”
“Shut up,” said John. He reached out and picked up the bird. It squirmed in his hand as its squawks got louder.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he replied. Without saying another word, he just turned around and started out of the vacant lot, back toward his house.
We all ran up behind him, shouting all sorts of nonsense about how the bird was fine and who cared, anyway? But John didn’t say a word. He just kept walking silently away from us. Just before we left the field, I grabbed his shoulder.
“Come on, man. It’s just a stupid bird. It’s not your fault,” I said.
John turned, looked up at me, and told me to &!%$ off. None of us had ever heard John swear, ever. I took my hand off his shoulder and took a step back. I could see tears in his eyes.
A few weeks later, we’d all but forgotten about the bird. John and his mother tried to nurse the thing back to health, but it died anyway. John wanted to take it to the vet, but his mother convinced him that it wouldn’t have done any good. They’d buried it after a few days, after John’s repeated insistence, in a private ceremony in his backyard. Once we got wind of that, his name was permanently changed.
The scheming after my birthday began as it usually did. We wanted to set out on an adventure. Andy offered up stories about how some bank robbers had stashed their loot in the woods beyond the shale road and oil fields. Charlie told him he was full of it, and I offered up my own idea for adventure. I’d heard my mother tell me about a kid that got caught in one of the oil pumps, and how horribly he died. Of course, it was just a story to keep us from venturing out there, but it was a story apparently concocted in unison by all the parents of the neighborhood – so we’d all heard it, and we all believed it. What the other parents didn’t tell their children, though, was something that my mother was happy to embellish upon. The kid’s ghost still walked the woods around the oil fields, trying to find its lost head. I, in turn, embellished further. I spun what was apparently a very convincing yarn about how there was something evil in the woods that kept the kid’s ghost alive and walking. The kid’s moaning could be heard at night, if you listened closely enough. This was true, in the sense that you could hear something coming from beyond the shale road at night. Granted, we all knew it was merely the metal of the oil pumps expanding and contracting – but it was enough to convince the other kids that my story could be genuine.
This all sounded like a great adventure, and one in which we could potentially dare each other into grand acts of stupidity and torment. We decided to camp out one night beyond the oil fields. I’d pick the spot because I knew where the ghost was. Andy would provide the sleeping bags, and Charlie would supply the cover story. His parents traveled a bit during the year, on the weekends, to visit his sister at school a few hours away. He was the oldest among us, beating me to thirteen by about three months, and his parents let him stay home alone. We would all sleep over at his house, if we could get our parents permission. We could and we did, although I had to swear to keep my room clean and practice my piano every night. Andy didn’t really have to make such concessions. His mother let him have a surprising amount of freedom, which we all envied. We couldn’t understand then why his divorced mother would let Andy go where he pleased and stay as long as he wanted, provided she had a boyfriend at the time – but secretly I think that we all wished our mothers would do the same.
The three of us were at Andy’s house, gathering supplies and preparing for the outing, when Bird knocked on the door. We hadn’t invited him on the camp-out for the simple reason that, if we had, there would have been no camp-out at all. He would tell his mother, who would tell our mothers, and then the whole thing would be over before it ever got started. We took turns explaining to him that we would have invited him, surely, but we hadn’t seen him at school the past week and assumed he was sick. He assured us that he was fine now, and we had no real choice left but to invite him.
Surprisingly, Bird didn’t tell his mother. Instead, he brought his own sleeping bag and three flashlights. Part of our arrangement was no flashlights though, so we left them at Charlie’s and headed out for the woods beyond the shale road.
We never made it past the oil fields. We set out late in the afternoon, and dusk was on our heels as we headed down the shale road. The sun had fully set by the time we neared the first of the pumping rigs. It was monstrous in its size. We’d all seen them, from time to time, along the highway – but this was the first close encounter with them for any of us. We pressed on a bit, past a few more pumps, until it was almost completely dark and the noises started.
They were subtle at first, small metallic pings from every direction. Andy was the first to notice them. “You guys hear that?” he asked. None of us answered, save for a unanimous head nodding. “Maybe it’s just the pumps,” he offered hopefully. We tried to keep walking, but the sounds started getting louder. Louder, and different.
“Scratches,” said Charlie, “it sounds like something’s making scratches.”
We all took turns looking around, peering out into the impenetrable darkness. I spoke softly. “We should have brought flashlights,” I whispered. I felt a light tap on my shoulder, and turned to see Bird’s hand pulling back. “What?”
He said nothing, but instead pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket.
“Excellent,” I told him. I aimed in the general direction of the closest noise and turned the flashlight on. Andy, unaware of the flashlight’s presence, let out a quiet yelp when a bit of an oil pump was illuminated out of nowhere.
Charlie punched me in my arm. “We said no flashlights. What’s the matter? Scared?” he said, insult dripping from his mouth.
“Bird brought it,” I shot back in defense. Charlie just sighed, and in one motion managed to roll his eyes, turn his head, and kick some loose dirt onto my foot.
“Whatever,” he said.
I traced the pump with the beam of the flashlight, exploring for any hint of what was making the scratching noises. Aside from an expected group of roosting birds, which appeared very much dormant until I shot at them with the light, there was nothing. They flew away, Andy and I jumped back dramatically, and then it was quiet again. Quiet, except for the tinny pings and the scratches. We could place a vague direction for each little creak and moan of contracting metal, and so our confidence in that regard was boosted somewhat. Of course, the yin to that yang was that, while we had no idea what was making the scratching noises, we were also at a complete loss as to being able to detect exactly where those noises were coming from. Andy snatched the flashlight from my hand.
“Look,” he shouted as he painted a nearby tree with the beam.
“What?” asked Charlie.
“It’s just a tree,” I said.
Andy argued. “No,” he said. “Look, right there on the ground. Beside the tree. What is that?”
We squinted our eyes for no reason.
“Get closer,” I commanded.
Andy took a few steps forward before turning back to look at us. He didn’t have to say anything for us to know that he needed backup. Charlie and I exchanged a quick glance and a mutual shoulder shrug, then caught up with him. We walked slowly forward toward the tree. Just when we were almost near enough to make out the shape lying quietly in the shadows, a loud shriek shot through my right ear. I jumped back in terror as my heart decided that this was no place to be at all, and tried to crawl down into my stomach. I closed my eyes, and only managed to muscle them open with great effort. When I could see again, I was greeted with a vision of a maniacal Charlie, who was clutching his stomach in exaggerated hysteria.
“Screw you,” I barked as I turn my back on him.
“Shut up, both of you,” commanded Andy, who was a few steps in front of us now, and right on base of the tree. He froze. Charlie quickly stopped laughing, and we moved in beside Andy.
There was a small patch of leaves covering something, with hints of gray sticking out between the foliage. A thin ribbon of pink was slipped underneath and to the right, and there was movement all across it. I knelt down while Andy focused the light. I realized what the movement was, but Bird beat me to it.
We’d all forgotten he was even there. I remembered him giving me the flashlight, but that was my most recent thought of him. He’d been rather quiet through all of this. He walked up now, slowly and calmly. He picked up a stick from the ground and brushed away the leaves with it.
“It’s dead,” he said in passing. “Probably died a few days ago. Look at the flies on its tail.” He knelt down and started prodding the thing with the stick. “Look at how mushy it is.”
Andy, who was bent over slightly and holding his hands on his knees asked, “What is it?”
Bird stood up and let go of the stick, which fell silently to the ground. “It’s a possum. A dead possum,” he said.
“How do you know?” asked Charlie.
“Because flies are eating it,” Bird responded.
Charlie shook his head. “No, how do you know when it died?”
Bird just looked at him. “Because that’s what happens after a few days,” he said sharply before turning his back to us, walking away into the woods past the oil fields.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. Bird just walked away, leaving Andy, Charlie, and I standing by the tree. After a few seconds, I remember that one of us yelled something at him. He didn’t yell back. All I remember after that is the noise. In the excitement of our discovery, we’d forgotten about the scratches. They decided to remind us that they were still there. They started small, with a tiny scratching somewhere in the distance. Then they grew louder as they also grew in number. Eventually they surrounded us, light taps and scrapes on metal grew into louder and heavier chalkboard nails. Louder and louder they grew, behind us and beside us, above us and all around us. They grew heavier, too. It was no longer a scratching on metal, but a slashing of it. We could hear it with enough clarity to picture all of the oil pumps around us being ripped to pieces by something that we couldn’t see. Gashes appeared in the metal around us, in our minds, and something was slashing at it. Slashing at us.
We ran. I remember that much. Running and screaming, the beam from the flashlight bouncing wildly around in front of us, not so much showing us where we were going, but all the places that we weren’t. Eventually, Andy stumbled a bit and dropped it. By then, though, it didn’t matter. We were back on the shale road, out of the oil fields and near enough to the neighborhood to pick up the spilled light of the street lamps. Once back on blacktop, we slowed down. Feeling more secure under the glow of the street lamps, and surrounded by cut grass and landscaped shrubbery, we stopped and allowed the breath we’d left behind in the fields to catch up with us and get back in our lungs where it belonged. We were so relieved, each of us, to be back in the security of civilization that it took several minutes before we realized that one of us wasn’t there. We’d forgotten Bird.
Our parents, minus Andy’s mother, formed a makeshift search party the next morning. We went with them, in the daylight, out onto the shale road and beyond it, into the oil fields. What we found when we got there was absolute normalcy. There was no ripped metal, and no oil pumps lying in ruin. Everything was as it should be. Everything, that is, except Bird. He wasn’t there. We led our parents to the tree where we’d found the possum, only it wasn’t there either. The patch of leaves, yes. The stick Bird had used to poke at its carcass was there as well, but the animal was gone. We all fanned out, each kid sticking close to his parents, with Andy following Charlie. We looked for hours. We shouted until our voices rasped with gurgling consonants. We couldn’t find him.
After hours spent searching, we gathered together into one group again, and headed back to the neighborhood. Our parents decided to call the police. Johnny was missing.
I remember the walk back the most. I don’t remember the details of the it, except that it was silent. Barring the crunching leaves beneath our feet, there was no sound. No sound that I could hear, anyway. I was feeling something then that I’d never felt before. There was a hole where my stomach should have been, only it was more than a hole because it seemed to be sucking the rest of my insides into it. Our friend was lost, and it was our fault. My head was filled with concentration on the happenings inside my body. I completely lost track of my feet. It was more like I wasn’t there than anything else. A kind of floating. Then, without warning, there was a commotion. My stomach found its way back home, my mind reassembled itself, and I located my missing feet. They were running toward something. I looked ahead, and could see where they were heading.
The entire group of us was racing to an oil pump. We’d passed it on the way in, but there was something new about it now. Something beside it, sprinkled with leaves. We got closer. There were flies. A man shouted. A woman fell to her knees. I saw what it was.
He was lying there beside the oil pump, a few handfuls of leaves having fallen on top of him. Someone brushed them off. Something red smeared on his jacket. Blood. There were flies.
I don’t know how we didn’t see him when we passed the pump on our way in. I don’t know what happened after my mother dragged Andy and I away and back home. I only remember seeing the blood. It came from what must have been thousands of tiny scratches all over his face and hands, his clothes, his eyes. His throat. Thousands of them. Tiny. My mother dragged us away.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I was in my bed, covered up with my mother beside me. I’d been too scared to sleep alone. She fell asleep holding me, and I was caught under her arm. I tried closing my eyes. I tried counting sheep. I tried not trying. I just couldn’t stop hearing the scratches. They were in my head now, scratching at it from the inside, scraping against my skull. Then there was a tap. It was light at first, then another came. Tap. Tap tap. Louder, and not inside my head this time. Tap tap tap. I shot up. My mother startled awake. She slurred confused questions at me, wanting to know what was wrong. I didn’t hear her. I just heard the tapping. The tapping. I looked around. Tap tap. It was coming from my window. I shoved myself back against the wall my bed rested on. I brought my knees, shivering, up to my chest and held them there. My mother shook me, begging me to tell her something. Instead, I just pointed. I pointed to the window. She got up, went to the window, and pulled the curtain cord to raise the blinds. There was nothing there. Tap tap. My mother looked down at the window. I shivered – she’d heard it this time. It was real. She looked out. Tap tap tap. It got dark.
The next thing I remember, my mother was stroking my hair and humming to me. I’d passed out.
“What was it?” I asked her, pleadingly.
“What was what?” she asked back.
“At my window,” I said with a shake in my voice, not really wanting to know the answer.
“Nothing,” she said, as she rocked me in her arms. “Just a bird.”
*******
Happy Halloween!
Guys. IT’S ONLY A STORY. You know, for Halloween. Please don’t call the cops on me. Again.
If you’ve been following the little horror series I’ve been writing all month for Halloween, then you might’ve noticed a new update I posted to it last night, wherein I was forced to explain that it was only a story because this is Texas, where people can apparently convince the police that shadow ghost demons are real and need to be investigated.
Which is why three officers showed up at my house last night and interrogated me in my own living room. After they saw that my wife and child were fine, that I was fine, that everyone was fine, they eventually left laughing about the whole thing and clearly annoyed that they were ever called out to begin with. But the point is that I had the cops called on me OVER A GHOST STORY.
(Pssst! Hey, you. Did you know you that could pay what you for a cool eBook version of the Supernatural story? Because you can! Ask me how.)
In their defense, they’re required to investigate any calls that come in, and the person who called them made sure to send them carefully edited and very specific quotes from the story, with no context or explanation, which is probably why the officers were pretty confrontational when they first showed up, with one of them taking the lead and trying to coax me into telling them that I was depressed and violent. It was surreal.
She just kept repeating questions like:
It was at that point that I went and got Brittany out of bed, so that they could see that she was fine and unharmed. Trey was already in the living room, happily playing on his computer the whole time. Once Brittany came out and saw the cops, she just started laughing. They saw that her face was very much un-hit and that everything was fine. Then, we all laughed about it, they said goodnight, and went on their way.
At first, I was kind of flattered that anyone would actually believe the story enough to call the police. I mean, that’s a pretty big compliment to a writer. I also thought it was really sweet that someone was concerned enough to call the police to come check on us. But mostly, I was shocked that I was answering my door and being grilled by cops at 9:00pm over a freaking ghost story.
Then, it dawned on me that the call might not have been made out of concern, but of malice. So, I did a little digging and found out who it was, and yup. Big fat malice.
The person who called the cops on me is an omnipresent source of stress in my life, but it’s unavoidable. He makes it very difficult to write passionately or with any honesty about difficult subjects, because I always have to be on the lookout for him to pounce on what he sees as an opportunity or a weakness he can exploit. It’s annoying, but nothing I haven’t been through before.
In truth, any genuine concern would have resulted in a phone call or at least a text to one of us before the cops were called. I actually received quite a few such messages from concerned friends yesterday, and I responded to each one, letting them on to what it was: a Halloween story.
It all started as a way to prank Brittany, back in July. When October rolled around, I decided I could turn it into a scary story for Halloween, so I started writing. Then, somewhere along the line, the whole thing became one giant metaphor for Depression. If you’ve ever struggled with depression, then you understand why a psychological horror story was a good fit. And every horror story is a metaphor for something.
The list could go on forever. Horror is always a metaphor for something else. The monster is never just a monster. My shadow ghost demon was an obvious metaphor for Depression, because depression is scary. It stalks you, you can’t predict when it’ll show up, and you’re powerless to stop it. All you can do is deal with it as it comes, but you can’t do anything until you accept it. Acknowledge it. Own it. Then, you can work on dealing with it.
Which is exactly what my story is about.
I didn’t want to write a traditional narrative, so there’s no discernible plot to it at first glance. It’s random. Things just happen, and then they happen again. Sometimes, they seem like they might be tied to something else, some events seem to echo earlier ones, etc… This was all by design, because I worked hard to actively avoid standard storytelling. Plotting a standard story arc would’ve been much, much easier.
But I wanted it to come across as an as-it-happens journal of some poor guy’s descent into madness. The best way to do this was to not write a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To not write characters or situations and plot. I had to write it from the first person and write it in the same style as the rest of the posts on this site, so it would be believable. I wanted it to seem real, but never to actually be real.
At best, I wanted to instill in readers a small grain of doubt that maybe it was really happening, even if they mostly suspected that it was just a story. That little nugget of doubt is all it takes to get someone to suspend their disbelief enough for the horror to work. It’s easier in a conventional narrative, because when someone sits down to read a horror story or watch a movie they know is fictional, they come prepared to accept certain tropes of the genre, so they won’t think twice about a ghost moving things around or the walls bleeding or whatever. Because they expect it. It’s all just part of a horror story.
But what I was trying to create was, in a way, a text-based version of a found footage movie, but one that the reader follows more or less as it’s happening, rather than years later when someone discovers an old video tape stuck inside the walls of their basement. This presented a lot of problems though, because when you’re writing something to seem real and you’re using real people, you have to stick to real things. Or at least not push too far into the standard conventions of horror, because then the illusion breaks and the whole thing falls apart.
Still, I wanted to break the spell, on occasion. I wasn’t trying to convince people that what was happening was real. I was trying to convince them that it could be real, even if it probably wasn’t. Uncertainty and doubt are central themes of the story, and I wanted them to come across organically in the reader’s mind. The best way to do that was to do things like tell them up front that nothing they are about to read is real, and then undermine that by mixing (possibly) supernatural elements into what are otherwise very normal posts using natural language, very informal writing, and some jokes.
Just as the main character (me) in the story doubts the supernatural bits are actually happening, I wanted the reader to doubt them, too. I actually scaled a lot of things back, because I wanted to maintain that sense of uncertainty. I injected some “physical evidence” of the goings-on to further blur the line, because I knew such proof would only work against anyone’s belief that any of it was real. Creepy images and scary sounds are fine in a movie, but in the context of what I was writing – as if it was all actually happening, as it happened – then any tangible evidence I provided would only stand out in stark contrast to the psychological elements of the story. In short, they’d seem fake.
So I kept purposefully blending obviously staged supernatural events with (seemingly) very real, ordinary events to keep the reader swaying back and forth from being 100% certain it wasn’t real one minute, to not being quite so confident the next. If I had to put a number on it, I really only needed like 5% doubt. My aim was to make the reader feel somewhat like the narrator: questioning his own reality while the reader questioned the story’s veracity.
I think it worked. Maybe it didn’t. I don’t know.
But anyway, that’s what I was going for: a scary story for Halloween, wrapped in a metaphor for depression. I wanted to have it ready to be read in its entirety for Halloween week, which is why I ended it yesterday. I didn’t want to give it a climax or any real resolution, because it wasn’t a traditional narrative. I left it open-ended and on kind of a downer, because that’s how depression works. There isn’t a satisfying ending to an ongoing struggle. Because it’s ongoing.
Then again, my ending might not be such a downer, after all. Accepting depression, letting it in and owning it is the only way to get through it. So, in that respect, it’s actually a happy ending.
Or is it?
DA-DA-DAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Happy Halloween, kids.
Now click over here and share the bejeebus out of the Supernatural story. Please? It’s currently within striking distance of overtaking Ridiculous Baby Headbands as my most shared post, and that’s really all I want out of life.
Also, if you feel like helping me out so that I don’t, I dunno, maybe die alone on the street, penniless and curled up inside a drainage ditch for warmth while hungry buzzards peck at the ancient disposable contact lenses stuck to my eyeballs, then you could always head over here to send me a few clams. There’s even a DRM-free eBook version of the Supernatural post in it for you.
HOW GENEROUS OF ME! I mean you. Whatever.
I was a very trusting child. If someone in a position of authority told me something was true, I usually believed them. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why I grew up to distrust all authority as an adult. Because authority is full of shit.
My parents were my first authority figures, which probably isn’t all that much of a surprise, since parents are pretty much everyone’s first authority figures. And I believed everything they ever told me, which is a fact they routinely exploited with the kind of sadistic relish only parents delivering a little payback to their weirdo kid can.
For example, a favorite pastime of my folks was alternating between telling me that they were either going to ship me off to the orphanage, or some supernatural force was going to murder me. ALL THE TIME.
My Other Questionable Decisions
The orphanage threats usually came at the end of some parental frustration involving my being annoying, obnoxious, loud, or excessively weird. Probably all at the same time. And in public.
We’d get in the car, and they tell me they’d had it. They couldn’t take it anymore, and it was off to Boy’s Haven with me, which wasn’t really an orphanage so much as it’s a great local organization that takes in boys aged 5-17 who need a little help, and gives it to them. But in my home, it was basically a Dickensian work house for pickpockets and street urchins.
I did not want to go to there.
But every time I acted up, we were, in fact, going to there. My parents would even start driving and pointing out landmarks along the way, like they were following some kind terrifying treasure map that led directly to my incarceration. The whole time, they’d be telling me things like no one there would be nice to me, I wouldn’t ever get tucked into bed, and – when I did go to bed – I wouldn’t be able to snuggle with my favorite stuffed animals BECAUSE THEY WOULDN’T LET ME TAKE THEM.
It was basically the saddest scene in a Toy Story movie, but worse because I knew they wouldn’t understand. My stuffed animals, I mean. I hadn’t even been given the opportunity to explain the situation to them or even say goodbye. For all they’d know, I just got tired of them one day and never came back. The guilt weighed heavily on my young soul.
Of course, I never did get shipped off to the orphanage. Because they lied.
Spoiler alert, I guess.
Happy Teddy! Nooooo!
The times when they’d convince me that the devil himself was out to eat my soul were, I think, meant more playfully. I don’t think I was being punished for anything when my dad suddenly cut power to the house one night and started walking into the living room with a life-sized, glow-in-the-dark skeleton while he made moaning sounds and said things like, “Mister Funnybones wants your soul.”
Yeah, I think that was just being playful.
Or all the times when we were riding in the car at night, and both my mom and dad would start FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because they’d just seen a witch out the rear window, and she was chasing us. My dad would pretend to speed up, my mom would start having a panic attack, and then…then the witch would attack the car.
We could hear her big, buckled pilgrim boot-heels scraping against the roof. We could hear her long talon nails tearing through the metal of the trunk. We dared not look.
I’d find out later that all the noises came from the power of suggestion and a little help from the retractable radio antenna on the car. It made this whirring, electric, scraping noise that, if you didn’t know any better (because you trusted your parents when they told you that evil, soul-sucking monsters were out to murder your entire family), sounded a lot like a witch attack.
And that’s not even going into how, when we’d go to visit my grandparents on my dad’s side, the car would always barely make the drive across the Swamp Monster Bridge, where all the elaborate stories of supernatural murder, death, and mayhem were that much more believable because the bridge was is Louisiana. Which you’d understand if you’ve ever been to Louisiana.
Those were just the standard lies, though. Then there were the exceptional ones.
The very same year I was being shipped off to The Special Class every few days at school, my dad decided to tell me how BBs were made. We’d gone on a camping trip with the Indian Guides (because I was way too nerdy for the Boy Scouts, and I guess my parents figured adding racially insensitive feathered headdresses into the mix couldn’t really make things any worse), when it happened.
I was marveling at a super tall lookout tower near a lake at the campground (which could’ve just been a normal lifeguard’s chair, now that I think about it), when my dad decided to ruin my life. He pulled me aside and, in whispered tones, conveyed to me the secret of BB manufacturing.
“You see that platform up at the very top of the tower, son?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where they make BBs.”
“Really? How?”
“Well,” he said – and this is where he would’ve leaned back in his chair and taken a long, satisfied puff off his pipe if we were near a chair and if he’d smoked a pipe – “it takes two guys. One guy climbs way up to the top with a bucket of water. And another guy stands underneath him on the ground, with an empty bucket.”
“Then what?”
“Then, the guy at the top takes an eyedropper and sucks up a little water. Then, he carefully squeezes out just one drop over the edge of the platform. And as it falls, it spins and spins and spins so fast that it turns into a metal ball, and the guy at the bottom catches it in his bucket.”
Seems legit.
“But,” I asked, seriously concerned for the safety of the poor guy at the bottom, “what if he misses the bucket?”
“Ah,” replied my dad, taking another happy draw from his imaginary pipe, “that’s why he wears a hard hat.”
And that’s how I learned how BBs were made. Which I would excitedly tell all of my classmates at school the following week, but not before I’d burned my foot on a hot coal and rescued a fish from certain death.
See, on that same camping trip, we also went fishing. I only remember two things about it, though: the kid who went to cast his line, caught his hook on his own back fat and then…well, it was gruesome. Let’s not dwell.
The other thing I remember was The Fish. I think it was a perch, because every fish is a perch to me since I know exactly jack shit about fish. At any rate, I managed to catch a fish, and I think it was a perch. But that’s not the important part.
The important part was my immediate regret over having caught the fish. I didn’t want it to die, but I also didn’t want to be the one kid who didn’t want to kill a fish on the camping trip, so I didn’t throw it back. We tossed it in a cooler where it flopped around, gasping for water-air and crushing my soul. I showed everyone I caught it, then closed the cooler and went off to pack up our tent and cry.
Which is when I walked right over the fire pit someone did a horrible job of covering with dirt, because my bare foot found a still-hot coal. Right in the arch. Burned like hell.
So now I’m crying and my foot’s on fire, my fish is dying in a cooler, and all I want to do is go home and never again venture into the great outdoors where sadness lives. We finish packing up, then hop in my dad’s old red truck and head on down the road. With me still crying, my fish still dying, and my foot still burning.
My dad pulls off into a gas station along the way, then goes inside and comes back out with a little styrofoam bowl of water. He sticks The Fish inside, then pops a lid on the bowl and tells me to hold onto it. But not to open the lid, because then bad things would happen and it would probably die.
It was already dead, of course. But I believed him when he said it wasn’t, because authority figure.
He gets back in the truck, then turns on the air conditioner and tells me to stick my foot up next to one of the vents. The AC cools it down and I manage to stop crying for a little while, with my foot getting some relief up on the vent and my fish potentially not dying in my lap.
*Styrofoam bowl not to scale
Of course, it was basically Schrödinger’s Fish at that point, both alive and dead at the same time, and only by opening the lid would I collapse the probability wave or whatever. So I kept the lid on tight. But any time I would start questioning why it didn’t feel like the fish was moving around in the bowl, my dad would come up with some kind of believable reason, and then switch the AC over from Cool to Heat.
Which my foot would quickly realize before I did, after which I’d scream and start crying again. My dad would laugh and shout, “Say hello to Mister Fire!”
After a minute of that, he’d switch it back, and, for a little while, I’d be too angry and confused to question the condition of The Fish.
Before we got home, we took a slight detour near a drainage ditch. My dad hopped out of the truck, came around to my side, and asked me for the fish. I handed it to him, then he told me he was going to set it free in this large body of water I thought looked nothing at all like a drainage ditch. Probably very little poop in it.
He walked over to the water, knelt down, I heard a little splash, and then he came back.
My dad shouted, “He made it!” – and I didn’t question a word of it.
That was a good lie. But then I went back to school Monday morning and decided to tell everyone who would listen how BBs were made, which is how I ended up getting into a fight with a kid named Chuck because SHUT UP, MY DAD WOULDN’T LIE TO ME!
As I’ve started opening up a little about my various absurd struggles with depression and all my weird little quirks – thanks, in large part, to Jenny Lawson making me feel like it’s okay to be broken – I’ve noticed something not good: there aren’t many dudes talking about their feelings.
Not in the way that the women are, with jagged bone honesty and brutal humor to highlight how ridiculous everything is. The few men who are writing about mental health tend to write like, well, men writing about mental health. It’s usually very cold and antiseptic, as if depression can be conquered through spreadsheets and actuarial tables.
Now, I don’t subscribe to the idea that men are from one planet and women are from another, because I really don’t think we’re all that different from each other. Not really. We tell ourselves we’re different – and, more importantly, we’re told how different we are all our lives – but it’s all just stupid marketing. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina. And that’s about as deep as it goes, except that my penis doesn’t bleed every month, and I can’t grow babies in my testicles. I suspect there was some divergent limb on the evolutionary tree that tried this once – men being the baby makers – but natural selection probably kicked in after every single dude just started lying around in the fetal position, clutching his balls and crying for days at a time every month, and nipped that in the bud.
The point is, while plenty of brilliant women are writing brilliant things on the subject, men remain pretty silent. Why? If we’re not so different, then why aren’t more men trying to do what I’m probably failing at doing?
I think it’s probably down to gender roles and behavioral psychology and stuff. You know, the same crap that tells little boys they can’t play with dolls, or that girls need princess tiaras and pink everything. But that’s all over my head, and best left to people who have, I dunno, gone to school and learned something about it or whatever. The tweed jackets with elbow patches crowd.
All I know is that writing about this crap has helped me not only keep pushing through a serious bout with depression, but with putting my entire life into ridiculous perspective. Some of the things I’ve done have just been crazy weird. Most of the things I still do are crazy weird.
I’m crazy weird.
And so are a lot of other dudes. Even if they haven’t been able to admit it yet, because no one has told them it’s okay.
Instead, we lurk over at The Bloggess or find quiet solidarity in Hyperbole and a Half, but as far as anyone else knows, we’re only there to laugh at the jokes, and all the touchy-feely stuff is for the girls. Like watching a romcom – we’ll do it as long as there’s enough John Cusack to counteract the Katherine Heigl, but we’ll pretend like we’re not really enjoying it the whole time.
Men also hide behind manly manliness, which here in the south means taking long hunting trips or talking about sports. We’ll buy things, too. Cars in the shape of a midlife penis crisis, expensive sunglasses, stupid active wear we pretend does some really cool sciency thing, but that we’re only buying for the stupid logo, etc… We’ll even plop down a stack of cash for a ridiculous ice chest because it’s the cool new thing to do. (See also: Toyota’s Scion, Ray Bans, Under Armour, Yeti Coolers…)
Which is fine, I guess. Whatever gets you through it. It’s better than breaking up with your girlfriend or cheating on your wife, like a whole lot of other dudes do along their misguided quests to find fulfillment.
But what are guys who hate brand marketing, can’t stand sports, despise trends, and would never cheat on their spouses or go to the store for a loaf of bread and not come back until 20 years later supposed to do?
Oh. Wait. I hope you’re not expecting me to have an answer for that one, because I don’t. I play video games, watch Netflix, read books and write dumb blog posts. And cookies. I eat a lot of cookies.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
The only thing better than gingerbread is nerd gingerbread.
I’m not even sure I have a valid reason to be depressed, which is how depression likes to make you feel. Sure, getting laid off and being pretty hardcore unemployable when I live in the Deep South and write about things like feelings and how stupid I think the God, Guns, and Jesus mentality is around here is probably a “valid” reason for feeling depressed, but I was depressed even before my job went to India.
I worked hard at my last job. I was called the “go to” guy of my group. I routinely resolved more cases than everyone else on my team combined. Every week. I was basically on call 24/7/365 because I was “the guy who gets things done”.
But I also had Hillbilly Voldemort.
Hillbilly Voldemort, if you’re new around here, is the name I gave to the opportunistic, slackjawed bully who was my last middle manager, before he failed upward and moved on to upper management after contract renegotiations with our client took a turn and my company ended up partnering with an outsourcing firm. And, armed with the power of layoffs, he systematically went through the company roster and eliminated everyone who was ever a threat to him, or who he just didn’t like. It was a common theme in hushed employee-to-employee conversations when it was all going down.
Someone else being laid off would ask, “Oh, hey. Did you, by any chance, ever happen to piss off Steve?”
And then The Stories would be told, and yup. Common theme.
So maybe I have a right to be depressed now, but why was I depressed back when I was making good money, before The Dark Lord rose like a pimple off the back of some slimy dude’s head?
I have no idea.
I didn’t have a bad childhood. If anything, my childhood was too good, because I constantly want to go back there. It’s why I’ve devoted countless hours to writing a nostalgia-soaked trip down memory lane. Sure, life wasn’t perfect back then, but it was a damn sight better than it usually is now.
I was such a cute kid. WITH PERFECT EARS.
Yeah, I was a goofy kid. I didn’t have many friends and I was kind of a weirdo, but my parents made time for me and made me feel loved, even if they did worry a little too much about my weirdness at times. In short, I had a nice time.
Even if I’ve filled my life with Questionable Decisions.
Even if I always worried about everything.
Even if the emotional scars left by my childhood peer groups haunt me to this day, to the point that if I ever walk near any group of people who start laughing, I’m instantly convinced they’re laughing at me, and I start running through a mental checklist of everything I’ve been doing since I’ve been in their eyeline, trying to track down exactly what it was that set them off in their open mockery of everything awful about myself. And that goes triple if it’s a giggling group of teenage girls, which is basically the scariest thing on earth.
But the way depression works – for me, at least – is that it makes me feel bad for feeling bad. Right now, I have something to be depressed about: I’m unemployed, money is running out, and I can’t find a job anywhere. So I’m good on the nodding heads and sympathetic looks from people I know front. For now. (Speaking of…if you’re looking for an employee, I’m great at IT work, systems administration, web solutions, and SharePoint. I’m comfortable working remotely, and I can even handle PR, technical writing, and making really lame jokes during awkward staff meetings. Hire me!)
All the other times, though… Times when things are good, when I’ve got money in the bank and plans on the horizon, when things are happening and all seems right with the world – those are the times when I hate myself for feeling like I hate myself.
Other people have it worse!
Be grateful for what you have!
Stop whining.
Why are you so awful?!
The shouts in my head never stop, even as some other part of my fractured psyche shouts back that I DON’T KNOW WHY.
I don’t know why I wake up every morning feeling like a failure, even on the increasingly rare mornings when I wake up after having not recently failed at anything. I don’t know why I don’t trust good days, or why I think happiness is out to get me. I don’t know why I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, the unexpected phone call, the red letter in the mail.
I DON’T KNOW WHY.
I don’t know why I feel like I haven’t accomplished a damn thing in my life, or why it feels like I peaked in high school when I really didn’t do anything in high school. I wasn’t class president, I hated pep rallies, I didn’t have many friends, and I did the bare minimum needed to pass my classes and graduate. If that’s my peak – then my life is a damn greek tragedy.
But without any of the heroic, monster-slaying bits.
I don’t know why I’m sitting here, typing this out and making myself feel worse. I don’t know why I wake up every morning, and the only thing I look forward to doing all day is going back to sleep. Or eating cookies. Preferably just before going back to sleep.
I don’t know why every post I write that gets a lot of traffic but hardly any shares feels like a waste of time. I don’t know why I keep hoping someone influential will find what I’ve written and help get me noticed. I don’t know why not being noticed makes me feel like a failure, when being noticed makes me feel like a fraud.
I don’t know why I think the success of nerds being nerds has created a bizarre tiered nerd hierarchy, where someone as awesome as Felicia Day makes me feel like even more of a loser because I’m not a cool enough nerd to roll 20-sided dice and eat cold Pop-Tarts at her super nerdy lunch table.
I DON’T KNOW WHY.
But I do know I wish other guys were talking about it. I’m sure they’re out there – and if you know of any, or if you’re one of them – please let me know. Send me an email, or leave a comment and link me in their direction. Because as great and inspirational as it is to read Jenny and Felicia and Allie, I need to know that there’s at least one other tripod out there who’s been where I’m at. Who’s going through what I’m going through. Who knows the difference between who’s and whose without having to look it up every damn time.
Ok, maybe not that last one.
But really, why isn’t there a community of struggling daddy bloggers? Or depressed single guy bloggers (who aren’t misogynistic asshats)? Or stay-at-home dads who constantly get emails from their kid’s school addressed to Moms?
Where’s my tribe?
Don’t get me wrong. I feel a great sense of community and belonging from the wonderful people who frequent the other sites I’ve mentioned, but I need more dude stories.
Are there other guys out there one leaky pipe away from a total breakdown because plumbing is terrifying? Do any other dads try to follow the “some assembly required” instructions of any given toy, only to feel like an abject failure when none of the included, easily-followable instructions make any damn sense at all? Does the thought of interacting with other dads scare the shit out of anyone else, when all anyone ever wants to talk about are hunting, sports, and cars? Are any other husbands kinda scared that writing about all your internalized oddities will freak out your wives, who will inevitably leave you for someone less weird who’s the exact opposite of you and therefore cool and sexy and everything you aren’t?
Or am I just alone out here, shouting nonsense at the heart of the world?
Because it sure feels like that, at times.
It feels like I don’t have a right to be depressed, or to worry, or to be depressed over worrying about things, and then angry at myself for being worried that I’m depressed about how much I worry.
It still feels like I’m weird for enjoying video games rather than football. It still feels like I’m weird for wanting to pet animals rather than murder them. It still feels like I’m weird for never feeling like I’m doing enough for my kid, or that everything I am doing is wrong. It still feels like I’m weird when I talk about how much I love him, or that I crave his hugs. Because none of that is man stuff.
It’s just stuff that makes me weird.
I just fixed this today. Not ideal, but it’ll quiet my head demons. FOR NOW.
And that’s not even going into all the things that make me feel crazy. Like…
You get the idea.
Maybe I am alone. When you start listing out just a handful of your odd little quirks off the top of your head as bullet points, it tends to put things into perspective.
Yeah.
I’m crazy weird.
This is going into my Questionable Decisions section because…well, you’ll see. Spoiler alert: I chose wisely.
I met Jenny Lawson tonight. She was super sweet and gave me a bunch of compliments. It felt great and awkward, and everyone was looking at me, so I wanted to run for the exit as soon as it was over. Only that would’ve probably drawn even more attention, so I just decided to walk normally. But then I felt like I was overcompensating and walking too slowly just so I’d look like I was walking at a normal pace, so I sped up a little until I started to feel like I was walking too fast, then I just gave up and looked at the watch I wasn’t wearing so I could pretend I was late for something. By the time I had it all sorted out, I was already back at my car.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before any of this happened, it was just a normal Friday, and I was doing normal Friday things like not cleaning my house. That all changed today though, because I’ve been wrestling all week over whether or not I was going to go to Jenny’s book signing in Houston for Furiously Happy. However, since I’d never been to a book signing before, I didn’t know what to expect. I had it in my mind that it would be a tiny space crammed with people who would all recognize me from my bit in the video I was in for the book trailer, and then I’d have to talk to them and explain my sign (because I’d be holding my sign since part of the reason I was going was to get Jenny to sign my sign), and I just couldn’t handle that sort of pressure.
So instead of not cleaning my house today, I spent most of the morning dusting and sweeping and rearranging my living room with pathological tidiness characteristic of both ’50s TV housewives and lunatic serial killers. I did this because I’d decided to go to the signing, and I was terrified of following through with it.
My Other Questionable Decisions
So I cleaned like a madman until it hit me, and I realized that I was panic cleaning. Which is something I’ve never in my life done before, as I generally feel more comfortable amidst the detritus and refuse of my own filth than I do in any sort of properly maintained and orderly environment. But I was doing it today like I was making up for lost time.
Until, of course, it was time to go. It’s Trey’s weekend with his dad, so instead of waiting for him to drive into town to pick him up at 4:30, we left at 2:30 and met him halfway at the one gas station of a tiny little town called Devers, which is only really notable for the fact that it has exactly one gas station. We met up and said our goodbyes around 3:30, then headed onward to west Houston.
Which should’ve only taken about an hour to get to from where we were, but if you roll into the Houston area around 4:00 on a Friday expecting to get to where you’re going without frustration and heartache, you’re gonna have a bad time.
We had a bad time.
If you’re not familiar with the Houston area, it’s roughly the size of Connecticut. This is not an exaggeration.
Sure, Houston itself isn’t all that big, but nobody actually lives in Houston. They live in the Houston Area, which is made up of all the little suburbs that dot the landscape around the city. It’s basically like a big fallout map from a nuclear explosion, if ground zero were Downtown and the radioactive cloud was just cars. Lots of cars. Everywhere.
With madmen behind the wheel.
We didn’t arrive at Blue Willow Books until around 5:30, after having spent nearly an entire hour driving the last 15 miles. But we managed to get there safely, with me only suffering a few micro heart attacks from swerving assholes and maniac lane cutter-offers. (That’s a real term. No need to look it up.)
Blue Willow Books was, in fact, a tiny space – just as I’d feared. But it was a nifty little bookshop with a lot of character to it, and the reading was going to happen outside, behind the store. So it’d be open air and I could hide in a corner someplace. No problem.
My wife and I (my wife and me? I can never remember the rule) went to the counter and bought a copy of the book, since I hadn’t bothered to buy one earlier. I considered this good manners, since turning up with my own copy of Furiously Happy that I’d bought somewhere else would’ve been like showing up to a friend’s house for dinner with my own hamburger because I wasn’t sure if I’d like whatever they were serving and also if i had friends.
You get the idea.
So we bought a book, got our place in line – we were in Blue Group, which was cool because it’s my favorite color, but also a little less cool because it was the penultimate signing group, which is just a polite way of saying we were just one step away from being dead ass last – and then made our way out back.
There were a whole bunch of white plastic chairs, and my wife picked the 4th row back – which was cool, because I’ve always liked 4 and I have a deep aversion to odd numbers, but also less cool because that left rows 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 behind us. Which meant I was sitting with people to my back, and I hate that.
Seriously, I can’t stand it. For example, when we go to a restaurant, my ideal table is the one in the corner, and my chair is the one on the wall so nobody can sneak up on me. If there’s no corner table, then I take whichever chair gives me the best view of the entrances and exits of the place, so I can keep my eye out.
For what, I have no freaking clue. It’s not like Virgil Sollozzo is going to suddenly creep up and garrote me from behind or anything. I’m not in the mob, and I hardly know any Italians. But it’s still a thing.
By the time things got going, most of the seats were filled, and I was just sitting there uncomfortable as hell, from both the plastic chair of questionable rigidity I was sitting on, and the fact that hundreds of eyeballs were looking at the back of my head.
And I started to feel like Luca Brasi.
I spent most of Jenny’s excellent reading laughing while having my arms crossed in front of me in the universal sign of I AM NOT AT EASE HERE. But even then, I still wasn’t comfortable because I bite my fingernails like any self-respecting neurotic psychopath, and my hands basically look like Snausages. I’m super self-conscious about them, which is a problem when I spend so much of my time with my arms folded across my chest.
I have to either tuck my hands into my elbow holes to hide my secret shame, or ball up my fists and just kind of rest them on my forearms in a way that makes me feel like, for some reason, one of those “wooden indians” you see in old movies but never in real life.
Anyway, Jenny read a couple of chapters from Furiously Happy and everyone laughed at the funny parts and nodded in sage agreement with the serious parts, and it was generally a good time for everyone. But by the time she started the Q&A, the backdrop the bookshop had put up behind her started to make me dizzy.
Something about trying to focus on Jenny with this bright white and blue-dotted tarpaulin behind her just started to confuse my brain, and I had to actively concentrate to keep things in focus as my eyes conspired to trigger a migraine.
So that was fun.
Once the reading was over, it was signing time. But they started with Red, and after I saw the horde of people in just one group, I realized that Blue wasn’t going to come up until much later. They were taking them in the order of something called Roy G. Biv, which I’ve been told has something to do with the order of colors in the rainbow or something, and that I really should’ve learned that in school, only I never did because I was probably off in the special class that day, playing with parachutes and that weird ass plastic thing with a ball in the middle to improve my handwriting.
At any rate, it meant that I had time to kill.
There was an HEB grocery store nearby, so I walked over to pick up some snacks for the wait. On the walk there, I had to pass an AutoZone, where I witnessed a very large, very old man leaning under the hood of his car, with the folded crevices of his upper butt crack just flapping in the breeze. I tried not to stare, but how could I not? It isn’t every day you get to see an origami ass crack.
Anyway, I eventually made it to the HEB and ended up checking out at the register with one bottle of Coca-Cola, some fake HEB Doritos, a caffeine candy bar, and a bag of Skittles. As I dug into my pockets for the last of my cash and counted out change, I realized this is probably the menu of a drunk person. Or possibly a stoned person, although I really only understand the drug culture from afterschool specials and Nancy Reagan PSAs from the ’80s, so I’m just guessing.
By the time I got back to the sitting area for the signing, my wife had Made Friends, and was busy chatting them up about my sign: the sign I’d carefully kept hidden via discrete book placement so nobody could see what was written on it. And here she was, chatting about it. Just like that. Openly. In public. With strangers.
I was mortified. But then they had to start telling me how much they liked it, so it got really awkward and I wanted to crawl into one of the nearby garbage dumpsters to hide.
After they finally left (they were nice, but I hate talking about myself in person…which is weird, because I write about myself all the time), I relocated to a safe area and sandwiched myself between a Volvo and one of the dumpsters while I waited for something to happen. Which is basically just a metaphor for my entire life.
Time passes…
By the time Blue Group came up, we missed it because I wasn’t paying attention. We ended up getting in line with Pink Group, which I’m pretty sure was the last group, instead of the next-to-last one we would’ve been in, if I hadn’t been so busy being awful.
Once we’d realized my mistake, we hopped in line and were eventually ushered back inside the store, where we then began waiting in another line while I looked at a bunch of children’s books to kill time and avoid making eye contact with other humans.
Then, it was my turn.
The lady working the signing table wanted to read my sign, so I showed it to her. Then, she told me I needed to hold it up while she took our picture with Jenny. Which was horrible.
But also wonderful.
I’m not going to say much about what Jenny said to me while she was signing my shit, because it was all way too nice and I’m embarrassed. But the takeaway is that she really loved the Furiously Happy side of my sign, and told me that a lot of other people did, too. Then, she said a bunch more super nice things before signing my sign and writing, “You are my hero.”
Which very nearly wrecked me.
But in a good way.
After we got done with the chatting and the signing, it was picture time. I held up my sign as the nice lady from the bookshop took a few snaps as everyone else in line was LOOKING RIGHT AT ME. And reading my sign.
Like I said: Terrifying.
Knowing me all too well, my wife redirected attention away from me and back onto Jenny by telling her the shape of her eyeglasses temples looked like the Elder Wand, and that she was probably a badass wizard. Or witch. Whichever.
Everyone laughed and I said thank you and goodbye, followed by my aforementioned walk/run/walk to the door.
If you’re thinking about going to one of her signings, all I can say is do it. Even if you have to drive through crazy traffic both ways, do it. Even if you’re socially awkward with an aversion to large groups, do it. Even if you’re a complete weirdo, DO IT.
It’s not scary. It’s uplifting.
As for me, it was hard, but I’m glad I did it. I’m probably going to frame my sign now, assuming I can either scrape up the cash to have it done, or just try to do it myself (and probably end up spending more money to fix it after I inevitably screw it up).
I want to hang it someplace important that I’ll see every day, as a reminder to myself to always stay FURIOUSLY HAPPY.
I have some sort of mysterious, undiagnosed developmental disorder. Or, rather, it was diagnosed, but said diagnosis has been hidden from me for the past several decades of my life, ever since I was in 2nd grade and found myself going to a special PE class just for me and a few other kids.
Which was actually, I would come to find out years later, a special class. You know, for kids who have something wrong with them or whatever. Only no one told me that at the time, so I just bounced along, happily thinking I was getting out of class for an hour or so every few days to go play on a janky teeter-totter and some weird-ass plastic thing with a ball in the middle.
But what I was really doing there was working on my penmanship.
SUPPOSEDLY.
My Other Questionable Decisions
According to my parents – two people who I love dearly, but who would also, without question, be safely categorized as Unreliable Narrators in the Story of My Life – I was enrolled in the class after my teacher, Mrs. Wenner, suggested it because she felt that I was a stupid kid who couldn’t write good.
Ok, maybe she didn’t use those exact words…
It also had to do with me having trouble telling left from right and tying my shoes, and really just being kind of goofy and clumsy, because I guess the diagnostic criteria for General Nerdiness hadn’t yet been defined back in the early ’80s, so everyone just figured I suffered from some kind of mental illness, rather than simply being a gangly stick figure of a boy, with a bowl cut and an unhealthy obsession with computers.
Well, they probably thought it was unhealthy, anyway. Them. The Powers That Be.
So, just because my handwriting was awful and I liked science fiction, I found myself enrolled in some sort of “coordination class” since I couldn’t be trusted to walk across a room without tripping on my own elbows or something.
I actually liked the class, though. We played all sorts of different games, and we almost always got to have time with THE PARACHUTE – which was always a highlight of gym class in elementary school – but we didn’t have to share it with the unclean masses of normal kids. It was just us weirdos, so we could totally spaz out and nobody would punch us later or push us into the urinals when we were trying to pee.
Because that tended to happen.
A lot.
This is actually from third grade, but it’s close enough. The happy, smiling kid is the one I’m not.
Looking back, I think maybe my teacher just needed a break from me for a while, every few days. If she could send me off to the special class, then she could have herself an hour free from my constant questioning, horribly unclean desk (I had (have) a hoarding problem), and general disregard for the social rules of the classroom.
She called her class The Apple Core for some reason, and one of the things she would do is give everyone a little construction paper apple she’d cut out. We would pin them onto a construction paper tree that was pinned onto the classroom bulletin board, and every time we did something good, our apple would get a “nibble” – which was really just a hole-punch. From a standard hole puncher.
After we’d accumulated so many nibbles, we could exchange them for things like computer time or extra recess and stuff. I always went with the computer time, because most of the other kids didn’t give a crap about them, and I’d spend my recess inside where I was safe amongst the glowing phosphors of an Apple ][ monitor.
Which also meant I was alone in the classroom a lot. Which meant I could go up to my apple and punch a few extra nibbles in it without anybody noticing, which I could then trade in for more even computer time later after I hadn’t done anything to deserve it except circumvent the teacher’s authority.
I liked that part. (More on that here.)
But I was still weird and annoying, so she probably hated me. I know she hated me the day she made me stay late, after tipping out the entire contents of my desk into the middle of the classroom floor while all the other kids watched and laughed. I had to throw almost everything I cherished away and “get organized” like a good little cog. OR ELSE!
She also hated me when I threw together a science project at the last minute (because I always did (still do) projects at the last minute), and ended up winning at my school, then later at the district-wide science fair…
I built a robot.
Which probably sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was. All I did was spray paint a shoebox silver that I stuck it on top of a remote control car I had. I glued another box vertically onto that one and stuck the guts from a couple of Intellivision controllers to it because they looked cool and all electronic-y.
I used toilet paper rolls in the sides where his arms would come out, then fashioned a little mechanism with a servo from one of my dad’s model airplanes so they’d move up and down. I used some kind of building toy I can’t remember the name of off hand for the arms themselves, but it was kind of like opposite Lego. They were little flat pieces of plastic with holes in them that you’d join together with little plastic rivets. They were fun.
I built a robot.
Anyway, one arm was functionally useless. It went up and down, and that’s about it. But for the other arm, I attached an electromagnet I put together from a battery, some old wire and a rusty ass nail I found in the garage. It could pick shit up. Totally rad.
The head was just a styrofoam ball we picked up at whatever passed for a craft store back in the ’80s, with some funky metal coil things I got from somewhere jabbed into the sides and a face hastily scribbled on the front with a magic marker.*
*Sidenote: The head would’ve been silver, too – but it turns out that silver spray paint is basically fluoroantimonic acid to styrofoam. It ate right through the first head as soon as I pushed down the nozzle on the can. Literally, it just sort of melted. I’m not sure if the same thing would happen today, though. There’s a lot more concern with not poisoning children with death cancer paint these days, so I imagine modern spray paint is a bit more on the mild side.
Anyway, that was my robot. I called him 2-KAB after my own initials because I was an egomaniacal little bastard. All he could do was wheel around the room, picking up paperclips and bumping into shit. But I was pretty sure I was kind of a genius.
But I don’t think she liked that I was successful with my crappy little project. I was, after all, one of those kids. You know, the kind of weirdo that has to be dealt with before He Becomes A Problem.
My parents obviously felt the same way, or they’d never have allowed me to be enrolled in the special class to play with the weird plastic thing with a ball in the middle. They were just trying to do what everyone was telling them was right, I guess. Which I appreciate, but it didn’t work.
I’m still weird.
In order to further help me assimilate into the armies of mediocrity, Mrs. Wenner (or maybe one of the teachers from the special class) also suggested to my parents that they could help me overcome my shyness and aversion to social situations by buying me a little black boy to play with.
Wait. That sounds wrong.
This was the early ’80s – the early 1980s – a full 120 years or so after the Civil War ended. And yes, we lived in Texas, but it wasn’t like that. The little black boy was actually a dummy.
Ok, stop. I feel like this is going all wrong. Let me try again.
My parents bought me a ventriloquist dummy on the recommendation of some authority figure, with the reasoning being that, by learning to speak through the dummy, I would overcome my disdain for ever having to actually talk to people. So my parents took me to the toy store, and the dummy I picked out just happened to be black. THAT’S ALL.
His name was Willie Talk, which I guess was supposed to be a clever take on “Will he talk?” or something, but I just called him Willy and never did very much with him.
Mostly, he just kinda creeped me out. But I played along and made a show of trying to master a skill that would SURELY expand my social circle, because who doesn’t love the dude who whips out his wooden dummy at parties? Amirite?*
*Technically, he was plastic.
The sad news is that, even after all their efforts to normalize me, I stayed weird. I still liked books. I still played computer games. I still pretended, well past the age when you’re supposed to stop. (I still play pretend, only now I can hide behind my kid and call it something like Encouraging His Creativity or whatever. Makes me look like a responsible parent.)
Looking back, I kind of miss that special class. That was probably the first – and to this day, one of the only – times I was ever with my own kind. The weirdos. The freaks. The square kids who will never be squeezed into your round holes, no matter how much of their souls you try and carve out to make them fit.
I wear contacts now, so I’m totally cool.
Years later, I’m finally – and slowly – learning to acknowledge my insecurities, and to embrace being an introvert. All my life, I’ve had to pretend that I enjoyed the things other people enjoyed. That I could make small talk. That I was interested in anything normal people are fascinated by. And it’s been draining.
But I’m finding my pace. My people. My tribe.
And I’ll always be weird.
Growing up, I was incredibly close to my grandmother. I was even incredibly close to her as a grown-up, if a punk twentysomething kid counts as a grown up. (It doesn’t.) And I’d still be incredibly close to her today as a 40 year old husband and father, but she passed away many years ago and I can’t even talk about it, so don’t ask me to.
For real, though. I’ve never “dealt” with her…geeze, I can’t even write the word death in context with her without pausing for way too long while trying to think of another synonym that isn’t “passing” and getting weepy. It’s probably not at all healthy, never advancing past the Denial stage of grief, but I fear change. Don’t push me.
This isn’t about my grandmother, though. So don’t worry. I only mention her because this post is tangentially about her, in the sense that she features as only a minor character in this particular embarrassment, but recalling it did make me think of her, and I had to process it before telling you about the night I was almost murdered by insects.
You’ll see. It’ll all make sense in a minute. I promise.
My Other Questionable Decisions
I don’t know my exact age, but I was probably somewhere around 10 years old when this all went down, because that’s when KILLER BEES were really big in the news. If you weren’t around back in the mid-’80s, the media basically spent several minutes every evening warning everyone that swarms of homicidal rage bees were bearing down on us, and that we were all very likely to die any minute.
That happened a lot in the ’80s. If I wasn’t abducted from the shopping mall and murdered, I was probably going to end up taking candy from a stranger and then get murdered. Or I’d fall in with a Satanic cult and murder some other kid who we offered candy to before I was murdered by the high goat priest or whatever. Or, of course, the bees would get us.
Picture the movie Jaws, but with thousands of tiny sharks that fly. That’s how I imagined killer bees, only slightly worse because I assumed that they could actually kill me. Just one of them, I mean. Not an entire hive. A killer bee was a killer bee, and I figured that one was just as deadly as a thousand. You know, truth in advertising, sort of thing. They said it on the news, after all. Had to be true.
I imagined they did this by way of poison stingers that would paralyze, then kill you in some terrible way. But all it took was JUST ONE STING.
Because that’s how everything worked in the ’80s:
The ’80s were weird.
Back to the bees, though. I just assumed that, if one stung you, that was it. Card punched. Ticket taken. Death would show up on a pale horse, I’d lose at chess because I was still struggling to master Connect Four, and off I’d go into the undiscovered country.
It was pretty terrifying.
I mentioned in another post recently that I’ve experienced only one episode of sleep paralysis – and that was mostly true. And it was a pretty classic (and terrifying) example of the phenomenon. (Click here to read about it.) But it’s not entirely true, because it kind of also happened many, many years before I was a twenty-something and living in a crappy, probably haunted, apartment.
I was somewhere around 10 years old the first and only other time it happened. And killer bees were in the news. And my grandmother had knitted me an afghan.
With tassels.
One night, I was sleeping under that afghan when I had a nightmare that I was being chased by a swarm of the murderous little bastards. I don’t remember when or where they started coming after me, but I do know that I somehow managed to outrun them just enough to barely escape inside my house. I slammed the front door behind me, and could hear them buzzing and crashing against it. And, being somewhere around 10 years old, I ran to my room and hid under my covers until they went away.
Or, more specifically, I hid under the afghan my grandmother knitted for me.
With tassels.
Of course, as with any good horror movie, my dream didn’t end there. Not before I discovered that one lone killer bee had made it inside the house.
And it had found me.
That’s when I woke up. In some kind of crazy Inception moment, I’d awoken from a nightmare where I’d hidden from killer bees under the exact same afghan I was currently sleeping under. And one of them was on my chin.
It was just sitting there, waiting to pierce its terrible stinger into my tender flesh, rendering me helpless and immobile and very, very dead. I was terrified.
Killer bees have faces. And also mohawks. TRUE FACT.
But I couldn’t move. I could barely even breathe, not that I really wanted to. I was scared that any tiny hint of movement would provoke the bee to sting, and that would be it for me.
So I was just lying there, silent and still and screaming inside.
It wasn’t quite sleep paralysis, because I don’t remember ever thinking I couldn’t actually move if I’d wanted to. I just really didn’t want to, because I wasn’t all that eager to piss off the tiny murderer standing on my chin.
I don’t know how long I’d lain there, but it seemed like forever. Every now and then, I’d feel the bee move – just the slightest twitch, maybe one of its legs (but probably its stinger), and I’d panic. Eventually, I tried to call out to my sister across the hall.
Which was mostly just like that almost-silent whimper a dog makes when you haven’t given it any of your cheeseburger, and it knows you’re about to eat the last bite. So she didn’t hear it.
I tried calling out to my parents. Same thing.
So I just stayed still in the bed, terrified and sweating until something snapped. At some point, I just gave in. I accepted my fate and started coming to grips with my own mortality.
Yes, when I was somewhere around 10 years old and in otherwise perfect health, I was saying my goodbyes to friends and loved ones there in that bed, that night. Apologizing for all my secret wrongs and asking for forgiveness. Admitting that I did not, in fact, think my sister was a trollbeast, and that I actually kind of loved her. Wondering what would happen after I died…
That sort of thing.
Once I’d finished my little existential reckoning with the Powers That Be, I was ready to go. And I knew what I had to do.
I might be walking into death’s door, but I’d do it on my own two feet. And maybe – just maybe – I’d defy the odds and live another day. Maybe I’d even manage to trap or kill the bee, after which I’d be a hero to my family and then probably be on the local news or something, and maybe even get invited to appear on Donahue. Who knows?
I spent the next several minutes contemplating my pending fame, the end result of which was probably just me and Tiffany trying to get away into the night, then I’d put my arms around her and we’d tumble to the ground, and then I’d say, “I think we’re alone now.”
Or something. I had a crush. Shut up.
Either way – death or fortune – I was ready to end it. Mustering up all my courage, my body tensed. I took a deep breath, slowly, and held it. I let it build up in me until I was ready to gasp for oxygen, then I shot violently from the bed and swung around in mid-air to, I dunno, roundhouse the bee into oblivion.
Except that never happened.
Goodbye, cruel world.
What actually happened was that I screamed like a wet cat as I threw off the afghan and more fell out of the bed than leapt like a ninja. I scurried backward, away from my bed, dragging my ass on the ground as my heels dug into the carpet and pushed. All the while, screaming.
My parents remained asleep. As did my sister. Maybe I screamed a lot in my sleep and they were used to it, or maybe they just figured times was hard, and if a killer bee wanted to lessen their financial burden by one nerdy child, then far be it from them to get in the way of nature’s wrath. It could’ve gone either way, really.
When no one came to my rescue and the bee never dive-bombed my skull to deliver a death sting, I figured it out.
Those damn tassels.
I’d been dreaming about killer bees, one landed on my chin, and then I woke up. In bed. With one of the tassels from my grandmother’s afghan resting against face, which I then just naturally assumed was a murder insect come to kill me.
I think that was the first time I laughed at myself. Properly, I mean. In the self-aware, slightly lunatic, way of an adult after you realize just how stupid whatever it was you just did was.
Not too long ago, the Queen of the Internet (as far as I’m concerned, anyway) put out a call for help. Her name is Jenny Lawson, she’s known online as The Bloggess, and she’s weird and wonderful and damaged. One might even say broken.
She would say that, actually. She has said that. And she needed help from other broken souls to put together a trailer for her new book, Furiously Happy. Turns out, I am one of those broken souls.
I’m in the Tribe!
I responded to her request along with thousands of other broken people, which was pretty simple: she wanted us to tell her why we were broken, but why we’re also furiously happy. Because you can be both. At the same time.
I thought about it, then decided to send her my deepest, most secret fear that I am (was) terrified of anyone ever finding out: I am a failure.
I constantly fail. All the time. I try things, they don’t work, then I try the same things again, they don’t work again, then I try once more. And another time after that. And another after that. Constantly.
I try.
I fail.
Incessantly.
It’s part of what makes me who I am, both as a perpetual work-in-progress and as a chronically depressed, anxiety-plagued broken shell of a man. (I’ve recently started trying to write about my struggles with depression, which you might want to check out, if you haven’t. I’ve also started opening up about My Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, which are a lot funnier than depression. But more embarrassing.)
I have the support of a great wife and amazing 9-year-old stepson, who see me through the really dark times. However, even when I’m feeling really low, I still hold on to the belief that success is predicated by failure as a necessity; there are no “overnight” successes. Anyone who wakes up a success one morning hasn’t been sleeping. They’ve been trying, working, and getting better at what they do until the lightning strikes: skill meets up with luck and timing, the stars and planets align, and Something Happens.
I’m still waiting for Something to happen.
And I’m still trying. And failing. And trying again. It’s what I do.
I’m broken because I always fail at everything.
BUT
I’m furiously happy because the only difference between a happy ending and a sad one is where you stop the story. And I’m not done.
Thanks for letting me be part of this, Jenny. You sure are a nifty person.
I’ve embedded the video below, but do be sure to go read Jenny’s post about it. The comments alone are worth it. If you’re looking for me, my ugly mug turns up 5th in the video, right after the person who comes right after Felicia Day.
Yeah, I’m in a video with Felicia Day now, which is kind of amazing. (If you don’t know how inspiring I find her, you should find out. Seriously, click here.)
Christopher Moore is there, too. Along with John Scalzi. And Patrick Rothfuss. And, of course, Jenny Lawson.
And a bunch of other really amazing people who make me brave. Which is the only reason I’m writing this, because I’m still kind of crippled with anxiety over anyone I know ever actually seeing me sitting there with my sign, admitting my greatest insecurity to the world.
I tried explaining this strange combination of excitement and crippling anxiety to my wife, and she responded in the way in which I’ve grown accustomed: “Think of something comforting. Pretend I said it.”
It’s why I love her.
I put myself out into the world every time I publish anything on this blog. Sometimes it’s ugly, and sometimes it’s embarrassing. Usually, it’s funny – but it’s always scary. But putting my greatest insecurity out there – letting everyone I know see how broken I feel sometimes? That’s downright terrifying.
But it’s all right. I’m not worried anymore.
I’m in the Cool Kids Club!
None of this is real.
It can’t be. I don’t believe in ghosts. Or demons, or magic, or psychics, or anything supernatural. I’m a realist. Show me the observable, repeatable, verifiable evidence, and we’ll talk. But anything short of that, and I’m going to give whatever you’re saying as much respect and attention as I give to the wacky-haired Greek dude on the Ancient Aliens show.
That includes anecdotes. Especially anecdotes. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence; it’s just stories. People love ghost stories, although they’re hardly ever told oirsthand. It’s always a friend or a cousin, or maybe Earl down by the car wash who tells them this super legitimate and believable tale of Strange Things, so I really should start believing in the power now, or else!
The point is, it’s all bullshit. Comforting bits of horror we tell ourselves to forcibly project some kind of cosmic will onto an uncaring universe, and I’ll have nothing to do with it, thankyouverymuch.
THAT SAID…I’m pretty sure I’m being stalked by supernatural forces beyond my control that want to murder, maim, or otherwise do physical and mental harm to my person.
I’m probably going to die.
Updates
(At roughly 23,000 words or so, this post is pretty long. If you’d rather take it with you as an eBook, click here.)
There have been a few WTF? instances in my life, where I haven’t been able to piece together a believable scenario that would account for what happened. Not that I’ve ever looked too deeply into any of them, because even if the caveman fears of my lizard brain are completely unfounded, they’re still freaking scary.
I’ve had unlit candles explode for no reason. Cabinets apparently opening themselves, followed by plates being tossed out to shatter onto the kitchen floor. Night terrors. Sleep paralysis. My ex-wife.
There’s probably an entirely rational explanation for any of them, but they were all scary. The candle’s glass probably had an unseen fracture that just gave in one day, but it still exploded. The plates were probably not put back into the cabinet correctly, and were left pushing against the door that eventually opened, but they weren’t. That sort of thing.
But they still creep me out. The worst was the sleep paralysis, though. It only happened once, but it was absolutely terrifying. I woke up in the crappy bed of my old crappy apartment one night, unprovoked and scared shitless. I couldn’t move, and I could feel this ominous, entirely evil presence just…looking through me. I could see it in the hallway; a dim red glow and this sort of shadow that felt alive. Then, a face looking down at me in bed…
And that’s all I’m going to say about that, because just thinking about it creeps me right the hell out, and I’m already barely functioning as it is. Because something new just happened, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
But first, here are a couple of posts I made to Facebook when the latest things started happening. All that other crap was years ago, back when I was a stupid twenty-something. Like most self-respecting twenty-somethings, I was almost always up too late after drinking too much when I was that age, so most of the crap that happened back then was probably just a case of me being young. This stuff, though. This stuff just started happening, and I’m 40 years old now.
Which somehow makes it worse.
Anyway, I’ll put these in chronological order for now, then add anything new that might happen as it happens. Or I’ll be dead and not do that. Whichever.
First, a quick primer for those new around here: Brittany is my wife, and Trey is our son. (My stepson, technically. But I don’t go in for labels.) Stomper and Giles are our dogs, and Spooky’s the devil cat. We live in Beaumont, Texas and I hate it here.
OK. Here we go…
Late last night, after Brittany had gone to bed, I was getting ready to turn in myself when the dogs lost their minds.
Giles began barking like mad in his crate, while Stomper bayed and growled at the front door, pacing the room between outbursts and whimpering.
I assumed the neighbor’s dogs were loose again and had wandered up onto our porch, so I took hold of Stomper’s collar to keep him from darting out, and opened the door.
No dogs. Just stillness and the haze from the marsh fires.
Then, I looked up.
In the space between two of the trees in my front yard was a shape. Not a silhouette, or someone in darkness, but a shape. A vaguely human shape, but with slightly wrong dimensions. It was like a solid shadow, if that makes any sense. It was absolutely still and just standing there. Looking at me.
I glanced down for a fraction of a second to shove Stomper behind me and reach for the handle of the screen door, but when I looked back up as I pushed it open to go out onto the porch, it was gone.
I walked outside, looked around, and there was nothing there. A trick of light and shadow, I guess. No big deal.
I went back inside, locked up the house and laid down to sleep. The dogs continued their protests, but mostly it was just whimpering. The angry, panicked barks had stopped.
I went to sleep.
This morning, I woke up and leashed up the dogs to take them outside. I stepped out onto my front porch, and the chair I sit in was completely turned around and moved.
Instead of sitting to the left of the door and facing the street, it was facing toward my house. And placed directly in front of my door.
As if someone had used it to sit and stare, waiting for me to open it again.
So…anyone want to buy a house?
I fell asleep on the couch earlier, and now I’m never going to sleep again.
A little while ago, I woke up to the sound of someone panic banging on my door. Like, I’m talking seriously angry or terrified rapid-fire knocking. Scared the crap out of me.
I jerked awake and stayed still for a second, but there was no more knocking. It was all quiet and the dogs weren’t even concerned. Usually, they flip the hell out if so much as a leaf lands on the porch, so I figured I was just having a nightmare and laid back down.
I couldn’t get back to sleep, though. Too freaked.
So I’m just lying on the couch feeling like a terrified baby man with Stomper just hanging out by my side, not giving a crap.
At this point, I really don’t think anyone was ever actually knocking, or Stomper would be pacing and growling at the door. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong, so I work up the courage to get off the couch.
And I did have to work it up. I haven’t felt this kind of raw, jagged fear since I was a kid. It was weird.
Anyway, I shove Stomper off the couch and grab his leash. He’s coming with me, for all the good he’d do me by trying to lick any would-be murderers into submission. Still, it’s company. And I’m scared.
I go to the door and listen. Don’t hear anything. Then, I check the peephole.
Our porch light’s burned out, so you can never see very much through the peephole at night, but you can generally still make out shapes or whatever from the street lights. But this time, it’s just black. Totally black, as if someone has put a finger over the far side of the hole.
More terror. I try squinting and blinking, putting both of my hands on the door and pressing my eye as tightly against the peephole as I could, and still nothing. Until – whoosh – I could suddenly see out into the yard again, like whoever had their finger on the peephole had just let off.
Now I’m standing there with Stomper’s leash around my wrist, panicked that someone is trying to break into the house. But it wasn’t like a normal panic. It was an in-the-bones terror. Can’t really describe it.
I stand there for a minute with my ear pressed against the door, listening for any sounds of movement on the other side.
Nothing.
I’m really freaked out at this point, so I grab my best sword (yeah, I have swords instead of pistols because screw gun crazy Texas) and check the peephole again.
Nothing there. Just grass and entirely normal shadows.
Now you have to picture the scene. I’m standing at my front door in my pajamas, with an excessively sharp sword in one hand and the world’s least intimidating beagle by my side, like some kind of grown ass man ready to fight the darkness armed only with the power of imagination and his underoos.
I looked like a moron.
After a minute or so, I decide to just open the door to see if it’s creepy girl from rapevan neighbor’s house trying to leave more freaky sewing patterns on our porch again.
I open it slowly, and take a peek.
All clear.
I stand and listen. Stomper continues to not make a sound.
I open the screen door and step outside onto the porch, dragging Stomper with me.
I look around, and everything’s still fine. Had to be a dream.
I let Stomper back inside, then I take a seat and laugh at myself for a minute. But I’m still scared.
I get up and decide to take a quick glance around the corner of my porch, in case someone was over by the car.
Nobody was.
But then… I see a dude farther down the street. He’s just sort of ambling by the curb a few houses down, slow-walking away.
Again, not an unusual sight. People walk to the 24hr convenience store by my house all the time.
I think it’s just odd timing is all, but then I notice it looks like he’s wearing a black or maybe really dark blue trench coat like he’s Neo or something, which is just weird. It’s 85+ degrees at midnight in the middle of summer. And we’re in the humid swamplands of East Texas.
That just ain’t natural behavior.
I watch him for a minute, but just before I start to turn to go back inside – he stops walking.
He just froze. I froze.
I don’t know if maybe he heard the door, or if I was just making too much noise, but he stopped dead in his tracks, out of the blue. Like he knew I was looking at him. Then, it looked like he was starting to turn his head…
Aaaaand, that’s when I freaking bolted back inside, locked all the doors, turned on all the lights and grabbed my phone.
That was about an hour ago, and nothing else has happened since.
Maybe nothing did happen. I probably dreamed the knocking, which is what woke me up, and then my fight-or-flight brain just started filing in the blanks and making things worse.
The only thing I know for sure is that there was a creepy dude walking down the street, but there’s almost always a creepy dude walking down the street. It’s Beaumont.
If it was somebody who wanted to break into my house or murder me, I think he would’ve come back by now.
Then again, maybe he has. Maybe he’s out there right now, standing on my porch with his finger over the peephole.
Waiting.
Well, that was unpleasant.
Brittany crashed out early tonight, having sneaked into the bedroom and fallen asleep sometime between 8:00 and Mario Maker thirty, which is when Trey when to bed. (That’s roughly 10:00pm in normal people time.)
I remembered that he didn’t have all of the things he needed in his binders Monday at school, so I sat down at the kitchen table to double check that he would have everything he’d need tomorrow. I found some missing Math and added that, then figured out what bits of Language Arts I hadn’t put in Monday, when I found half of it inexplicably stuffed under my chair. So I added that to his binder as well, then started leafing through everything, checking to make sure all the returned homework had been taken out and all of today’s work was added in.
And then…
Ok, first a little bit of geography regarding my house. My dining room is actually part of the kitchen, according to Brittany, because it’s separated by a bar rather than a wall. So, either I was sitting at the dining room table or at a dining table in my kitchen, depending on your point of view regarding room terminology. Either way, the place where we eat (ok, the place where we do anything requiring a dining table that doesn’t actually involve eating, because dinner requires Netflix or Hulu) has a big, double-sliding door in it that’s a pain in my ass.
Whoever built this house was either an expert in impossible geometry or a lunatic, because nothing makes any sense. Nothing is squared, no surface is quite level, and there’s nothing even approaching standard units of measurement for anything. Finding studs placed evenly apart, for example, is an education in madness.
The sliding door in question takes up the entire wall, doesn’t quite close properly – and, thanks to past hurricanes – one of the doors is permanently shut, as it’s prone to lifting off the bent rails to fall inward and crush whoever might be trying to open it. The door that still slides open isn’t much better off, since it, too, likes to slip off the railing, but never so much as to rain plate glass down upon anyone’s head. Mostly, you’ll just have problems getting it shut again. We’ve never had it fixed because it’s insanely expensive, due to how NOTHING IS STANDARD in this house. The doors would have to be custom-made, the frame custom made, the railing custom made, etc… Many dollar signs, in other words.
At any rate, we never use them, so it’s really just a big, wall-sized window into the backyard, where my pecan tree looks like the desiccated corpse of an unholy nightmare in winter, but an all-consuming blob of branches and green in the warmer months. It’s currently in active Blob mode, so it consumes most of the view. What’s left is the trampoline over in the back corner of the yard, along with my barbecue pit.
I have flood lights that will illuminate the porch well, while dimly lighting the rest of the yard at night. I leave them off though, because there’s really nothing to see out there, and replacing flood lights every few weeks isn’t in the budget.
Although that might change after tonight.
But back to Trey’s binders… I’m just finishing up and getting ready to start cramming everything into his backpack, so I get up to go around to the other side of the room to grab his History book, rounding the other side of the table, which faces the aforementioned window of horrors.
And then…
Yeah, if you haven’t figured it out by now, this is another one of Those Posts. Like the one where the shadow monster thing was staring at me in my front yard, or the other one where something was blocking the peephole of my front door until it wasn’t, and then Neo from the Matrix almost certainly tried to murder me. And it’s probably more rambling than either of those, because this was the worst. THE WORST.
And I don’t really want to talk about it. But I’m sure as hell not going to sleep anytime soon, and maybe posting this will at least record my final moments before the delayed effects of the heart attack I just had kick in.
So anyway, I round the corner of the table (which is kind of a lie, since it’s a round table, but I’m not stable enough to figure out a better way to phrase it right now). I’m looking forward, out into the darkness of the backyard without really paying any attention because why would I, and I reach down to grab Trey’s book.
Nothing special. Just grabbing a textbook off the table. No reason at all that SOMETHING SHOULD FREAKING BREATHE INTO MY EAR.
It wasn’t a breeze. The air conditioner wasn’t running, and the ceiling fan wasn’t on. No open windows. Just me, a quiet house, a textbook, and…whatever the hell FREAKING BREATHED INTO MY EAR.
It wasn’t a whisper, or anything that spooky. Just a hollow, breathy “whaaaah” sound blown into my right ear, complete with an air current that I could *feel*.
I kind of ducked my head and whipped myself around, thinking I was going to catch Trey or Brittany in a little jump scare joke. But the room was empty. They were in bed, sleeping. Like they always are when this crap happens.
Which, of course, is when I actually jumped. Empty room. Breathing into my ear. I jumped. You would too, so shut up.
I looked around, trying to figure out what had caused it. Maybe the cat got in and…ok, no. My neck wasn’t bleeding from his murder claws, so that was a dumb idea. I scanned the room for a minute, then shrugged and tried to forget about it.
Which was impossible.
Trying not to get even more freaked out, I decided to just finish loading up his backpack and get back to the living room as quickly as possible, where I could play a video game and be safe and normal again.
So I start doing that. Packing up his stuff. But then I decide to take one more look around the room. And out the window.
I don’t even want to write this part. Seriously, I’m still shaking thinking about it, and I don’t want to think about it, but holy crap.
An old man – I’m not even kidding – a damn old man was standing in my yard. Just standing there, somewhere out between the BBQ pit and the trampoline, where the light from the dining room / kitchen just barely reaches. Dim light. Shadowy light.
And I swear, there was this old man just standing there. I don’t have any idea what he looked like, or why I even thought he was old, because I couldn’t see much of anything other than the shape of him, which was dark and black…except for his head. That was lighter, like where skin would be. Not white, but maybe just a less blackish blackness.
I know. Sounds stupid.
But you try looking out into your backyard and seeing a creepy ass old man standing there, staring at you. See how you like it. How rational your mind might be.
I don’t know how long I stood there, looking at him looking at me, but at some point I just shot across the room to switch on the flood lights. No idea what the hell I was going to do after I turned them on, but I was going to light his ass up, at least.
The light switch is right next to the window/door. I was on the other side of the room and had to get there, which meant losing sight of him for a second as the pecan tree would temporarily block my view of where I thought he was. Of course, none of that was going through my mind at the time, and I just kept my eyes locked on that spot in the yard as I moved as fast as I could to the light switch.
Coming around the table, my eye-line moved such that the branches from the pecan tree blocked him out for a fraction of a second between when I was at the end of the table and by the light switch. Just a fraction of a second. But there’s also school crap all over the floor, so I had to look down to avoid tripping over Education before I got there. And when I looked back up, right as I got to the light switch……
HE WAS ON THE PORCH.
I looked up, and he was RIGHT. THERE. And it WAS a freaking creepy old man, and I swear he was there. Completely dressed in black. If he was dressed. I honestly don’t know because all I could see was the black around his face. Pale and wrinkled, wearing some kind of a damn hipster fedora on his head…and he was smiling. Just standing there, black and still and smiling. Kind of like the preacher guy from, I dunno, the second or third Poltergeist film that was crappy. A lot like that guy, actually.
But he was right there, standing a few feet away from me, separated only by a half-broken sliding glass door. I could make out every feature of his face in detail – for the, maybe 0.0001 seconds I saw it. I didn’t dwell.
When I looked up and saw him there – RIGHT FUCKING THERE – I hit the light switch. The flood lights came on, and then…nothing.
Nobody there. No scary old man. No terrifying, friendly grin. No black suit, no shadow hat. Nothing. Just the porch, the pecan tree. The BBQ pit. The trampoline. Grass. Bugs. The backyard.
Now what I’m telling myself is that I saw a shadow in the yard, probably cast by the light from the kitchen onto the branches of the pecan tree. Made it look scary. It happens.
And then, already freaked out from the UNEXPECTED BUT ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE puff of air that I’m not going to think too much about, I caught my own partial reflection in the glass of the door when I got close to it. It would’ve been faint and probably distorted a bit, and my brain just filled in the gaps with that smiling preacher from whichever Poltergeist movie he was in.
I’m going with that. That’s probably what happened. It’s much more likely than any other freakish and terrifying explanation I can think of, but I’m still not going to sleep tonight.
Or go back into the kitchen.
Ever again.
I’m just going to sit right here in the living room, playing with the Wii U while I work on a happy Mario level for Trey to play before school. With happy Mario music and happy Mario Koopa Troopas, and HAPPY SOUNDS AND HAPPY THOUGHTS WITH EVERY LIGHT IN THE ROOM SWITCHED ON.
Goodnight.
First, some backstory. Last week, I went to see The Bloggess in Houston, which meant driving in Houston. During rush hour. I was a nervous wreck the whole time, and tensions were high. I have a pretty debilitating level of social anxiety, and I’d never been to a book signing before, so I was already freaked about that. Add in trying to navigate the death fields of homicidal Houstonian motorists, and…well, I hurt my back.
It’s my mid-to-upper back, and I think it happened when I whipped my head around, trying to see if I could change lanes before I crashed into the 18-wheeler that was screeching to a halt in front of me. At least, that’s the only thing I can think of. It could be that it started hurting because spontaneous back pain is just one of the many surprises of middle age. Who knows?
At any rate, it hurts. And last night (today is October 2; this happened either late last night or early this morning), it was hurting worse than it had all week, seizing up to the point where I couldn’t stand up straight and it was difficult to breathe. You know, fun times.
Other than that, nothing at all usual happened last night. No ghost people in the yard, no pasty white old men smiling at me, no nuthin’. Just a normal night, apart from the horrible back pain.
Until I went to sleep.
I don’t know what time it happened, and I’m not even really sure if it did happen, or if I just dreamed it, but at some point in the night, the pain in my back got so severe that it woke me up. I’d lied down with it hurting in the same spot (which was focused roughly in the area where my bra strap would go, if I wore bras, which I don’t – but I’ve found it a good descriptor when helping others to pinpoint the specific geography of my back), and tossed around until I found a position tolerable enough to allow sleep.
And then I slept.
I woke up when the pain had wrapped around my back and moved across my chest, covering my torso as if my entire bra region (again, this is just a descriptor) were caught in a vice, and someone was twisting it tighter and tighter. I couldn’t breathe. I jolted awake with my eyes closed as I winced from the pain. I sat up as best I could and, between a few brief but furious coughing fits, eventually managed to take a few deep breaths until it slacked off enough that I could stop wincing.
I opened my eyes.
The room was dark, but slightly illuminated by the various status LEDs and blinking lights of the electronics I have lying about the room. It’s not enough to really see by, but you can make out shapes in the night. Rough outlines. Like the one standing right over me. Person shaped, and staring. At me.
As soon as I saw it – another damn shadow thing – my back and chest immediately seized up again, tighter and more painful than it had been just a second or two earlier, when I’d woken up. I grabbed at my chest and pushed back against my pillows, wincing again from the pain. I closed my eyes, not out of fear of some creepy dude watching me sleep, but just reflexively, because it fucking hurt.
I forced my eyes open against the pain. I’d only had then open for a split second before, and I needed to see if I’d just imagined this shape of a man standing over my bed, or if anyone was actually there.
No one. Nothing.
I scanned the room as best I could, still clutching my chest. Empty.
I reached over and switched on the lamp beside me. The light shot daggers into my eyes, which took a second to adjust. I looked around, blinking and panicked.
Nothing there.
As soon as I realized the room was empty, the seizing stopped. Just like that, it eased off and everything was back to normal. My back still hurt, but the wraparound pain in my chest just stopped, the vice no longer tightening.
Did I imagine it? Was I dreaming? No idea.
The only thing I know is that it felt real enough. And, even though I only saw the shape for a second, I could tell by looking at it that it…was looking at me.
Apart from the blinding pain, I felt exactly two things when it happened: terror and hate.
One came from me. The other…
NOPE.
Not really wanting to go to sleep, I spent most of last night searching around the interwebs for some info on this nonsense. Turns out, “shadow people” are a fairly common element of sleep paralysis and night terrors, so all this isn’t nearly as creepy as it sounds. It’s pretty normal, actually. They even have their own Wikipedia entry.
People have even reported seeing a “hat man” shadow, which pretty much lines up with the creepy old dude I imagined seeing on my back porch a few weeks ago. I haven’t experienced any paralysis though, so what I’ve been going through is probably just down to some other sleep disorder. Maybe a combination of them, I dunno.
Anyway, everything I’ve found says that seeing these things can be brought on by stress, which makes sense. I’ve been out of work for months now, with no potential jobs on the horizon and money’s running low. Saying that I’m stressed out is an understatement.
After staying up until the wee hours researching this stuff, I was pretty sure I’d at least have a normal nightmare about it when I went to sleep, but I’m happy to report that I slept just fine. No shadows, no terrors, no nothing. Just blissful unconsciousness from whenever I managed to fall asleep, until my dogs woke me up in the morning.
The funny thing is, all the stuff I’ve read says that lack of sleep can also cause these…hallucinations, for lack of a better word. I don’t think I’m actually seeing anything, though. I think it’s just stress and insomnia, coupled with an overactive imagination. But when you start getting scared to fall asleep, you tend to avoid falling asleep. Which, it turns out, only makes it worse.
I’ll try going to bed earlier tonight, maybe with some soothing music playing through my headphones. Cut out a little of my normal caffeine intake today. Try not to worry about money or finding work. Maybe watch a family movie with Trey before bedtime. You know, normal things.
Sorry to disappoint anyone reading this who might’ve been expecting some kind of cool supernatural twist to happen, but I never said this was going to end up being anything like that. It’s been freaky so far, but I think I’ll be able to exorcise these particular demons with a few lifestyle changes and a little more sleep each night.
I will say this, though. I know I’ve written before about some of the weird things I do that make me seem crazy, but this entire experience has actually made me feel crazy. And I don’t like that. Seeing things that aren’t there, feeling inexplicable terror over nothing, and being afraid to go to sleep at night like I’m 10 years old again and just watched A Nightmare on Elm Street has not been pleasant.
The idea that my own mind can betray my senses whenever it wants? Not cool.
Which is the only truly scary part of all of this, really. The idea of going crazy is one thing, but getting a taste of what it actually feels like is terrifying.
It’s just after 3:00 A.M., and I’m done. I’m fucking done.
I drank milk before bed. I didn’t watch any scary movies. I put on headphones and listened to classical music as I went to sleep. And all of it did exactly nothing.
Except make it worse.
I fell asleep listening to music through Pandora, which interrupts the songs every now and then to throw an ad at me because I’m too cheap to pay for a subscription. Which is fine, if a little annoying. No big deal.
But they don’t normally talk to me.
I was drifting off sometime after midnight, listening to a random classical song I don’t know the name of but was probably called something along the lines of Concerto Or Whatever In G Flat. It was a nice enough song, but this isn’t about the song. This is about the advertisement that came after the song.
I don’t even know what it was for, because I was almost asleep when it came on. All I remember is waking up when I heard my name.
“Hello, Kristian.”
Nobody calls me Kristian. I go by Kris most of the time, as a side effect of all the involuntary gender reassignment I endured back in middle school, because I guess public school teachers have a hard time with phonics or something, and could never figure out that a K makes the same sound as a Ch, but whatever. I’m not bitter.
“Hello, Kristian.”
I froze. It was a raspy, gravel-throat of a voice. I didn’t know if I’d really just heard it say my name, or if I just thought I had, or maybe I did and it was just part of the ad. But I woke up. And listened.
Static. Not normally part of the Pandora listening experience.
“Kristia–” *crackle* *hiss* “–you know–” *pop* “I am.”
I reached down, grabbing the cord of the headphones and yanking them out of my ears as I sat up. I looked down at my phone. Pandora was still playing. I could hear tinny music coming from the headphones.
It was something from Bach. Ten minutes long. Halfway though.
Pandora doesn’t play ads in the middle of a song, which meant I hadn’t just heard one. I dreamt it. I went to bed early, I didn’t eat anything after 10:00, I cut back on caffeine and sugar yesterday, I didn’t do any job searches, and I didn’t even think about money problems. I did everything I could to be chill and mellow and…I dreamed that an Internet radio app was talking to me.
I pulled the headphones out of my phone, double-clicked the Home button and closed the app. I looked at the time: 2:37 A.M.
It was only a few minutes past midnight when I laid down, so at least I was asleep and this wasn’t a waking hallucination or anything. Just the start of another nightmare, but one I’d avoided because it startled me too hard, too soon, and I woke up.
Trey wanted to have an Air Mattress Night in the living room, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. We inflate our fancy air mattress in the living room and go to sleep there. I’m not sure what’s so exciting about it, but he loves it, so I do it. Tonight was one of those nights, but I wasn’t getting back to sleep anytime soon, so I crawled off the air mattress and flopped onto the couch. Trey was sawing logs.*
(*This means he was fast asleep, just in case this is one of those southern idioms nobody outside of the Bible Belt knows about.)
I briefly thought about watching a movie or some YouTube videos until I was calm enough to go back to sleep, but I didn’t really want to do anything with my phone. I couldn’t just sit in the dark either, though, because then I might start seeing shit again. I decided the best thing to do would be to just go analog and grab a book.
Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job was sitting on the end table, so I switched on the lamp and picked it up. It’s about a normal dude who becomes Death, so maybe it shouldn’t have been my first choice given the circumstances, but it was there and it’s funny, so I didn’t see a problem with it.
I try to add a few jokes into these posts, because they take my mind off of how freaked out I am, and nobody wants to sit and read a bunch of paranoid rants from some guy losing his marbles. I try and make light of what is actually a terrifying situation for me, probably as a coping mechanism some psychiatrist would tell me to try, if I had money for a psychiatrist.
Moore’s books are a lot like that, although they’re a little more on the funny side for the sake of satire than as a means of keeping the darkness at bay. Not for his readers, at least. But I have to wonder if maybe this is exactly what Moore is doing when he writes. Using laughter to drown out the screaming.
Anyway, whatever.
Cutting to the chase, I get a little ways into the book before I start getting sleepy again. My eyes start drooping, the words start bleeding together, the usual. I feel the familiar little jolt I sometimes get right before I fall asleep, like a quick muscle spam that’s caused my wife no end of annoyance over the years. I let the book fall on my chest, and I drift off…
Full on sleep paralysis. That’s what comes next. First time since I was in my crappy apartment two decades ago, and it still feels the same. I can’t move, something is squeezing my chest, and all I feel is afraid. I don’t see any shadows, though. But I can feel them, if that makes any sense.
And I can also feel the color red, which I know doesn’t make any sense. But it’s just like when I was in my crappy double bed years ago, and I could just tell that something malevolent and horrible was standing in my hallway, just out of sight. It felt dark and black and red, all at the same time.
I glanced over at the air mattress. Trey was still sleeping, the dogs weren’t barking, and nothing was moving. But still, I could feel it getting closer. I tried to move my arms, my legs, even tried to talk. Nothing. I felt my muscles tighten, I felt the strain from trying to push against whatever was holding me in place, but I just Could. Not. Move.
All I could do was watch. Scan the room, find what was out there. Whatever it was that was causing this, it left my eyes alone and free to swivel, as if it wanted me to see it. To be afraid. Terrified.
I stayed focused on Trey, mostly. Maybe it was stupid for me worry about him when I know all of this is just in my head, but I couldn’t help it. As consumed by fear as I was while this was happening, I was even more scared that whatever was in the room with me would somehow get to my son. And I can’t even describe what that feels like, lying paralyzed and powerless to stop whatever it is in the darkness that’s stalking you, while your kid is in the same room. With you. With it.
I was in a complete panic when I finally saw it, with raw images of fear and no emotion other than terror running through my mind. It wasn’t a shape yet; just a patch of shadow, from the corner of my eye. My gaze was fixed on Trey, who was sleeping on the air mattress. I wasn’t looking beside me.
It formed all at once: a head and shoulders, right next me. If it had been a person, it would’ve been kneeling beside the couch, right by my face. I couldn’t look at it, but I could feel it wanting me to. I kept my eyes on Trey.
Which is when it just…flickered. I’m not sure how to describe it, exactly. It was beside me one second, and then it was above me, like it had stood up and then leaned directly over my face. But it hadn’t moved, not like a person would have. It didn’t just zap there, either. It did this sort of rapid fire, herky-jerky…thing, where its “head” kind of cocked back and forth and one of its “shoulders” sort of skipped a frame. I know. Fuck it. It doesn’t make any sense.
Point is, it was suddenly right above me, inches from my face. And it was so black. More than a shadow. It was totally opaque, almost like it was sucking in light. All I could see was absolute nothingness. Just this huge, endless pit of darkness with…red in it. Somehow. Maybe it was from its eyes, but I don’t remember seeing any eyes. And I don’t really remember actually ever seeing anything red. But it was still there. I could feel it, somewhere deep inside the thing, seeping out.
I tried everything I could to move. I tried screaming. Anything to wake up, to move, to get away. To get to Trey.
As soon as that thought hit me – that I had to move so I could get to Trey – I could feel the thing’s focus shift. It stopped coming at me, stopped projecting its terror in my direction. I still couldn’t move, but there was a relief there, a kind of cautious calm in the eye of a storm. I was still scared, but I wasn’t being crushed by fear anymore. Until the shadow moved.
It did that spazzy, herky-jerk thing again, and even though it didn’t really go anywhere and looked basically the same, I could just tell that it wasn’t looking at me anymore. Its “head” had turned. It was looking at the air mattress.
My own fear turned to rage, terror mixed with parental dread, and I started pushing harder against the paralysis. I stopped trying to scream, and just tried to roll over. If I could just do that, I’d fall off the couch. I’d hit the end table on my way down, knocking off all the crap that was on it, and the noise would probably be enough to wake up Trey. Or maybe Brittany, if she heard it from the bedroom. So I just tried to roll over.
I closed my eyes, clenched every muscle in my body and just pushed. My back felt like it was ripping apart as I tightened every injured muscle. I felt my hip twist, just a little. I pushed harder.
And harder.
And harder.
I don’t know how long it took, and I didn’t care what the shadow was doing while all my attention was focused on moving, but I eventually broke through all at once. The paralysis snapped, and I went flying over the edge of the couch.
Except that I didn’t.
I opened my eyes. I wasn’t on the floor. I pulled my arms under my chest and pushed. I was on the air mattress, which gave slightly as I pushed against it to sit up. Something yanked at my ear on the way – it was one of the headphones popping out. I still had them in my ears. There was still music playing. I looked at my phone.
Pandora was running. Some classical song I’d never heard of was playing. I was sweating. My back was killing me.
I looked at the time: 2:37 A.M.
It was the same time as when I’d woken up earlier, except that I hadn’t woken up earlier. I only woke up just now, which means the paralysis never actually happened, and I didn’t actually wake up earlier. Or I did, and all of it happened, and this is still part of the dream.
I’m sitting on the air mattress now, with Trey sleeping beside me as I type. I’ve turned all the lights on, and I’ve been watching the clock. It’s 3:43, over an hour since I think I woke up. But I don’t know if I’m really awake right now. I don’t know if I’m asleep. I don’t know if I was awake for any of the other things I’ve seen, or if I was sleeping every time.
I don’t know what’s real.
I don’t want to go to sleep.
I don’t want to do this anymore.
UPDATE: Trey also had nightmares last night. Three of them. The first one, he woke up crying because he dreamed that Stomper was Old Yeller. The second one, both Giles and Stomper had huge bites taken out of their sides.
I have no idea what the third one was about, because it was, according to Trey, “too horrible to talk about”.
Oh, and Brittany said she woke up at exactly 2:37, too.
So there’s that.
Earlier today, my dogs started barking at nothing Taken by itself, this not entirely out of character for my dogs, who are very lovable but deeply stupid creatures. However, they’re usually barking at the front door, probably after hearing some distant noise or suspecting the mail carrier is coming around to invade the borders of their clearly demarcated territory again – but this time, it was different.
They were barking at nothing in the center of the living room. There was nothing on the floor, no noises were going on outside, no knocks on the door. Just two dogs, barking with increasing ferocity at the center of my living room. They weren’t standing in the center of the room and barking at the walls, either. The were walking around in a circle, staring and barking at the very center of the room.
It was a little unsettling, but it since it happened in the middle of the day, I didn’t think too much about it, which is something I’m doing a lot of lately…trying not to think too much about things.
Like what happened last night.
I was playing a video game when I needed to heed nature’s call, so I pressed pause and hopped up. Or hobbled up, really. Waddled. Because back pain.
I opened the living room door and walked down the hallway toward the bathroom. No big deal. My overhead light fixture broke awhile back and I’m no electrician, so I “fixed” it by way of buying several motion sensing LED lights that I mounted a couple of feet off the floor, running the length of the hallway. It’s actually pretty cool, because I get to pretend I live on a spaceship every time I have to pee. Which is nice.
Anyway, I walked down the corridor of C Deck toward the urination Jeffries Tubes, then went inside and proceeded to flush my tachyon coolant into the dilithium chamber, and all was right with the world again. Except that it wasn’t.
While I was standing over the Star Trek metaphor and doing my business, I left the door open as usual, because Brittany and Trey were already asleep and you stop caring so much about privacy when your kid loves to bust in on you, smack an imaginary button on the wall that lowers an equally imaginary disco ball, and starts yelling PARTY IN THE BATHROOM before dancing around like a madman to a modified version of a C+C Music Factory song. I also leave the door open at night so I don’t have to bother turning the bathroom light on, since the LEDs from the hallway light up enough of the bathroom for me to thread the porcelain needle.
Sometimes, I’m not fast enough though, and the LEDs end up turning themselves off after a few seconds, so I end up having to finish peeing in the dark.
Which is what happened tonight. I was in mid-pee when the last of the lights went off, and I was left there to aim in the dark. But then, they lit back up again.
One at a time, they started switching back on, as if someone was walking down the hallway. At first, I thought it must’ve been Trey or maybe one of the dogs, but my child is physically incapable of doing most anything silently, and I would’ve heard the dogs’ nails tap dancing their way down the hardwood flooring. But it wasn’t the dogs, and it wasn’t Brittany, and it wasn’t Trey.
It was him again. It. Assuming there’s only the one, of course, and that they don’t tag in new murder shadow demon ghosts every few nights. I’m not sure what the rules are because I’m not up to speed on my workplace guidelines for murder shadow demon ghosts. They could be unionized, for all I know.
But joking aside, this is what happened. I lifted my head when the first light came on and looked toward the doorway, expecting to see Trey or Brittany walking by. Instead, I didn’t see anything. Just the slow progression of the lights turning themselves on, until it reached the bathroom.
Which is when he appeared. The last light came on, and in the doorway was a very tall, very black, very shadowy figure. Watching me.
I wish I could make you understand what it feels like to see this thing, whether it’s real or not. I can keep using words like terrifying and scared, but they’re not strong enough. It’s a crippling gut punch, is what it is. An instant, inescapable fear stabbed right into your heart. There’s no controlling it, no rationalizing it away when it happens, and no higher thought process presents itself. There’s only fear.
This is the first time I can say with absolute confidence that I saw it. I can’t dismiss it as a trick of light or blame it on my imagination. It was there, it was solid, and it was watching me. I know I keep calling it a shadow, but that’s just because I don’t have any other way to describe it. Shadows are ephemeral things, with soft edges and a translucence to them. But whatever this thing is, it’s solid. And really, really black.
Like I said, I jumped back, reflexively. I’d like to say I was composed enough to at least have stopped peeing, but I’m a terrible liar. I dribbled, and fell partway into the sink before I caught myself. My pants fell down, and I was just standing there, half naked and terrified, with a little pee dribbling down my leg.
Heroic imagery, I know.
I just started at it, and it just stared at me. I could feel the color red again, which is a weird and creepy sensation I can’t even describe. I watched it standing there, unmoving and watching me, until the LEDs started to flick off.
One by one, starting at the far end of the hall where they’d begun, they started dimming and switching off. And the thing in the door way just kept getting darker. And darker. And darker, until the last LED turned off and he disappeared into the night.
Which is when I got really scared. At least I could see it when the LEDs were on, but now that there was no light source, there was no shadow man. But I could still feel him there, for the longest. The most terrifying thing I’ve ever had to do was pull up my pants and walk toward that doorway. Not knowing if he was still there, or what would happen if he was. Or if he was even real.
It took me a lot longer than I want to admit to make it to the other end of the bathroom, but I got there, feeling along the wall the whole time, my arm outstretched ahead of me, searching for the light switch. When I found it, I was even more afraid to switch it on, because if he was still there, I’d be right next to him. To it.
I flipped the switch, and…nothing. Empty doorway, empty hallway. The waves of fear started to recede, and I could breathe again. I checked on Brittany and Trey, who were both happily asleep and fine. Then, I went back into the living room to check on the dogs. Giles – the little Yorkie – was sitting in front of the door to the hallway, waiting for me. Stomper was by my recliner, staring at the center of the room and whimpering. Because he’s super brave.
I switched on all the lights, put my fancy surround sound headphones on (because they’re great at blocking out external noise), and jumped back into my video game, where I was safe. There was something comforting about getting back into the game in a way that I haven’t experienced before, even if I was suddenly transported to a decommissioned space station where evil androids and an unstoppable alien xenomorph were trying to kill me.
It was better than being in the real world, where only two possibilities exist: either I’m going crazy, or I’m not.
I’m not sure which one is worse.
I’m starting to think that posting about all of this has been a mistake. It only ever seems to make things, and now I’ve got people reading these updates and thinking they’re being funny by coming by at night and doing crap on my front porch.
I’m not sure if it’s a friend who thinks he (or she) is hilarious, or if an old enemy just wants to watch me lose my shit, but whatever this is, it’s a little ridiculous.
I was fetching Trey a towel for his shower last night, when Brittany called out for me to come back into the living room. I gave the child his towel, then went to see what the fuss was about. She’d opened the front door, and the chair that normally sits over to the side of the porch was directly in front of the door, facing it. A pillow we’d left outside for my mother to use whenever she comes over was placed in the chair, and the two other chairs in the yard had been knocked over.
If that’s all that had happened, the high-larious practical joke might’ve worked, because that freaking chair has been moved in that exact way before, and not by any practical joker. I probably would’ve ascribed it to the weirdness going on, if that had been all it was. But the funny person had to go and push a little too far, and left a little trinket hiding under the pillow.
It doesn’t look nearly as creepy when it’s just grass and pine needles in full color. And without Photoshop.
Sorry, but you overplayed your hand, whoever you are. Murderous shadow ghost demons don’t make things that look a little too much like the stick dolls from The Blair Witch Project. At least, I wouldn’t think they’d do that. Seems like a waste of time when they can basically just apparate wherever they damn well please, like a bunch of overzealous sixth years at Hogwarts.
So thanks for thinking my descent into madness is a joke. I really appreciate the extra push to try and take me right over the edge. You’re awesome.
That was last night, though. I just had an odd encounter this morning that’s a little on the creepier side.
After dropping Trey off at school, I decided to grab some fast food for breakfast. I pulled into a McDonald’s, went inside, ordered some greasy food with my +10 Hammer of Fatty Goodness, then gobbled it down. I ate it there, because I didn’t feel like going home and listening to the dogs whimper at me because I hadn’t taken them out yet. They’re needy little bastards.
I was just about finished when my stomach started gurgling in a fairly dreadful way, so I made a quick sprint to the restroom as soon as the folded egg product I’d just eaten took a detour on the expressway to my colon. I already don’t like using public restrooms, and it’s even worse when gastrointestinal distress is involved. But I didn’t want to chance the drive home, so I bit the proverbial bullet and entered a stall.
I’ll spare you the rather slushy organic details, and skip right to the creepy part.
I’m sitting there, in a closed and locked stall when someone else comes into the restroom. I clinch up to avoid embarrassing audible cues, and start semi-holding my breath while I wait for him to go away. My social anxiety, it would appear, has no limits.
The guy walks up to a urinal on the opposite side of the stall’s partition, and I can see his feet between the stall and the little gap above the floor. Looks like a businessman. Black slacks, black socks, shiny black shoes.
Then he says, “Hello.”
Just like that. Nobody else in the restroom but me and him, and he starts talking to me. If I hadn’t been actively involved in the biological process already, I would’ve immediately shit myself. His voice sounded a lot like the one I’d heard say my name in the Pandora ad the other night. A lot like it, but slicker. With slightly less gravel throat.
I don’t respond.
Again, he says, “Hello.”
I manage a sheepish, “Hey” and that’s about all I want out of this conversation. What sort of person talks to strangers in public restrooms, anyway? Aside from serial killers and rapists and serial rapist killers, I mean. It’s freaky enough on its own, but that voice…
He doesn’t say anything after that, and I can hear his pee start to splat against the side of the urinal. It goes on for days. And I start feeling red again, which is freaky and weird, and I wish it would stop. There’s a little sign on the wall with some red text, and I swear I start to taste the font. Salty and metallic, like aluminum foil dipped in sodium chloride. Weird shit.
When he’s done, he lets out a huge sigh, and steps away from the urinal, which flushes behind him. His feet disappear from under the stall, and I can hear his shiny shoes clip-clopping on the tile. The faucet comes on, and he starts washing his hands. And whistling.
I recognized the tune, but still haven’t been able to place it. It’s going to bug me all day until I do.
He finishes washing his hands, the faucet turns off, and I hear his shoes again. I wait for the air dryer to come on, but it doesn’t. Neither do I ever hear the door open. So I just keep sitting on the toilet for what seems like ages, until I figure he must’ve just slipped out and I didn’t hear the door.
I finish up my business, and the toilet flushes behind me. I go to unlock the stall and open it, when…
If you’re expecting me to say that he disappeared without opening the door, that’s pretty much what I expected to happen, too. Which, while creepy enough in its own right, was preferable to the idea that he was still standing in the bathroom, waiting for me to open the door. Lurking.
I stand with my hand on the little latch for way too long, then finally open the stall. He’s still there.
His hand is on resting on the pull bar of the restroom door, and he smiles at me as I come out of the stall. He’s wearing a black suit, with a white shirt and a thin black tie. He looks just a little older than me, maybe in his mid 50s, with dark brown hair and pencil-thin eyebrows. He seems familiar, but I’m pretty sure I don’t know him. I’m generally really good with faces (but absolute crap with names), so I think I’d know for sure if I knew this guy. But he just seems familiar, is all. Like I’ve never actually met him, but maybe I’ve passed him at the grocery store or something.
At any rate, he reminds me of what I imagine door-to-door salesmen looked like in the 1950s. And he’s just standing there, smiling.
I break eye contact and walk straight to the sink. The faucet comes on as I put my hands beneath it.
“Hello,” he says again.
I don’t respond.
“You look tired.”
I continue looking down, then grab some soap from the dispenser and start scrubbing my hands with Silkwood determination. I’m freaking out and I just want to leave, but I don’t want to walk past him.
He starts whistling again, the same tune that I still haven’t been able to place. It’s nothing creepy, though. It’s a happy sort of song, and I remember it. I just can’t tell from where. Or when.
I get more soap and keep scrubbing my hands like I’m prepping for surgery. He finally pulls on the door and it opens. He starts to walk out. Finally.
Just before he leaves, he stops one more time, and I can feel him smiling at me again. He stops whistling and says, “Goodnight.”
He starts whistling again, then leaves. Freaky dude stalks me in the bathroom, starts talking to me and whistling, then tells me goodnight at 8:30ish in the A.M.
No, not creepy at all.
I wash my hands for a little while longer, then dry them thoroughly to kill some time, because I don’t want to run into the crazy bastard on my way out. After a minute or so, I open the door and sort of peek out as I leave the restroom, just in case he’s waiting for me. He isn’t.
I glance around the restaurant as I make a beeline to the door, just to see if he’s sitting anywhere. I don’t see him, and make it out and to my car before my hands really start shaking.
Now, I don’t know if this guy was just one of those weird, overly-friendly sort of people that everyone bumps into every so often, or if it was something else. I’d like to dismiss it as just somebody who’s screwing with me in the same way as whoever left the little Blair Witch thing on my porch last night, but that’s probably giving a little too much credit to the reach of my blog. But if it wasn’t just some random weirdo, and if it wasn’t somebody messing with me, then things just took a turn and this crap has started happening in the daylight.
I went home, let the dogs out, fed them, then left again. Brittany’s at work, Trey’s at school, and I don’t want to be home alone right now. I need to be around people, so I’m writing this inside a Chick-Fil-A. I ordered a Coke and some hash browns I’m not eating while I type and take advantage of both their free WiFi and their divine connection to the Lord or whatever. I mean, that’s why so many Bible-thumpers eat here, isn’t it? It’s kinda like a church, right?
Oooh. Spooky!
I’m still trying to figure out the song that creepy dude was whistling the other day, but I’m having no luck. I’ve tried various apps that let you whistle or hum a tune to compare against a database, but so far, nothing has recognized what I’m whistling. Which is probably because I’m not doing it right. I can hear what he was whistling in my head as clear as day, but whenever I try to hum or whistle it myself, it comes out wrong.
I’ve got the first bit down, but it always ends up turning into You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato, and I know that’s not the right song. It’s kind of like what happened when you try to remember the Family Ties theme song, and just end up humming the theme to every ’80s sitcom that wasn’t Family Ties. Or how it’s impossible to hum the Mission Impossible theme if you’ve just listened to the Mortal Kombat song. (Try it.)
Anyway, I’ll keep trying. It’s not a song I recognize as knowing, but that just sounds very familiar. Like I’ve heard it somewhere before, but it’s not something I ever really listened to. I might try whistling what I know and posting it on Facebook or something. Maybe someone there will recognize it.
In other news, since calling out the prankster a few days ago, no other nonsense has happened outside. There have been no further instances of inexplicable lawn chair placement, nor have any suspicious gifts been left for me on my porch or in the yard. It’s just normal stuff out there right now, like dirt and dog poop.
Inside the house, however…
First, I need to back up several months, to a few events that I’d forgotten about until all of this crap started happening. The very first thing that happened – and I’m not saying any of these things are connected to any of the others, but still… – the first thing was me hearing children laughing and playing just outside the bathroom window while I was taking a bath late one night.
Let me say that again, in case you just skimmed over it: it was late one night, probably around 3:00 A.M. or so. I remember having had a crippling migraine, and I was resting in the bath to try and calm it since there’s really nothing that helps, but scalding my entire body in irresponsibly hot water whenever I get one at least seems to distract from the throbbing going on inside my braincase. So that’s what I do.
Even if it’s three o’clock in the morning. On a school night. When there’s no reason to expect a bunch of children would be laughing as they frolicked outside my bathroom window.
And yet, there they were. Or, rather, there the sound of them was. Outside. Laughing. Frolicking.
Shortly after I heard them and recognized what I was hearing, it got quiet. Still.
Followed a very heavy, very large, very unexpected BANG of metal on tile, as if someone had just thrown something through the window. I jumped up out of the tub, and looked at the window. It was closed and locked, and nothing out of the ordinary was on the tile of the floor.
But I felt whatever it was, when it hit. It was that heavy. I toweled off, put on some PJs, and searched the bathroom. I couldn’t find anything that had fallen over or could’ve slipped and crashed to the ground that would’ve made the sound. The best explanation I could come up with was that Trey had left his belt on top of the little bag I keep my razor and deodorant and junk in, and the buckle had slipped off of the bag and onto the tile of the counter by the sink.
As far as rational explanations go, it was pretty weak. The distance it would’ve fallen from the top of the bag to the counter was maybe two inches, and even if it fell to the ground, the buckle is tiny and lightweight, and would in no way make the heavy, metallic thud I’d heard.
The mystery remains unsolved.
A few days later, Brittany woke up early one morning, then stumbled into the kitchen to make some coffee and do whatever it is she does on her computer that isn’t any of the cool stuff I do on my computer. While she was doing whatever that was, she heard the bathroom door open and shut, then the shower came on. She assumed I’d woken up too, and continued sipping her coffee.
Once she was finished with her cup and ready to wake up Trey, she walked into the hallway and noticed that all the lights were still out. The bathroom door was closed, and the light was off in there, as well. She opened the door and she could feel the humidity from the shower having been running, but it had stopped. She then found Trey and I still sound asleep, after which she woke me up with no explanation for why the shower had just turned itself on.
The mystery remains unsolved.
A few days after Brittany’s shower incident, it was a Friday night and I playing a video game in the living room. I don’t remember what I was playing, but I do remember Trey coming to the hallway door and just standing there, annoying me. I could see the shape of him out of the corner of my eye as I was playing whatever it was I was playing, and I remember saying something like, “Hey, bud” or “Whatcha need?” which are my standard Dad-phrases whenever he spontaneously appears, but he didn’t say anything back.
I asked him again, and was again met with silence. I asked him a third time, and still he refused to tell me what he needed or why he was just standing in the doorway. Aggravated, I sighed, looked down at my controller to press Pause, then set it down and looked directly at the doorway.
“Seriously, dude? What do you — ”
It was at that point that I remembered he was at his dad’s that weekend.
Whatever it was I saw in the doorway remains a mystery.
Which brings us up to the present day, when not much has been happening except for one slightly terrifying thing that I might just be imagining because I do live in the Deep South, where Pareidolia is apparently contagious. However, I’m not seeing the sweet baby Jesus in my Egg McMuffin or anything like that. Nope, I’m seeing evil murder death demons. In my bathroom.
After the candle we have sitting on the toilet burned uncharacteristically sooty a few weeks ago, I replaced it with another candle I haven’t lit recently. However, the soot stain from the previous candle was still on the tile above the toilet because dammit, I do all the dishes and the laundry and keep the main rooms of the house clean, so would it kill someone else who lives here to tidy up the bathroom once in a damn while?
Oh. Wait. Sorry about that. I feel like I’m getting off track.
At any rate, the soot stain was still there a couple of nights ago, when I noticed it looked like Trey had been doodling in it. It was just some lines and junk with dots on the end of them, but it drew undue attention to this dirty patch of sooty shame that I hadn’t cleaned, so I wiped my hand over it, declared it good enough for government work, then went about my day.
At some point between then and now, my half-assedly “cleaned” sooty area partially re-sootified itself, probably as a result of showers and such steaming up the bathroom and making the leftover soot get all drippy or whatever. You would think such an event would just make a random dribbly pattern on the wall, but you would be wrong.
Because I live on a Hellmouth.
What I just noticed on my wall today can only be described as a freaky demon face, once you see it. I whipped up this handy .GIF where I traced over the face I see, so that you can more easily see it, too. Unless I’m just imagining it, which at this point, I really have no idea what to think anymore. Is it a random collection of soot and steam, or has the shadow murder demon possessed my bathroom?
Because a lot of freaky shit happens in the bathroom.
Maybe we have our own Moaning Myrtle, but just, I dunno, less clinically depressed and more homicidal ragebeasty.
Sleep tight.
I just stopped at the same McDonald’s as the other morning, although this time I went through the drive-thru, for obvious reasons. I ordered a sausage McMuffin (with no egg), two hash browns, and a Coke. I pulled through the line, paid my money at the first window, then picked up my order at the second window and drove away.
As is customary, I reached into the bag on my way through the parking lot to start eating on the drive home, and discovered that my sausage McMuffin (with no egg) had turned into an bacon, egg, and cheese McGriddle because of course it had. I sighed, turned around, then parked and went inside to correct my order. I don’t do this sort of thing at the drive-thru, because then I can’t see what horrible things probably aren’t actually being done to my new food by a disgruntled cook, but that are clear and present in my imagination.
After standing in line until roughly five and au seconds before the heat death of the entire freaking universe, I explained the mixup to the cashier, who then put in the correct order and told me it’d just be a minute. I walked over to the far end of the counter and leaned against the wall, so I could pretend to not be watching the kitchen while I waited.
Which is when I saw him.
It was the same creepy dude who talked to me in the restroom the other day. He was on the other side of the restaurant, just sitting at a table and staring straight ahead, toward the counter. Food in front of him, and a coffee – and he wasn’t touching any of it. He was just looking at me.
At least, I think he was looking at me. He might’ve just been watching the fascinating goings-on in the hectic world of the fast food marketplace, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. He was wearing the same outfit as last time: black suit, white shirt, thin black tie. I came close to saying screw the food and leaving as soon as I saw him, but I decided to be brave. I guess as long as I’m in a public place with other people and it’s daylight outside, I’m pretty fearless.
While I waited for my corrected order to come out, I forgot all about pretending to not watch the kitchen, and instead started pretending to not keep checking out creepy dude. I wanted to take a picture of him with my phone, but there was no way to do that without being obvious, so I just occasionally pretended to look at one of the televisions relentlessly running Fox News (which is the default station for literally every single restaurant with a television in southeast Texas; there’s probably even some kind of special, Fox-only cable subscription they get). Every time I feigned interest in whatever nonsense the talking heads were spewing, I’d steal a glance at creepy dude; and, every time, it looked like he was looking at me. His food remained untouched.
After they handed me my bag of greasy goodness, I got really brave. I decided to go wash my hands in the restroom, just to see if he’d come in there and start talking at me again. I was ridiculously nervous about it, but I pushed through the anxiety and walked into the restroom. There was no one inside, and I didn’t really want to set my bag of food down in the restroom because ew, gross. So I just stood there for way too long, with one hand waving under the faucet every few seconds to keep the water running while I waited for the door to open.
It never did.
When I left, I looked for creepy dude on my way out. He was gone. In his place, there was a mother sipping coffee while her toddler did unspeakable things to a hash brown, but that was it. They were sitting at the same table he’d been sitting at, and he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t anywhere else in the restaurant that I could see, and I didn’t spy him in the parking lot as I got in my car. He was just gone. Again.
I’m not sure if seeing the guy jogged my memory or what, but when I got home, I decided to try once more to find the song he was whistling the other day. This time, I was finally able to either hum enough of the tune or at least hum it somewhat accurately, and the app on my phone was able to pick it up.
I wish it hadn’t.
It identified a Glenn Miller song that I don’t ever remember hearing, but that I probably heard at some point in my childhood because I had grandparents who liked Glenn Miller back when Glenn Miller was a thing, and they used to play his music sometimes, probably to drown out the incessant synth beats of ’80s pop songs.
It was called The Little Man Who Wasn’t There, and it’s creepy as hell, considering the context. I put the title into the Google bot and read up on it a little, and it turns out the entire song is lifted from a poem titled Antigonish, which was inspired by reports of the ghost of a man roaming the stairs of a haunted house in Nova Scotia. So yeah, not creepy at all.
I wasn’t sure if the Soundhound app had picked the right song when it started up, because it really only sounded like every other big band / swing song I’ve ever heard, but then it broke into a whistling solo and I heard the chorus and…
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
I don’t even know what to say right now. The past few days have been quiet and peaceful, with not a single horrible thing happening. It’s been nice.
A friend of mine sent me a message in the middle of the night a couple of days ago, because she was watching the original Poltergeist and noticed something weird. The clock on the TV when Carol Anne says, “They’re here” reads 2:37 – which, if you’ll remember my update from October 4th, was the time I woke up in one room while my wife woke up in another on the opposite end of the house while terrifying things were going on. It was a scary night, and the coincidence my friend pointed out was SUPER fun to ponder when I was the only one awake in the house and alone with my thoughts.
She also noted that 237 was the room in The Shining though, so the Poltergeist thing was probably just a reference to that. I don’t know. I did some Googling on the number and some conspiracy lunatics seem to think it has significance to the Illuminai, so there’s that. For all I know, I could be a sleeper assassin just waiting to go full on Jason Bourne and, at any moment, I could start hopping trains across Europe between bouts of murdering people with rolled up magazines and flirting with that girl who looks like Helen Hunt.
And that’s about the creepiest things have gotten this week…until just a few minutes ago.
I had a nightmare last night, but there was nothing special about it. It was just a standard sort of scary dream. No shadow murder demon ghost men, no creepy old dudes in suits, no nuthin’. I don’t even remember much about it, other than the fact that I was terrified in it.
I was in my house, but I also remember a strong sense of being in the forest, which was strange. I remember hearing branches cracking – the heavy, large crackle of actual branches breaking off of tress, not the sharp snap of twigs being cracked underfoot – so I guess my house moved to the deep woods in my sleep. Neat.
The only other thing I remember is that I was screaming.
When I woke up this morning, I didn’t think much about it. I had to get Brittany to work and Trey to school, so it was a typically hectic time. Go, go, go, sort of thing. But after I dropped Brittany off, I hit a red light and noticed my left arm.
Here’s a picture:
What in the actual hell?
I snapped a photo as soon as I saw it, and sent a text to Brittany. She had no idea.
I didn’t notice it at any time this morning, but I don’t often look at the top of my forearm, because unless it’s on fire or something, I don’t really expect anything terribly exciting to be happening with it that requires my attention. Brittany didn’t notice it either, but on a situational awareness scale of 1-10, with 10 being Sherlock Holmes and 1 being a tube of toothpaste, my beautiful wife sits somewhere around a 3, which is the perceptive equivalent of a blueberry muffin. I love her to death, but I wouldn’t want her watching for snipers in a war zone is all I’m saying.
It doesn’t hurt, which is kind of weird. I can poke it and rub it, and it just feels like I’m getting a little too familiar with my own forearm and should probably stop before people start to stare. Doesn’t hurt, though.
I had to run home and change shirts into long sleeves before I took Trey to school, because I didn’t want to have to respond to any questions I don’t have the answers to. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t even know what this is. There are five little scratches on my arm, they’re already healing, and I have no idea how they got there.
We have a cat, but he lives outside and is kind of gross, so I haven’t even tried to pet him in ages. I couldn’t have scratched myself in my sleep, because I bite my fingernails like an coked up lab monkey. It’s a side-effect of my crippling anxiety issues; don’t judge me.
The best I could do is drag my fingernubs along my skin, which has about as much of an effect on an itch as scratching myself with a velvet pillow would, so I hardly think I could cause injury. It wasn’t the dogs, because their nails are trimmed, and also because just look at it.
It’s five little scratches. Four in a row, and one slightly lower on the left. It didn’t come from a dog’s paw. It came from a freaking hand.
I put my own hand over the scratches to see if things lined up – and they kind of do. The only problem is my hand is too big for the placement of the marks, but they do match up to fingertips and a thumb; it’s just that they were made by a smaller hand.
Which is somehow even more terrifying.
I don’t think I have any more jokes to work into these updates to try and keep things light. I don’t have any explanations for what just happened. Or, rather, for what I just now noticed happened at some time last night, probably while I was asleep and dreaming of screaming in the wilderness.
Everything else – everything, from the very first crap that happened, right up until this morning – I could explain away, even if the explanations weren’t very convincing. But this?
It’s physical evidence of something I don’t understand and don’t want to understand. Whatever it is, it’s making all of my other, real issues that much worse. I’m even more compulsive than usual about things being turned the right way in the trash can, making sure there’s no unused time left on the microwave, that the toilet lids remain closed, etc… I even nearly ruined dinner last night after Brittany told me to reheat the spaghetti sauce by setting the burner to three, but because I couldn’t bring myself to set it to an odd number, I cranked it up to 4 and then forgot about it.
I don’t have any idea what this is.
I don’t know what’s going on.
I feel like I’m being hunted, and I just want it to stop.
Please?
I remembered another thing I’d forgotten completely about, or at least hadn’t made the association that it might be connected to what’s going on now until it happened again last night. A few months back, I kept seeing these flashes of light pass over me at night, kind of like when a bit of light streams in through the curtains whenever a car goes driving by with its headlights on.
Which is exactly what I thought it was, until I realized it wasn’t. They aren’t orbs or anything, or maybe they are and I wouldn’t know because I can never look directly at it when it happens. It starts in my peripheral vision as a sort of little blob of bright white light, then it usually just moves across my chest very quickly. It’s always over in less time than it takes me to register that it’s happening and then try to get a look at it.
Eventually, I dismissed it as a trick of my contacts since I’ve been wearing the same pair of two-week disposables for the last year or so. Yes, I know it’s a bad idea and I’ll probably, I dunno, go blind or something, but people told me that about a lot of things growing up, and I can still see. Plus, it’s hard to pay for an eye exam without insurance, let alone buy contacts afterwards. Sue me.
But with all the other stuff that’s been going on, I’m starting to wonder if maybe the little light flashes are something else. I have no idea, because I’m way behind on my pseudo-scientific paranormal bullshit research quotient. I’ve never believed in any of that crap.
The scratches changed everything, though.
Like I said, I have no explanation for how they got there. Some friends of mine have insisted that I need to “get help” and “see a doctor” because they’ve seen “evidence of physical harm” now, with the not-so-subtle implication being that I’m losing my mind. Maybe I am, but telling someone who was laid off months ago and is still unemployed without insurance that they need to see a doctor is not helping. It’s just kind of being an ass. Like when rich people tell poor people they need to save x number of dollars from every paycheck, as if us poor people ever have any money left over from our paychecks. Assuming, of course, that we even get paychecks. Because I don’t.
Not that seeing a shrink would do anything to prevent me from self-inflicting more harm upon myself that I’m as equally incapable of doing as scratching up my own arm with all the fingernails I don’t have. I’m not exaggerating when I say I have NO nails. I bite them, compulsively. And, as a result, all I have are nubs on the ends of my snausage fingers. I can’t even scratch an itch effectively, let along carve long scratches into my tender baby flesh.
So I’m lost. I have no explanations for the scratches, and most of my dismissals of all the other stuff have been flimsy at best, so I’m starting to move toward the side of the True Believer. I just have no idea where to start.
It’s at this point in the horror movie when a wizened old anthropologist down at the local university or maybe a creepy homeless dude would conveniently appear to start spouting off helpful exposition about the Forces of Darkness or whatever, but I don’t know anyone like that. I do know the anthropology professor down at the local university, but if I went to her with any of this, she’d probably just slap me around with the business end of a mesoamerican masturbation phallus until I came to my senses. And nobody wants that.
Yes. They exist.
Instead, I’ve turned to the only things I have: books and the Internet. And maybe you people, if anyone out there is in tune with the mystical ley line vortex energy whatevers.
Earlier today, I dug out an old book my parents had for some reason while I was growing up. It always fascinated me in that dark, exciting way of all things taboo when you’re a kid. It’s titled The History of Magic, was published in 1948, and is filled with all sorts of crazy engravings and weird esoteric shit. I ate it up as a kid, not only because it contained what I believed to be forbidden knowledge, but also had plenty of racy 15th century woodcuts of nekkid witch bewbs.
In reality, it’s a pretty dry, academic examination of magic throughout history. It’s still interesting, but not entirely the Book of Shadows I used to think it was as a kid. I started thumbing through it today after digging it out of the room we refer to as my “office” in public, but that we normally call the Danger Room here at home. It’s basically just a giant box with a door that holds all our random crap we don’t know what else to do with. We even used to keep one of those baby-proof doorknob covers on it when Trey was little, as we’d likely never find him if he toddled in there one day and got trapped beneath thirty-seven boxes of assorted Christmas decorations and a cardboard Buffy the Vampire Slayer standee. It’s a mess.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really find anything useful in the book’s text, but as I was flipping the pages and scanning chapter headings, I did stumble across a picture that caught my eye. I didn’t know what it was, but it looked a lot like something I’d seen before.
At the time, I’d assumed it was just a doodle Trey had made in the soot stain on the bathroom wall, which I described as lines with dots on the ends because that’s exactly what it was. And it looked a lot like a picture I found in the book of something called the Celestial Alphabet.
I hit the Googlebot to see if I could turn up any more information about it, and I found several other crazy alphabets that all seemed to trace back to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who was apparently a German mystic or something. I might do some research on him, but for now I’m just trying to figure out what the doodles I saw have to do with all of this, if anything.
In addition to the celestial alphabet (also called Angelic Script), he also came up with the Malachim alphabet and something called Transitus Fluvii, which means Passing Through The River. Dude was big on lines with dots on the end of them, I guess.
Close.
After looking through all the characters or letters or whatever it is that lines with dots on the ends are called in the different alphabets, I think I found what I was looking for. I can’t be 100% sure it’s what was in the soot, but I’m pretty convinced it’s a match. I remember it looking kind of like a janky Y, with the stupid dots on the ends.
The one that matched was in the Malachim alphabet, which is another angelic script that’s different from the other angelic script for reasons I don’t understand. I think this one has more to do with Jewish angels or something, which I guess means Christians have different angels? Honestly, I have no idea. I’m not a religious scholar. But what was in the soot – I’m reasonably certain – were the lines with dots on the ends that represent the letter Nun.
So I hit up the Google machine again, and found that Nun is a letter in a bunch of alphabets, but since Malachim comes from the Hebrew word for angel, I assumed that’s the one I’m looking for. It was apparently derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph for a snake that eventually evolved into the letter N in English. I assume. In addition to not being a religious scholar, I’m also not a linguist, so I’m just going off the super reliable information I can find on random webpages. Seems legit.
To summarize, the letter N from an angelic script was doodled into the soot from a candle on my bathroom wall that I wiped away. After which, a few days later, a scary demon face appeared in its place.
Nah, not scary at all.
I have no idea what any of this means, but I’m putting it out there, anyway. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I just remember seeing something that wasn’t really what I remember seeing, but that looking through this creepy old magic book put into my head. Confirmation bias, sort of thing. Who knows?
There was another doodle that was doodled into the soot, but I can’t remember enough about it to look it up. It was kind of like a lowercase M with squiggly bits, but the only thing I found with lowercase Ms with squiggly bits is something called the Theban alphabet, which is also known as the Witch’s Alphabet, so nope. Not even going there.
Almost every single letter in that thing looks like an M with squiggly bits anyway, so it’d be impossible for me to pick out which one I saw, if I even saw one. It was probably just a random bit of doodling and I’m just remembering it as an M with squiggly bits because I’m creeped out and seeing arcane occult bullshit everywhere.
Maybe I just need to find a creepy homeless dude.
Couldn’t hurt.
HAWT!
Trey is at his dad’s this weekend, so I’m bored and miserable as is usually the case whenever he’s away. I’ve spent most of the time since he left bemoaning my fate as an unemployed loser with no job prospects on the horizon, wondering how we’re going to survive when my unemployment runs out at the end of the month, terrified we’ll have to pull him out of the private school he loves, scared we’ll lose our house. You know, typical Friday night fun.
When I wasn’t doing that, I started binge watching the second volume of Outlander with Brittany, which was fun. If you don’t know what Outlander is, do yourself a favor and check it out, because it’s not the terrible romance novel you probably think it is. It was developed by Ronald D. Moore, and Bear McCreary even does the music. It’s basically Battlestar Galactica with dirks and kilts instead of spaceships and murder robots. Good stuff.
We watched the first volume a good while back, but we’re only just now getting around to Volume 2 because our local library finally got a copy, which is now checked out to Brittany. Because getting their wives to check things out from the public library is how unemployed losers rent DVDs. Oh, look! There’s the depression again.
The rest of my time has been spent feeling pretty stupid and silly for spending so much time researching magic and ghosts and demon people the other day. My life isn’t a horror movie, no matter how much I might want to apply some sort of narrative cohesion to it. There’s no story arc; there’s no beginning, middle, or end. There’s just the relentless grind from one day to the next, and no amount of wanting things to make sense will magically conjure up a plot.
If I’m losing my mind, then I’m losing my mind. I can’t afford to go to a doctor, and I couldn’t pay for any prescriptions with all the money I don’t have anyway, so there’s no help to be had there. I could try to fight it, but maybe it’s like mental quicksand, and the harder I struggle, the faster I’ll sink. Trying to find deeper meaning in the all the weird shit happening to me has helped, in a way. I think. Doing all that research gave me an element of control over a situation I obviously have no control over, but it didn’t actually accomplish anything other than making me feel like an idiot.
To that end, I decided to just accept whatever’s happening, and roll with it. If I’m going crazy, then there’s not much I can do to stop it. If I’m being haunted, then I ought to just say, “Howdy, Casper!” and welcome my new supernatural buddies with a smile. If I’m actually being hunted by some dark terror, then what the hell am I going to do to stop it? I mean, honestly. If there are such things as supernatural forces of darkness, I doubt there’s anything I could do to stop them. I’m not a Ghostbuster, and I’m pretty sure Dan Ackroyd is just an actor.
So I went to bed last night, thinking none of this matters.
Brittany had gone in the back and switched on the air conditioner in the bedroom when we started Outlander, so it was icy cold by the time we went to bed. We use window AC units now, because my central air conditioner sucks donkey balls and the window units are surprisingly much, much cheaper than running the central unit. Using them actually cut my electric bill down to roughly 1/6th of what it used to climb to during the hottest point of previous summers.
I can’t stand being hot, which is a problem when you live in the murky swampland hellheat of southeast Texas. It’s always easier to warm up than it is to cool off, and there’s just something comforting about bundling up beneath heavy blankets when it’s cold out. Which is exactly what we did last night, only it was artificial winter. But the blankets were real. So were the snuggles.
I’m always the little spoon. Most men probably aren’t, or at least I don’t think many would admit it if they were. But I’m a great big baby in touch with my feminine side, so I’m not afraid to proclaim my proclivity toward being the snugglee rather than the snuggler. I don’t think my wife appreciates it very much, but every time I try to be the big spoon, I end up being unable to fall asleep because I’m either facing the wrong direction or I’m on the wrong side of the bed, which is a problem for my weird, idiosyncratic brain. I’m a creature of habit. I sleep on the right side of the bed, lying on my left side. Anything else just fries my circuits, and causes more problems than it solves.
Brittany’s hips were bothering her last night (she has metal pins and supports and crap all in her hips and legs, due to some medical issues she had as a child, and she’s basically a cyborg), so I didn’t get the standard spoony snuggles. Instead, we did the married thing and went with the butt snuggle boogie. Lying on our sides and facing away from each other, but still touching by way of ass cheeks. Hey, it’s something.
I don’t know how long it took the both of us to fall asleep, but I feel like I went under pretty quickly. I was in a nice cold room under a heavy blanket, my wife was next to me, and I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders after I had my sort of epiphany about just giving up and accepting whatever it is that’s been going on with me. I was comfortable for the first time in a long time, so sleep came quickly and easily. Things were good.
Then, my phone rang.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I do know that it was late. We didn’t go to bed until well after midnight, and I knew I’d been asleep for a little while before I heard the phone. It was the middle of the night, probably sometime between 1:00 A.M. and whenever the sun comes up. I don’t know the exact time of sunrise, though. I’m not a farmer, and I don’t have an almanac handy. Sue me.
I don’t have a nightstand by my side of the bed, so my phone was on the floor when it rang. I’m a forty year old married father now, which means nobody calls me in the middle of the night for anything good anymore. When you reach this stage in life, a late night phone call can only mean tragedy.
And it was Trey’s ringtone.
Hearing it immediately sent me into a level of panic people who aren’t parents wouldn’t ever be able to understand. I reached down and felt around for my phone, struggling to convince my tentacle arms to obey my slow-firing, still-asleep brain. I almost fell out of the bed looking for it, but finally managed to grab the familiar rectangular shape.
I rolled over onto my back as I tapped the screen to answer the call, and brought the phone up to my ear. I sleep mumbled a worried, “Hello?”
The line was all pops and hisses, like a ’90s flip phone in a tunnel. But I could hear Trey’s voice on the other end. “Papa?”
I sat up. “Trey? What’s wrong?”
More static and crackles.
“Trey?”
“Pa–” *hiss* *pop* *hiss*
I dragged my legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. “Hang on, bud. I can’t hear you.”
I stumbled out into the hallway and made my way to the living room, the phone crackling the entire time.
“Trey?” I asked, hoping the line would’ve cleared up in the front of the house.
It did.
“Papa?”
With the line clear of static, his voice sounded weak. Scared. “What’s wrong, bud?”
“Can you help me?”
If there were any remnants of sleep still clinging to my brain at this point, that shook them off. “OK,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Papa?”
“Trey?”
“Papa?”
Maybe the line hadn’t cleared up on his end. I shouted into the phone, “Trey, can you hear me?”
“Papa. I’m scared!”
You have to understand what hearing this did to me, but I don’t think anyone who isn’t a parent can, especially anyone who isn’t the parent of a child who routinely gets pulled away from home every couple of weekends. Seeing him leave rips out my heart. Every. Time.
I felt my legs get weak, and I grabbed the brick planter next to the front door to steady myself. I shouted into the phone again. “What’s wrong? Do you need me to come get you? What’s wrong?”
Or something to that effect. I was panic-talking at this point, and I don’t remember my exact dialog. I just knew that my kid was out there somewhere, scared and needing me, and there was nothing I could do to help him.
“Papa? Help — ” he said, cutting off. Everything went quiet.
“Trey?” I asked again, hoping he could hear me.
Silence. No pops, no crackles, no hisses. Just quiet.
“Trey?”
Nothing.
“Trey, are you there?”
Nothing.
“Trey!”
There was a rustling on the other end of the phone, like you’d hear when someone was moving it around or handing it to someone else. I heard a sharp intake of breath, deep and adult. Not a kid’s lungs. I assumed his dad had taken the phone, and waited to hear his voice.
Silence. Another breath.
“Hello?” I ask, much more tentatively than the shouting I’d just been doing moments before.
It stayed quiet for a second. Then, another deep breath. A brief pause. Then, the gravel voice from a couple of weeks ago came back, only this time is was louder. And angry. It shouted.
“LET ME IN!”
I nearly dropped my phone. If you could concentrate all of the hate, all of the anger, all the rage in the entire world into just three words, that’s what I heard. I can’t describe it.
I tried to say something – I don’t remember what – but stopped.
*BANG*
*BANG*
*BANG*
Something started beating on my front door. The doorknob turned and the door started shaking, like someone was pushing and pulling it back and forth with one hand while they beat on it with the other.
The deadbolt held, but the entire door was being violently attacked. The doorknob rattled as it shook, and I could feel the anger behind the fist that was beating on the wood. And it just kept getting stronger and louder, until I was sure the door was going to swing open and crash against the interior wall.
The taste of red filled my mouth again, and all I could do was scream. I shouted out Trey’s name. I kept shouting it, over and over, as the beating on the door grew more and more violent.
Then, I called out Brittany’s name. And it stopped.
Everything got quiet. The door stopped shaking, and the glow from my phone went dark. The light coming in from a streetlamp through the curtains faded. Everything went black.
I woke up.
But I wasn’t in my bed. I was in the bathroom, standing in the corner, by the front of the toilet. My right hand was clenched tight into a fist around my phone, and I was staring at the wall in front of me. Where the candle had been. Where the soot was. Where I’d seen the writing. And the face.
I don’t know how I got there. I’ve only ever had one sleepwalking experience in my life, when I was a kid in a campground and I wandered down a few campsites before lying down to fall asleep on someone else’s picnic table. (It’s actually a funny story, and one I’ll probably add to this series at some point, but not right now.)
I guess I was dreaming again. Another night terror, but without the paralysis. The funny thing is, I didn’t even take my phone to bed last night. It’s been slowly refusing to take a charge anymore except when I use Trey’s charger (not for any spooky reasons, but because we only recently bought it, and all our other chargers are crap), so I left it in the living room, on the table next to my recliner. He took his charger with him to his dad’s, so my phone use this weekend is limited anyway.
I must’ve sleptwalked walked into the living room, grabbed my phone, then dreamt the whole thing. I don’t know if I was dreaming in the living room, or if it all happened in the bathroom. Or maybe it happened the entire time. I have no idea.
This isn’t the first time this thing has involved Trey. When I was snuggling with him on the air mattress a couple of weeks ago is the only other time I’ve heard the gravel voice, and I remember feeling like it…noticed Trey that night. I chalked it up to parental paranoia and just the natural protective instincts I have for him, but what if it was more than that?
I don’t think I can just accept things now. Yes, it was probably just a dream. A nightmare – and a terrifying one – but that’s all it was. Unless it wasn’t. Unless it was more. Unless whatever this thing is, it’s real. And it wants my son.
I need answers.
I need help, but I don’t know where to get it. I don’t know much about any of this supernatural crap, because I’ve never believed in it before. If you have any answers, please let me know. Leave a comment. Share this post. Spread it around. Someone out there has to know something.
I need help.
For the past several days, I’ve tried to put all of this behind me and get back to reality. Out of sight, out of mind. Business as usual. Normalcy. That sort of thing.
Every time something weird has happened, or even just when any of this stuff would pop into my head, I’d immediately turn on some music or maybe watch a movie or something, just to get whatever I was thinking of off my mind. As a result, I’ve watched some really awful movies lately, and even almost considered starting the new Ninja Turtles once when things got really bad, just so you know how desperate I can get.
But for the most part, it’s worked. Ever since my last nightmare and the sleepwalking episode, things have been pretty quiet. There’s been the odd noise here and there, and I’ve had a few normal nightmares that haven’t involved things like murder demons and shadow stalkers, so all in all, it’s been a fairly normal few days.
I’ve even come to suspect that I’m ultimately responsible for almost everything that has happened so far, because most of it can be explained through sleepwalking. I might not be able to scratch myself with all the fingernails I don’t have, but if I’ve been walking around in my sleep like some kind of southern fried somnambulist, then I could’ve easily gone into the kitchen and scratched on my arm with a knife or something. I could’ve also drawn the doodle writing into the candle soot of the bathroom wall, although I lack the artistic ability to have created the demon face. Unless maybe asleep me is somehow more talented than awake me, which is just kind of depressing.
Although, to be honest, the idea that I’m doing creepy shit like standing in the middle of the kitchen with a knife at 3:00 A.M., staring blankly into nothing while I slowly etch bloodcuts into my arm is not much more comforting than thinking I’m being stalked by supernatural forces. Of course, that just means there are three possibilities now:
All of my options are terrifying.
Simple sleepwalking doesn’t explain the stuff I’ve experienced while I’m awake though, unless I want to add a fourth possibility and just admit that the fabric of my reality has become frayed and I can no longer tell when I’m awake or dreaming, what’s real or what isn’t, and I’m slowly losing grasp of my sanity.
Ok, fine. That has to be a fourth possibility, but I’m not adding it to the list. It can just stay right there in its own short paragraph as an afterthought I’d rather not think about. But however you slice it, things are looking pretty bleak.
At least my scratches are healing. It’s something.
I was thinking about all of this last night, when I went outside just after midnight because I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t fed the cat. I walked out onto my front porch, poured some food into his bowl, then sat down while I waited for him to wander up. It was nice out and my phone was fully charged for web browsing, so I didn’t mind. He got into a fight not too long ago, so I like to make sure he’s doing all right and is, I dunno, still alive and crap.
He eventually scampered across the lawn to his bowl and started crunching on his food, thus proving that he was still very much alive and still very much unimpressed with the whimsically shaped fish pellets I bought for him. The jerk.
I was considering going inside to grab the dogs so they could go out one last time before bed so maybe they’d let me sleep in a little, but then I remembered that Brittany’s on the early shift at work this week, so there was no point. I was just about to get up and go inside when it started raining.
Except it wasn’t rain. I didn’t know what it was, but it sounded like little plops and splats hitting tree leaves. I know it’s technically autumn, so you might be thinking it was just falling leaves or whatever it is that happens in places that actually have seasons, but this is southeast Texas. We don’t go in for things like fall foliage and nice weather around here. It’s all green everything until the day winter happens, and then it’s just dead everything. There’s no happy transitional phase involving things like the beauty of nature and crisp mornings with a cup of coffee. It’s just hot and then one day it’s cold. Then hot again. Then cold a couple more times, and it’s back to summer when everywhere else thinks it’s spring.
As the rain that wasn’t continued, it grew stronger. And louder. Eventually, there were a bunch of sharp little pops, like someone skipping pebbles on the pavement of the street because I guess people get bored and we don’t have any ponds around here. Then, things got stranger and I started hearing loud cracks in the distance, like the sound of tree branches snapping I’d heard in my nightmare a while back.
After the cracks came more sharp pops, but louder this time. And closer. There were lighter sounds too, like pinecones hitting concrete, and there were heavier ones, like they were landing on the grass. It started off as a trickle of random sounds, but then they started coming faster and faster, so I switched over to the voice memo app of my phone to try to record what was happening.
And it stopped.
The rush of sound slowed back to a trickle, with just the occasional pop or crack here and there. My phone couldn’t pick up most of it, but I did manage to get a couple of the louder ones, although they sound softer in the recording. I shifted in my chair and leaned forward, hoping to catch something I could show someone else, just to prove that I’m not hearing things. That I’m not going crazy.
There was one more crack or pop, then things got still.
I stood up and moved into the corner of the porch, right next to the front door. Every sense I have was on heightened alert, listening for the slightest sound and watching for I don’t know what. Anything.
A line of hedges runs along the front of my house next to the porch, with a three or four foot gap behind them, between where the house ends and the greenery starts. It’s filled with grass and pine needles, and probably snakes and spiders and god knows what else because I never walk back there. Nobody does.
I was concentrating on what was in front of me, listening and watching, waiting for something to happen that I could get on tape (technically on solid state digital storage, but shut up) when something started coming toward me. The cat was still happily eating his fish pellets, and it didn’t sound like paws, anyway.
Footsteps.
Little footsteps.
They were coming from behind the hedges, to my left. Small feet. A quick gait. Running. Toward me.
As soon as I heard them, I grabbed the handle of the screen door, threw it open, pushed open the inner door, then slammed it shut and locked it behind me, all in one quick motion. Then I just stood there, terrified and listening. I didn’t even look to see what it was that had made the noise. I panicked. You would, too.
I remembered I was still recording, so I clicked off the voice memo and just stood there, waiting for the knock at the door. The pounding. The rattling of the door knob as something tried to get in – but nothing happened. Whatever it was didn’t chase me inside, and it wasn’t trying to get in. Maybe it was just a squirrel. Maybe a possum. Maybe.
I waited at the door for a little while, then eventually calmed down enough to turn on something to watch. I had to not think about what just happened. I almost started the Turtles movie again.
Then I remembered that I hadn’t packed Trey’s lunch or even put his fancy lunch bag in the refrigerator to chill, so I headed into the kitchen. (His bag has a special lining that keeps his Lunchables and Kool-Aid cold during the day, because I’m the type of dad that sends his kid to school with Lunchables and Kool-Aid while all the other parents provide handcrafted organic, free range, gourmet trendy health food to their precious little ones. But not me. I suck.) Of course, his lunch bag wasn’t actually in the kitchen because that would make sense. But Trey is nine years old and thinks logic is something that happens to other people, so he’d put it somewhere else in the house for no reason whatsoever.
I went searching. It wasn’t in the dining room (which my wife still insists is actually just part of the kitchen), it wasn’t in the laundry room, or the living room, or the bathroom – all places he has left it before. He never takes his lunch bag to his room though, which is why I should’ve looked there first.
I remembered that he got $20 from his Math teacher for making a 100 on his last test, which he told me he put inside his lunch bag because that makes sense and of course he had, so I headed down the hall to his room. (Yes, it’s super cool that his teacher gives out cash rewards. Trey got $10 a couple of weeks ago for having the highest grade in his glass (but not a 100) on the last test, which he asked if he could give to charity because he’s an amazing kid. He decided to donate it to the UNHCR to help Syrian refugees, so he got a money order and sent it off. He made me proud, but I digress.)
I opened his door and switched on his light. Or tried to anyway, because his light switch is actually a cool video game joystick with fire buttons and everything that I installed all by myself because I’m handy, but that doesn’t always work reliably because I’m not really all that handy. I had to fiddle with it for a second to get it to work.
Once the light came on, I saw Trey sitting on his bed, cross-legged in either “criss cross applesauce” formation or “indian style”, depending on your political worldview. It startled me, since I knew he was sleeping in our bed because he wanted to snuggle with Mama. I’d told him goodnight in the other bedroom. Hours earlier.
But there he was, sitting on his bed, facing the door. Looking at me. Then, I blinked.
And he wasn’t there anymore.
It all happened in a fraction of a second. I switched on the light, saw him, jumped back a little bit and blinked, and he was gone. I saw him, though. Plain as day. He was there.
I reached in and snatched his lunch bag from his dresser as fast as I could, then switched off the light as I closed the door. As soon as the light went out, I saw Him again. It. The shadow thing.
Out of the corner of my eye as I was pulling the door shut, I saw him standing in the middle of Trey’s room, next to his bed, looking down at where I’d just seen the Trey that wasn’t there. I didn’t stop to double-check myself. I didn’t confirm that I actually saw it again and that it wasn’t just my imagination. I just closed the door and went into the kitchen. I tried not to think about the shadow person staring at my kid’s bed as I crammed a Lunchable and a Kool-Aid Jammer into his lunch bag along with a bottle of water, then zipped it shut and tossed it in the fridge. I walked back into the living room, still trying not to think about it and looking down at my own feet the whole way. I didn’t want to see anything else.
I went straight to the awesome new dad recliner Brittany surprised me with for our anniversary this month, then sat down and switched on the PS4. I loaded up Netflix and clicked on the first thing that looked comforting, then spent the rest of the night watching Star Trek until I fell asleep.
This morning, I took Brittany to work at the buttcrack of dawn. Her job is only like a block away, but we don’t believe in pedestrians here in Beaumont, Texas. She can’t walk to work despite it being close, because there are no sidewalks, she’d have to cross a couple of very busy streets and walk across overgrown medians the city refuses to ever mow. So I take her to work on the days Trey goes to school. I’m there and back again in under five minutes. No problem.
It was still dark out when we left this morning, which is why I guess neither of us noticed the pile of pinecones stacked neatly next to our car. Trey noticed them when it was time to go to school, though. We walked outside, and he just stopped and pointed at a bunch of pinecones that had been deliberately placed into a pile on the driveway, by the passenger side of the car.
Either our prankster’s been back, or we never had one. I didn’t start writing this update until this morning, after getting home from taking Trey to school. No one but me knew about what I’d heard last night, so if someone decided to gather up all of the fallen pinecones in my yard and driveway so they could put them in a creepy ass pile to scare me, then it’s a pretty big coincidence that they did it on the same night I heard what sounded like a ton of the damn things come falling down out of the trees.
Oh, and the pinecone on the top of the pile had a nasty dollop of the same oopey goop that was all over the little stick man thing we found on our porch a few weeks ago. Trey poked it with a stick.
I murdered it with the car.
wtf?
Things have been looking up lately. I’m still struggling with unreasonable depression and crippling anxiety, but I’ve had some minor wins over the last few days that have to count for something.
First, I went to the Redbox on two different days, rented two different movies, and received two different free game rentals in a row. In the parade of constant disappointment that is my life, a couple of free games is a pretty significant turn of events.
The movies were Avengers 2, which I’d already seen but needed a thoughtless bit of escapism, and Tomorrowland, which was immeasurably better than all of the reviews had led me to believe. It basically encapsulates everything that made Epcot Center an amazing, inspirational place back when it first opened in the ‘80s, before it turned into the directionless, soulless, merchandise-shilling wasteland it is today. But I’m not bitter.
The games were Mortal Kombat X, which has the misfortune of being exactly what one would expect from a Mortal Kombat game, and Until Dawn, which is basically a choose your own adventure version of your average teenage, cabin in the woods type of horror movie. It was pretty fun.
Another win was my wife surprising me with the amazing dad chair I mentioned the other day and in which I’ve remained exclusively seated like a cheetos-encrusted land whale ever since it arrived. After that, there was french toast and pot roast for our anniversary, which was today. She got me a card. I got her a nothing.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did buy her the new, fully illustrated version of the first Harry Potter book earlier this month, but I gave it to her early because I suck at waiting.
But mostly, I didn’t do anything for our anniversary because I’m kind of a lousy spouse. I’m also broke, and using her debit card to spend her own money on her present just seemed wrong.
A friend also stopped by for a surprise visit and dropped off some homemade treats for the dogs, along with some people treats for me. (A bag of cookies from the cookie place in the mall. They are as the crack rock, and I crave them constantly.)
And those are all my wins. I’m trying to focus on them, but in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t much. I’m still submitting resumes and getting excited, and then nothing happens. I’m still unemployed. I’m still running out of money. I still feel like a worthless failure. I still have every problem I had before my string of good luck, and each and every one of my doubts continues to eat away at me, gnawing at my soul like rabid little woodland creatures clawing around inside my braincase.
Which is probably why I had another sleepwalking incident last night. I don’t remember dreaming anything, and there were no nightmares or ominous sightings of murder death ghosts or whatever, but I did wake up somewhere other than where I fell asleep.
That alone is unsettling enough, but it’s not so much that I woke up in a strange place that bothers me. It’s that I woke up in Trey’s room, standing over his bed.
In the exact same place I saw the shadow the other night.
Facing the exact same direction.
Staring at the exact same thing.
Trey’s bed. The only difference was that this time, he was actually in it.
I woke up, and I was just standing there in his room, looking down at him, watching him sleep. I don’t know how long I was in there or where else I might have been in the house before I went into his room, but when I realized what was going on and snapped out of it, I knew I’d been standing there for a while. I could feel it in my legs.
And in my right hand, which I had clenched into a fist so tight that it’s still sore now, hours later.
Maybe I was having a nightmare, and I just don’t remember it. It could be that I dreamed something was wrong, and I was in there guarding Trey. Protecting him from whatever it is that’s out there in the dark. Or isn’t. I honestly can’t tell anymore.
All I know is that I woke up standing over my little boy’s bed with my fist clenched so hard that it hurt to uncurl my fingers this morning. And that terrifies me.
I can’t even write about what it could’ve been. I can’t acknowledge the possibility that I might not have been in there to protect him from something other than me.
Nope. Not gonna happen.
It took me all day to convince myself to even write this, because out of all the terrifying things that have happened so far, the one that scares me the most is what I woke up to this morning. Writing this stuff down tends to make it feel more real, which is exactly how I don’t want this one to feel.
When all this started, I thought that writing about it would help. I’d hoped that whatever it is that’s haunting me – either figuratively or literally – could be exorcized by putting it down in words. But I don’t think writing about what’s been happening is doing any good. At best, I don’t think I’m actually purging any of my demons with it. At worst, I might actively be encouraging them.
I think it might be time to stop.
(After I wrote yesterday’s update, I decided not to post it. But then today happened, and I had to. So I’m posting two updates at once, for reasons. If you just jumped straight to this latest one, you might want to scroll up and read yesterday’s before you go on.)
Apart from how I woke up, yesterday was a good day. It was my anniversary, Trey was unexpectedly home after his dad “forgot” he was supposed to get him this weekend, and Brittany made pot roast, which was amazing. If we’ve never actually met, then you probably don’t grasp the significance of this. Basically, the first thing most people learn about me is that I’m kind of a jerk. The second thing they learn is that my spirit animal is pot roast. The third thing usually doesn’t matter because piss off, I’m eating pot roast and no, you can’t have any.
We watched a family movie together, Trey and I played the new Transformers game that is pretty much the ‘80s cartoon come to life, and one of the dogs peed on my pillow. Aside from that last one, it was a really good day.
I’m not sure which dog did it, but I do know that it didn’t happen until after I took them outside and they just both stood there not peeing because a mysterious biological reaction to the slightest bit of rain somehow paralyzes their little canine peeholes or something, so I went the Prince of Verona route and ALL WERE PUNISH’D.
They spent the rest of the night in their crates.
Brittany and I stayed up and watched a few more episodes of Outlander while Trey got some Minecraft time in with some of his friends, and we all went to bed around midnight. Yes, we let Trey stay up late on Saturdays. We’re probably horrible parents or something, but whatever.
We all went to sleep, and I didn’t have any nightmares or sleepwalking episodes.
Another win.
Brittany woke up before me, then took the dogs out, fed them, and started breakfast before I even cracked open my crusty old eyelids to the smell of french toast and bacon. I woke up smiling for once, then shambled down the hall and woke up Trey. Then we both stumbled into the kitchen right as Brittany was plating up our food.
She’d even cleared the kitchen table of the schoolwork and random junk mail that’s usually scattered all over it, and we all sat down for a family breakfast. It felt kind of like Father’s Day, if I ever got to spend Father’s Day with Trey.
The french toast was delicious, the bacon was crispy – just how I like it and Brittany doesn’t – and my morning coffee was cold and bubbly and called Coca-Cola because coffee is gross and for grown ups.
Trey told a really terrible joke about pizza, and it was hilarious. We laughed and talked about what we wanted to do on this rainy Sunday, eventually settling on having a tabletop game day. Munchkin, Boss Monster, and Exploding Kittens were on the agenda. It was shaping up to be my best day in a long, long time.
“Wanna hear a pizza joke, Papa? Never mind. It’s too cheesy.”
Which is when it hit me: none of this is real.
I know better than to trust happiness, and something about all of this just seemed too perfect. Too idyllic, too on the nose for everything I think the perfect day should be. I realized I was dreaming.
Which is when He appeared. I saw him first out of the corner of my eye, standing in the kitchen, in front of the stove. I shifted my attention to him and he did that herky-jerk flash movement thing again and was suddenly in front of the refrigerator.
I knew I was dreaming, but I don’t think dreaming me quite realized it. It’s hard to explain. There was a disconnect there, like I was more of an observer inside my own body. I knew it wasn’t real on some level, but at the same time, I still believed it was all happening.
I tried to get Brittany to turn around and see it. I wanted her to know I wasn’t crazy, but I couldn’t say anything. I tried to point, but couldn’t lift my arm. I was paralyzed again.
He flittered over to the dining room table, and stopped behind Brittany’s chair. I tried to scream, but she just kept smiling and talking and eating her french toast. I couldn’t hear her.
Everything dimmed. The light started fading and the red crept in. All color drained from the room, until it was like we were in a black and white movie, tinged pink either from time or some chemical process eating away at the emulsion of the film. I saw scratches flash in and out of the air. Cigarette burn cue marks blinked in and out of existence. I was literally in an old movie.
The sound was the last thing to go, replaced by a twisted, ragtime version of The Little Man Who Wasn’t There tapped out on loose strings by the broken hammers of an ancient piano. It popped and crackled, like it had been recorded on the wax cylinder of an old phonograph. Edgy and distorted. And wrong.
While all of this was happening – while the world was falling away into nightmare – Brittany and Trey remained happy and oblivious. They just kept laughing and smiling, eating and sipping their coffee and milk. I was the only one who could see what was happening, and I couldn’t move.
The shadow reached out and put his arms on Brittany’s shoulders. The macabre soundtrack faded until all I could hear was the click-click-clicking of a film projector in the distance. The shadow leaned forward, his dark head over hers, and smiled at me – not a smile I could actually see because he doesn’t have a face, but that I could feel. Grim and gloating and…hungry.
Its hands slid up to Brittany’s neck, and it pulled its head back. The clicking of the projector stopped, and I could hear the reel of film slapping against the projector. The scratches went away. Color faded back into the world.
He squeezed.
Brittany started choking. Everything was silent, but she was choking. I could see her coughing and gasping for air, but I couldn’t hear it.
The sound came back when she slapped the table. She was struggling to breathe and begging for help, but I still couldn’t move.
She slapped the table again, knocking over her coffee and sending her fork falling to the floor. Trey cried out, pleading with me to help her. To help his Mama.
The shadow just laughed. It was the first time I’ve heard it make any noise, and it was laughing. It was deep, almost growling – but it was still laughter. It squeezed tighter.
Brittany tried to push up from the table. He held her down. Trey was screaming, all tears and panic. He ran to Brittany and started slapping her back, his little hand a blur of terror and pain.
“Papa!” he shouted, over and over. “HELP MAMA!”
She stopped moving and slumped down in her chair, but didn’t fall over. The shadow was gone.
Trey stayed behind her, pounding on her back and sobbing. Crying for his Mama. Begging her to be okay.
“Mama! What’s wrong? Mama? MAMA!”
I tried to scream. I tried to move. I tried to cry. I couldn’t do anything.
Eventually, Trey stopped trying. He just stopped. Everything. He stopped hitting her back, stopped crying, stopped moving. Frozen, the paralysis of shock taking over. Then, he looked at me.
His big eyes, red from crying, looked into mine, searching for answers to questions he didn’t know to ask. We just sat there, staring at each other. Not knowing what to say.
Then, he screamed.
He lifted his arm and pointed at the wall behind me.
“Papa!”
I turned to look – I could move again – and it wasn’t the shadow behind me. It was the old man from the back porch door. He was inside now, standing behind me and smiling at Trey. Leering at us.
He nodded his head and spoke. “It’s all right now,” he said through the grinning teeth of his stretched skin face. He nodded. “All right now.”
I tried to stand, but something pushed me down. It was him. The shadow was behind me now. I was next.
The preacher man walked around the table, the sharp click of his shiny black shoes tapping against the linoleum as he made his way to Trey, mumbling “All right” over and over. “All right now.”
I felt the shadow wrap its hands around my neck just as the old man sidled up to Trey. He put his arm around him and looked at me.
Trey wasn’t moving, and I could tell that he was struck by the same paralysis that keeps hitting me. And I could see the same terror in his eyes.
“All right now,” said the preacher man one more time. He looked up at the shadow behind me.
I heard the growling laughter again, then the gravel voice boomed inside my head.
“LET ME IN!”
The old man kept smiling, then nodded. He looked at me, then back at Trey. Then at me, and back to Trey. He stopped, looking back at me one last time. He raised his eyebrows.
I tried to scream, and felt my voice rise up in my chest. The paralysis was breaking. I shouted, “Get out!”
The shadow growled.
The preacher nodded.
“All right.”
I felt the shadow’s hands let go of my neck. The old man stepped away from Trey, and I saw my son’s eyes follow the shadow behind me. He could see it now, and I could see him, seeing it. And I could feel his terror.
The shadow slid out from behind me, stopping between me and Trey. Neither of us could move, but I could still scream. So I screamed.
I don’t remember what I shouted, or if I was even yelling words. I just remember screaming.
Screaming, as Trey watched the shadow reach out for him.
Screaming, as I saw the fear in his eyes.
Screaming, as I sat paralyzed while I knew he was trying to cry out for my help.
The shadow grabbed his neck, then looked back at me and growled. The preacher leaned over and reached out a bony finger toward Trey’s throat. He touched it. Trey screamed.
The shadow laughed and started to squeeze.
Trey tried to say Papa. He tried to say Mama. He tried to cry. But all he could do was gasp and cough and…
It was over. The shadow let go, and Trey fell forward in his chair, sliding down and onto the floor. I watched him fall, in slow motion.
I never stopped screaming.
The shadow flew in front of me, his dark, empty face nearly pressed against mine. I heard it again. The gravel voice.
“LET ME IN!”
I just kept screaming. Screaming and crying. I couldn’t do anything else. Everything was shattered. I was broken.
Somewhere between my screams, I heard Brittany’s voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I knew it was her. And it was coming from HIS face. From inside him. The shadow had taken her.
I could hear its growl laugh over her faded voice, mocking me as she cried out in the darkness. I tried to move again, at first to get away, but when I felt my arm twitch, my fear changed to hate. The same hate I’ve felt coming off of the shadow every damn time I’ve seen it. Hate and rage and contempt.
I tightened every muscle in my body that would respond. My right hand clenched into the tight fist I remember feeling when I woke up yesterday. The shadow leaned closer, still growling. Still laughing.
It reached out for me. I closed my eyes and let myself go. I felt my arm fly, and I hit it right in the face.
Brittany’s voice cried out. I reached out my left hand, grabbed its neck, and pushed as I tried to stand. I could hear my wife crying inside of it.
I opened my eyes.
The shadow was gone. The old preacher was gone. The kitchen was gone.
I was in bed, waking up. The nightmare flooded back over me in a rush of images and emotion, and I remembered knowing it was just a dream.
But Brittany was still crying.
In my sleep, I’d been shaking and yelling. She’d only tried to wake me up, to help me out of it.
I didn’t know.
I was asleep.
I couldn’t know.
I hadn’t punched the shadow. I’d hit my own wife. Hard. Hard enough to bust open her left eyebrow and leave blood streaming down her face. My left hand was still around her neck.
Yesterday was a great day. It was my anniversary. Brittany made me pot roast. She got me a card. She reminded me why I love her so much.
This morning, I think I tried to kill her.
I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. I can’t tell where dreams end and reality begins. I don’t know what I did to bring this…thing into my life, but I’m done. I’m just done.
Part of me just wants to leave. Tell Brittany I’m going to the store for milk and bread, and then just never come back. I want to keep them safe. Safe from me or from whatever it is that’s hunting me, but without them in it, my life wouldn’t be worth living.
I don’t know what to do. Six months ago, I was still fighting depression, but no more than usual. I was stuck in a great job with a horrible boss who had hated me since the day I was hired because he hated the person who hired me. I was on call 24/7, verbally abused on a daily basis, and constantly threatened to violate my ethics or else – but I was handling it.
Things were bad, but they were never like this. Even with all of the crap, I still had it pretty good. I was still bringing in money. I was supporting my family. I was providing. I was worth a damn.
But now? Now, I’m stuck with no job, no prospects in my area, and no way to move to anywhere there’s work because I can’t take Trey that far away from his dad. I’ve tried to make something happen with my blog, but I’ve failed every time. I’ve had great interviews that ended with me being told I’m the top candidate being considered, and then nothing happens. I’ve tried to find work outside my field, and every time it’s the same. I fail. Again and again. Every time.
I’m nothing but a drain on my family. I contribute nothing. I’m worth nothing. I am…nothing.
All I want now is everything I used to have, when I thought I didn’t have anything. And I can’t get it back. I don’t know how. I can’t right this ship, and I can’t let my family go down with it. With me.
I think whatever this thing is, last night was a warning. It wants “in” – whatever that means. I think it means me. And if it can’t have me, then it’ll go after Brittany or Trey. Maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe it’s real. Maybe just accepting whatever it is, is the only way to stop it. I don’t know.
But I can’t fight it anymore. I know what it wants, and it can have it. It can have me. Bent and useless and broken, it can have me.
I don’t know what comes next, but when I see the shadow again, I’m letting it in. Whatever that means, I’m letting it in.
I’m not going to write about it, either. I’m not going to tell you what happens, because I just don’t care anymore.
I give up.
I’m done.
Go back up and read the very first sentence of this post again. Note how it’s on its own line, and italicized for emphasis. There’s a reason for that.
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I develop weird obsessions like normal people develop healthy relationships. For example, I discovered Christian parody songs last night, and now I. CAN’T. STOP. WATCHING.
Seriously, it’s a problem. But don’t worry, I’ve scoured the holiest corners of Internet to find the best worst ones so you don’t have to. But more on that in a minute (or you could just skip right to it, if you don’t feel like reading).
I discovered these wonderfully terrible parodies while indulging one of my other bizarre obsessions: conspiracy theories. Honestly, I can’t even fall asleep anymore without finding a conspiracy video on YouTube before I close my eyes. I love the looney little bastards, which is strange because I also think they’re deeply stupid.
BUT, paying attention to them has become increasingly relevant in a post-Fox News world where Donald Trump is somehow a serious contender for President. Because a lot of what ends up coming out of the mouths of my more right-leaning friends started as a conspiracy theory on some fringe website.
Everything from “9/11 was an inside job” to Obama’s birthers started with a post by someone’s Uncle Crazypants somewhere online. Plus, they’re just fun.
My favorite right now – and one that is inexplicably gaining steam – is the Flat Earth movement. I shit you not.
It’s 2015. We’ve been to the moon (“No, we haven’t! Stanly Kubrick faked it!”), we have communications and weather and spy satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the globe, and there is somehow a growing number of people who believe the Earth is flat, and that the “ball Earth” is nothing but an elaborate conspiracy to hide the TRUTH!
Never mind all the imagery we have showing both the full globe as well as closer shots showing its curvature (“No, we don’t! Those are all faked!”), or the fact that things like modern communications and GPS work off of our fundamental understanding that THE EARTH IS A SPHERE. None of that matters to them, and it’s fascinating to try and figure out why.
The best that I can tell right now is that the Flat Earthers have their roots in Creationism and Young Earth theory, because they’ve interpreted the literal (and somehow objective) truth of the Bible as indicating the Earth is flat. Which sounds crazy because it is, but it’s also very disconcerting. Because these people vote.
Dismissing observable evolutionary science to embrace a 7-day creation myth is already taking a pretty big leap of faith, so it’s not really much more of a gentle hop to get to the Young Earth theory, which eventually boils down to, “Oh yeah? Well, dendochronology only shows that God created things old to start with!”
Seriously, that’s where every Young Earth debate eventually leads. Faced with insurmountable, observable evidence from multiple scientific disciplines showing that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, people of this kind of thinking always fall back on the idea that God only made things seem old. FOR REASONS. Mysterious ways and all that.
And once you’ve hopped on the Young Earth, it’s a short skip to either the Flat Earth or geocentrism. Or both, where the young, flat Earth that was created in seven days is the center of the universe, around which all the heavens revolve.
I’d say it’s a slippery slope, but since I don’t think a slope has ever existed in metaphor that wasn’t slippery, I’ll just say that conspiracy theories have a way of snowballing once you take that first big leap into the crazy pool.
Get past the initial hurdle of ignoring logic and reason, and everything else just becomes tiny upgrades, like how you go to the movies expecting to order a small soda, but eventually get the mega size because the mega was only .25 cents more than the large, which was only .50 cents more than the medium, which was only .75 cents more than the small you originally wanted.
In the end, we have a growing number of people who – despite all evidence to the contrary – believe that the Earth is young, flat, and at the center of the universe because the way they interpret the Bible tells them it is. And everyone who tells them it isn’t is either complicit in the conspiracy, or “asleep”. Or maybe a sheep or whatever.
As private, commercial space ventures get more successful, it’ll be interesting to see how the Flat Earthers adapt to a non-NASA cover-up. Since it’ll mostly only be very wealthy people going into space first, the theorists will probably label them Illuminati puppetmasters or something. Because that’s what they do.
Anyway, I like to track conspiracy theories and their theorists. It’s fascinating and cringe-worthy, and just good, clean fun for the whole family. Because I develop weird obsessions.
Like the one I started last night, after stumbling down the YouTube rabbit hole without looking where I was going. I was watching one of my random conspiracy videos when one of these nightmares came up next on YouTube’s autoplay feature after I didn’t close the window fast enough, and I found the treasure trove that is Christian Song Parodies.
They are real.
They exist.
They are awful.
And amazing.
I’ve collected my ten favorites (so far), and put them into a handy little list for you, because I care. YOU ARE WELCOME.
Remember Rebecca Black’s video, Friday? It was produced by horrible human Patrice Wilson of ARK Music Factory, the place where rich parents went to indulge their kids’ dreams of stardom. (Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except that then they put the videos on the Internet. WHERE EVERYONE WOULD SEE.)
Anyway, this is some church’s version of the most annoying song of 2011, which they’ve impressively made even worse by adding even more autotune and less enthusiasm from everyone involved. Unless you count the sudden appearance of “J.M. Beezy” at 2:55, who looks to be a youth pastor sporting the obligatory sideways baseball cap. Because rap.
Bonus points for Youth Pastor Soul Patch™.
Yeah, it’s another version of Friday, this time from Christian Community Church. But guess what? This one was uploaded on April 6, 2011. The previous one, from Trinity Church, wasn’t uploaded until July 11, 2012. And it stole most of its lyrics from this one, even though I’m pretty sure there’s one of those Commandment things against theft. Ah well, it probably only applies to things like, I dunno, cow and daughters or something, not plagiarism.
Jump to 2:30 for the youth pastor rap. This time it’s “homeboys” BP and Master E. I’m not sure who’s who, but the dude driving is definitely throwing off a “Hey, little girl. Want some candy?” vibe.
Bonus points for Youth Pastor Goatee™.
You’ve probably seen this one, and it’s just…something. I actually feel a little bad for this pastor and his wife. Kind of. They clearly had no idea what was going on, and they do have a certain naive charm about them. Still, there really is no way to watch this and not wince.
Bonus lyrical points: “Jesus Christ is my nigga. Let his light shine through ya! Let his love pop a cap in your butt and say HALLELUJAH!”
This one doesn’t look like it was made by a church, which would be a refreshing twist on the formula if the video wasn’t so damn creepy. It’s like what I imagine Carrie White’s mom might’ve made her watch, had YouTube been around back in the ’70s.
For added creepiness, all the people in this travesty of music are related to each other. The video proudly proclaims it stars three generations of Flanders family members, at least one of whom I sincerely hope is named Ned. Otherwise, they just missed the goodly doodly point.
Also, this will also be the only appearance of All About That Bass in this list, because I think we’re all more than over this song.
Bonus points for somehow being the whitest video on this list.
Mark and Lesley Thompson put together this Taylor Swift cover about a married couple that apparently hates the shit out of each other until they start praying or something. Ostensibly, it was made for a marital retreat for couples who can’t stand their passive-aggressive, hate-filled lives, but mostly I think the song is a way for Mark to make a little money off the ads he runs on the video.
Sadly, it’s not all that awful, even if Lesley sounds like she just gives up on the last word of every repetitive series.
Bonus points for overcoming her crippling gag reflex toward her husband’s stinky feet through the power of the Lord. Amen.
If you’ve made it this far in the list, then congratulations! We’re halfway there, so take a break with this song, which appears to be an actual parody. I don’t think it’s affiliated with any church, or is even meant as a religious take on a pop song. And it’s surprisingly good.
Also, have you ever noticed that every parody version of Blurred Lines is better than the actual song? Probably because it’s not hard to improve lyrics based on date rape.
Bonus points for Catchy Churchinese.
Back to the awful. You’ve probably seen this one too, but it had to go on this list. Originally uploaded way back in 2007, this Baby Got Back parody was one of the trailblazers of the Christian pop song appropriation movement, so it gets some credit.
Bonus lyrical points: “Some pervert tried to chase, but he didn’t make it past first base. She’s quick to resist temptation, and she loves the new translation!”
No video to go with this one, just the audio. However, I wouldn’t link to WBC if someone paid me, because they’re horrible people and I won’t contribute to giving them pageviews.
They actually have a lot of songs, but I’m only featuring this one. At this point, a Frozen parody is inescapable, so I might as well pair the worst group of people in America with the most insidious earworm to come out of the Disney company since It’s A Small World.
Bonus points for the singers never, ever hitting a single one of the song’s high notes, although they basically gave up by the time they reached the sustained Eb5 at the end.
Another song unaffiliated with any church. And, as far as I can tell, “Kirkshaw Records” is a computer in their mom’s basement, but whatever. Aim high, kids.
There’s not much to say about this video, other than to comment on a couple of the lyrics:
Ya Danny Glover was a star
In Lethal Weapon 1 thorough 4 (1 through 4)
And Jesus loves Danny as he loves us
With eternal love forever more
Um, ok. I’m not sure they’re aware that Danny Glover is still alive (as of September 14, 2015, anyway). Or maybe it has nothing to do with being dead and with the Lord, and they just randomly inserted the Lethal Weapon star in the song for unknown reasons. It’s probably best not to question it.
Then, there’s this:
If you’ve been bad he’ll wash you clean
Or you bat for the other team
You’re Jewish, Siek, Chaotic decent,
You’re Atheist, you’re Protestant
Tom Cruise and scientology
Crazy Charlie Sheenology
(Duh winning)
For all our bad sins he forgave because Jesus
He was born to save
I guess these guys are Catholic, since even Protestants are going to hell unless Jesus saves them. Obviously atheists are screwed, along with Tommy Cruise and Charlie Sheen, but then they have to throw a little Jewish hate in there, again for inexplicable reasons. And some gay hate too, because at least one of these dudes is clearly working a raging case of self-loathing.
Bonus points for predicting Charlie Sheen’s overdose by the end of the year that never happened.
I got praise on my lips, no child-bearin’ hips
Got no fear of an STD
Summin’ up, this is what’s up
I can care less what you think
I don’t have anything else to add, except to say that it’s couldn’t care less. But words are hard. Pray for grammar.
Bonus points for the dude who goes broke paying child support after he apparently knocked up half the county.
Here it is: the best worst Christian parody video, by some guy I’m calling Mr. Unpronounceable. He’s apparently hip to some kind of black Jewish conspiracy – probably funded by the Bravo network – to leave angry, anti-Christian comments on YouTube, and he’s got a few words to say about it. Or something. It’s not entirely clear.
There’s so much wrong with this video, it’s hard to pick any one thing as the worst. Maybe it’s the angry YouTube comments guy, or it could be whatever’s up with that keyboard player. Or the fact that this guy turned a song called “Fuck You” into a Jesus jingle. Take your pick.
Bonus points for the surprise MC Hammer reference.
You cannot kill The Metal! But I guess you can cut its hair.
Every now and then, a game comes along that’s so amazing, it changes everything. Ultima IX was not one of those games. Except that it kinda was.
You can catch up on the Origin story of this post by reading Life Bytes: Chapter Eight, or you can skip it and just jump straight into the deep end with me as I bring you my “review” of Ultima 9. It’s only about 15 years late, though. No big deal.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
People hate this game. Like, way more than should be legal. And I’ve never understood why. It’s not a bad game, and it’s definitely nowhere near the “worst RPG ever” as some have described it. Nor is it a betrayal, as Noah Antwiler (in)famously proclaimed it to be. It’s just what it is: a good game wrapped in impossible expectations, with a side of french fried bad timing.
First up, the hate. It’s actually been building over the years, like an angry little snowball rolling down the side of a mountain in a Saturday morning cartoon. However, contrary to what people want to believe now, it wasn’t actually hated then. Not really. Sure, it wasn’t given glowing reviews, but it wasn’t universally loathed in the legendary way it has become. It was received with, at worst, mediocre reviews.
The biggest gripe fans had way back in 1999 when the game came out had to do with performance and compatibility issues more than anything to do with the game itself. People didn’t start ripping apart the plot and yelling about things like, “What’s a paladin?” until much later, after YouTube happened and taking giant dumps on other people’s hard work became a subscriber-fetching trend.
So let’s roll the clocks back to November 24, 1999 – which is the day Wikipedia tells me Ultima IX came out, because I’m too old and senile to remember it. But whatever day it came out is the day that I had it. And the Dragon Edition, no less; I still have my tarot cards to prove it!
Feast your eyes upon its glorious glory!
Imagine me driving back to my apartment, giddy with excitement to play the latest installment of a game series that meant a lot to me, growing up. It’s something I played with my Dad, and it forms some of my earliest memories. We bonded over stopping Minax. We learned about each other by discussing Ultima IV. We yelled in solidarity when we played Ultima VII and just wanted EVERYBODY TO SIT THE HELL DOWN ALREADY in the damn wagon. It was a thing my Dad and I shared that kept me from ever entering that horrible father-hating teenage rebellion stage, and I will always – always – be thankful to Richard Garriott for giving us that.
But anyway, it’s not 1985, so enough with my Dad-memories. It’s 1999, and I’ve just arrived home and installed the game. I load it up and…it probably crashed. Because that’s what Ultima IX did when it was released. It crashed a lot. But so did every Origin game, which people tend to forget. Games from Origin were always demanding, always punishing to older systems, and always, always buggy. But this was 1999, and the Internet had happened, which made getting patches a whole lot faster and easier than the BBS days, and the U9 team was quick with early patching.
I didn’t have a lot of the same problems other people had with the game, because I had a 3DFX card in my system. However, a lot of people didn’t, at this point. Ultima IX had the misfortune of coming out during the awkward transition period between Glide and Direct3D. In the early days of 3D PC gaming, 3DFX was king – and everything used Glide. OpenGL and D3D cards weren’t very big in those early days, and the ones that did exist were usually slow and clumsy things when compared with the screaming speed of dual Voodoo 2s.
But U9 hit when things were beginning to change, after Nvidia came on the scene with their TNT line of graphics cards. They were getting popular, and Origin didn’t see it coming. Or, if they did, they didn’t have time to adjust.
But before that, the very first iteration of U9 didn’t even take 3DFX cards into account, as it was entirely software-rendered. But once the rise of graphics accelerators happened, they knew that they had to get on board, otherwise their game would be behind the curve. So they scrapped the engine and wrote a new one – and, well, this story has been famously told and retold to the point that most every gamer knows what happened by heart.
In short: EA moved the U9 dev team to Ultima Online, then back to U9 when it was done, after which they slapped it with a restrictive budget and impossible deadline. And the rest is history.
Or is it?
One commonly held belief is that Ultima IX was always intended to be the last Ultima, at least by the time development started on the third and final iteration of the game. It turns out, though, that’s not entirely true.
When I asked Richard Garriott about this over on Twitter, he had this to say:
“That was never intended to be the last Ultima! It was only the end of the trilogy of trilogies. Ultima ended with my departure.”
This is an important point to consider when remembering Ultima IX, because the one thing a lot of people seem to have developed a problem with (over time) is its story. Specifically, with how it basically saddles the Avatar with amnesia regarding the events of the previous games, along with breaking series canon in numerous ways. But more on that in a minute. First, we need to get back to me playing U9 back in good old 1999.
I loved it. I installed the game, I patched the game, I tweaked my machine until it ran the game as smoothly as it was ever going to, and I played the game. AND I LOVED IT.
Seeing Britannia come to life in 3D for the first time (outside of the Underworld games) was a revelation. Sure, sacrifices had to be made to render the world in all three of the glorious dimensions, but I didn’t mind that Britain was suddenly a tiny hamlet, or that you could see the skybox inside Lord British’s throne room because the view distance was so short. I was a lifelong gamer. I understood the nature of compromise when it came getting the technology to do what you wanted it to do.
And those graphics? They hold up. Even today, they’re still pretty to look at, and more detailed than anything else out there at the time. Britannia wasn’t just a bunch of polygons on a tiny worldmap. It was alive with fluttering birds and skittering insects. There were trees and foliage. Things in caves went drip. It was entirely immersive, despite the limitations of the engine.
What else was doing what Ultima IX did in 1999? Nothing, that’s what.
Sure, Quake hit in ’96, and it was fast and looked great, but it wasn’t a very richly detailed world. Unreal looked even better than Quake – and it had some life in it, with waterfalls and insects buzzing around, but it was still a nailed-down shooter. The geometry was a set to run around in, not a world to be explored.
But Ultima IX was filled with little details like the sound of footfalls being attached to world textures so that when you ran over sand, it sounded like sand, and when you ran over wood or stone, it sounded like wood or stone. That was new back then. People forget.
There were also no loading screens. None. Once you were in the world, you stayed in the world. You didn’t open a door to watch a loading screen hit you with a separate Tavern Instance. You just opened the door and walked in. Same with dungeons. An open world with no loading screens. Nothing else was doing that in 1999. People forget.
And about those dungeons: they were great! Even the annoying ones (I’m looking at you, Hythloth) were detailed and intricate and fun. The closest comparison one could make with the complexity of Ultima IX’s dungeons would be along the lines of the Tomb Raider series. Of course, the Avatar wasn’t as agile as Lara Croft, but the puzzles, the length, the immersion was all there – along with the open world above ground, and the NPCs, and the dialog trees, and the overall plot, and the multiple locations. Everything. In nineteen freaking ninety nine.
PEOPLE FORGET.
Also released in 1999, EverQuest was the closest anything came to doing what Ultima 9 did. Look at that ground texture. JUST LOOK AT IT.
Once the technical hurdles had been overcome with the final patches from Origin, people who wanted to dislike the game – or who were still feeling burned by its unfinished nature at release – moved on from performance issues to gameplay and story problems. Which is where Noah Antwiler comes in.
Now, I don’t want to rag on the guy. He looks like he works hard on his YouTube videos and such, and seems like a nice enough fellow – and most of his Ultima series retrospective is a lot of fun to watch. He clearly loves the series, and poking fun at its varied gooferies is all in good fun. Until, that is, he gets to Ultima 9.
The dude hated Ultima 9 so much he devoted three videos to trashing it for a total runtime longer than most feature-length movies. And most of his complaints stem from the story, and from his sense of betrayal at the hands of an uncaring developer. Or, rather, publisher. He blames EA.
And so do I. So does everyone. Ultima IX without Electronic Arts would’ve undoubtedly been one of those amazing games I mentioned at the beginning of this post, just like every Ultima before 8 was one of those amazing games that changed everything. Nobody likes EA. I get that. We all get that.
But…it’s not entirely EA’s fault.
Nor is anyone to blame for things that aren’t really problems, to begin with.
Yes, Ultima 9 severely retconned the previous fiction.
Yes, Ultima 9 basically gave the Avatar amnesia.
Yes, Ultima 9 catered more to new players than it did to returning players.
AND NONE OF THIS WAS BAD.
The landscape of gaming was changing dramatically in 1999. Not only had 3D taken a firm hold of the future, but the entire industry was changing. The era of the “hardcore” gamer was ending, and gaming was transitioning into something more mainstream. Naturally, the hardcore gamers resented this – just look at the hate something like Deus Ex 2 received due to how it was “dumbed down” and “console-ified” to see it. (Note to self: Write something about how DX2 also didn’t suck.)
The hardcore market was also shrinking. People tend to get less “hardcore” about anything as they get older, and other demands for their time start taking priority over gaming. Careers, family, children, mortgages, student loans, etc… Things add up, and people start leaving the hobby, or at least abandoning the “hardcore” games for titles that are easier to slip into and back out of again after the baby monitor goes off and you’ve got to get a crying infant back to sleep. It happens.
This sword was especially sharp for something like Ultima, which not only needed to attract new players, but somehow still please the returning ones. Which brings me around to what I said I’d get to in a minute earlier: that Ultima IX was never intended to be the last Ultima.
It’s a popular sentiment now, that EA always knew Ultima IX was going to be the last single-player Ultima game. It’s become accepted as just how it was, and I think that idea is partly behind some of the hardcore gamers’ hate for the game. Why cater to new players, after all, if you’re ending the series? Why “dumb down” the game for the fans, just so you can attract new players to a series that won’t have another installment?
And I totally get that. I’d probably be angry, too, if that were the case. But, as Richard said, Ultima IX was not always meant to be the end to the series – just the final installment of the third trilogy. The series didn’t end until he left, regardless of what EA might’ve had in mind.
So, yes. At the time it was being developed, Ultima IX had to adapt to the new gaming landscape. It had to bring in new players, and it had to go easy on returning players who might not have memorized every last little detail and event that happened over the course of a series that had been running continuously for the past EIGHTEEN YEARS.
A lot of Ultima fans in 1999 who had come on board with Ultima VI or VII probably weren’t even alive when Ultima 1 came out. Hell, even a 15 year old kid loading up Ultima IX for the first time would’ve only been 7 or 8 years old when the start of the Guardian trilogy – Ultima VII – was released. How much detail could you remember at 15 from when you were only 7? Probably not very much.
Which is why Ultima 9 needed to do something for everyone who wasn’t a member of the hardcore superfans club. In an era before the concept of rebooting a franchise ever occurred to anyone, Ultima 9 had to straddle the line between introduction and continuation, in a sort of quasi-reboot dance that a lot of players have since come to look back on with disdain.
Which, I think, is faulting the game for something beyond its control. Sure, it wasn’t handled as adeptly as we’ve come to expect from more recent attempts at doing the same thing (the Marvel cinematic universe comes to mind), but it was charting new territory. Again.
This was my childhood.
Because that’s what Ultima did. With every new entry in the series, it did something new. Most of the time, it worked. Ultima IV was a bombshell that showed you could have an engaging RPG without a Slay The Foozle plot. Ultimas V and VI heaped pounds of ambiguity onto the virtuous narrative, and gave the series more and more nuance. Ultima VII poked the religion bear with a stick. And each new game featured new tech. Each and every one.
Other times – *cough* Ultima VIII *cough* – they didn’t quite hit the mark. But for every one U8 (or, I admit, the horribly misguided and woefully executed romance subplot of U9), I can show you 7.5 other Ultima games that nailed it, along with two others that took the adventure to the Underworld and did things no one had ever seen before.
That’s a pretty good track record, and Ultima IX is somewhere closer to the Good side of that number line than the Bad side. Yes, it’s closer to U8 – but only by way of it not being Ultima 4 or 7. It’s less good by comparison, but it is in no way bad.
In fact, it’s even improved with age. The graphics really do hold up, and the GOG.com version is stable, with higher framerates, resolutions, and view distances than were ever possible back in 1999. You should really check it out.
I know I’ve been having fun with it. I think you will, too.
So, go on.
Try it.
All the cool kids are playing Ultima IX. Don’t you want to be cool, too?
Oh, and just in case I still haven’t sold you on Ultima IX, and you’re still longing for a return to those Elysian days of classic Ultima: Don’t worry. Richard has you covered, with Shroud of the Avatar:
“I hope SotA is a modernized best of: Ultima IV Story focus on Virtues, Ultima VII world sim, UO deep roles for emergent behavior.”
YOU ARE WELCOME.
Jenny Lawson made a post (yeah, I say “made a post” because “posted a post” sounds stupid; shut up) yesterday, answering the question of, “Is blogging dead?” – which was perfect timing, since I’d started writing yesterday what I’m posting today, because yesterday was one of those awful what’s the damn point? days that my depression house guest often brings over for an uninvited visit, so I didn’t post it. I didn’t even finish it, to be honest. See if you can spot where I rage quit.
So anyway, here’s what I started yesterday that I wasn’t going to finish until I read Jenny’s post and found the will to keep going. Or at least to not give a shit.
It could go either way, really.I think I had some kind of epiphany last night, although I guess maybe it could’ve just been gas. I don’t know; I’m not a doctor. But whatever it was, I realized an Important Thing I thought I’d share with you today.
YOU ARE WELCOME.
At my last job, I made very good money. Sure, it came at a high price – namely, insane amounts of unpaid overtime and (eventually) a wholly incompetent manager who was more Paul Blart: Mall Cop than he was an effective leader in a Fortune 500 company, but Hillbilly Voldemort doesn’t really matter right now. I mention him only as contrast, and to put the Good Money into perspective.
Most people either hate their jobs, or fuck it what’s the mother fucking point of any of this fucking shit nobody cares fuck it.
Aaaaand that’s all I managed to write yesterday. Whoever figured it out gets gold stars and a +10 bonus to their Perception stat. CONGRATULATIONS.
Dem teef, tho
So yeah, there really is no point to blogging. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead; it was just never alive in the ways most people thought it was. Jenny rightly points out that you’re not going to make a million dollars by blogging. Hell, her blog even led to one book already, with a follow-up hitting shelves later this month – and her blog is one of the most popular on the web. However, while I don’t know her financial situation, I doubt she’s a millionaire yet.
And if she’s anything like most of the working writers I know with books on the shelves, money is still a household issue on the same level it is for most everyone else. Maybe it’s not at the forefront of her thoughts as she subsists, huddled over her half-broken keyboard, on a steady diet of stale crackers and unmeltable dollar store cheese, but it’s jumbled in with the rest of life’s everyday concerns, just like it is for people living paycheck to paycheck. Which almost certainly includes you, even if you don’t want to admit it.
I’ve been at this blog for seven years now, although you might not know if from the recent Great Cleansing I did to remove all of the really awful old posts from the early days, back when I was bitter and angry and going through a terrible divorce. I was turning into someone awful back then, and it’s only through meeting my wife and her son that turned me around and saved me from becoming a Permanent Asshole.
But this entry isn’t about that.
This is about money, and my gassy epiphany.
I realized that I hate it. Money, that is; not gas. Gas is fine. My dogs LOVE gas. It’s why I can no longer eat my dinner in the living room without it tasting like dog farts.
But money…money is a bitch. As I mentioned earlier, before I was laid off from my last job when my position was outsourced to India, I made a lot of money. Of course, I’d never made a lot of money before, so most of what I earned went to paying old off old debts, like back mortgage payments and student loans – but I did manage to get everything back on track and even bought a new car before everything went pear-shaped. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Now I’m unemployed again and looking for IT work in an area where there are no IT jobs. I live in southeast Texas, remember – and, for those who don’t know – southeast Texas is a magical land where people have close, personal relationships with the Baby Jesus and technology is how the Devil gets inside you. So yeah, not a lot of opportunity here. (My last job was remote work; I administered several servers spread out all across the nation.)
So now I’m looking for pretty much anything else, and I’m constantly worried about money. Or, at least I was. But I’m not now. For the moment. Because epiphany.
I wasn’t happier when I was making a lot of money. In fact, toward the end of the job, I was downright miserable. From being on call 24/7, to having a manager who had us spend more time in meetings talking about all the work we weren’t getting done because we were spending all of our time in meetings, to filling out forms and recording duplicate information in no less than three different places across three different systems, the job became a bureaucratic, micromanaged nightmare. And I’m glad to be rid of it.
These days, I just want to make enough money to meet my obligations: pay my bills, put food on the table, and keep sending my kid to the private school he loves. That’s all. I don’t need nice things, I don’t need a big house, and I sure as hell don’t need status symbols. I don’t need people to think I have more money than I do, or even any money when I don’t.
I just need my family.
And I need to work.
Another side effect of living in the Deep South is the whole nonsensical idea John Oliver recently lampooned involving the idea that financial prosperity is given to those who are worthy in the eyes of God. So down here in America’s armpit, we not only have the standard status-obsessed people driving SUVs and bopping around in their khaki shorts, Under Armour t-shirts and designer flippy-flop shoes, but we also have an added layer of contempt for anyone who isn’t displaying those status symbols, because everyone who isn’t flaunting their wealth is clearly ill-favored by God because we’re horrible people or something.
But I don’t care about those people. They’re just the worst, and nothing shy of marching rank-and-file, Stepford-like with them into the abyss will change their opinion. So screw those guys.
Of course, while taking that view of horrible people is kind of liberating, they’re still a problem when you’re trying to find work in the Deep South. Sometimes, it seems like everyone is super religious here, and they just don’t want to hire people who don’t fall in line with their worldview.
It happens.
It has happened to me more than once.
It happens all the time.
So what does any of this have to do with blogging? Simple – I want to be better at it. And I want to turn it into something I can one day pay my bills with. That’s it. I don’t need to make millions. I just need to keep the damn lights on.
Which is hard, when I don’t even have ads anywhere on my site. I shun them because they’re generally horrible and Flash-based and people will just AdBlock them anyway, but mostly I don’t do it because the advertising model of the Internet is so effed up that it’s not worth bothering with. In every other publishing medium, ad cost is based on eyeballs: your number of subscribers, sales figures, viewers, etc… The bigger your audience, the more expensive it is for someone to run an ad in your publication.
Except when it comes to the Internet.
Ad costs aren’t typically based on pageviews (it’s a factor, but a very small one); they’re based on clicks. Someone needs to actually click one of the ads on your site for you to get any real money from it, and that almost never happens – especially when potential advertisers just cram all the information readers need into the ad itself, thereby negating the need for anyone to ever click it.
If your business is having a Labor Day sale, for example, then you can just stick that in the ad. Everything in the store! 50% off! One day only! – and nobody needs to click it for further information. It’s all there, and so it’s basically free to the advertiser.
So no, there’s no money to be made in blogging unless you can turn it into something else, like Jenny has done with her books.
Sure, I’ve had a few offers for freebies and stuff. I got a fancy razor once, some kind of funky USB key I’d forgotten about until just now, and even my wedding ring for free, just because of this blog. But razors and rings don’t pay the bills.
Which is why I’ve become increasingly frustrated with updating this thing while sinking deeper and deeper into the pits of despair when nothing ever comes of it.
Which is stupid.
Because nothing will ever come of it.
Because that’s not what blogging is about.
Blogs are supposed to be fun – a creative outlet for people who can write and express themselves in ways that other people might find interesting, or that might speak to them. We write blogs to communicate, not to haul in the buckets of cash that aren’t in it.
Jenny was right – blogging is far from dead, but it’s far from the idea that it was ever anything more than it has always been: people stuffing virtual letters in virtual bottles and tossing them into the virtual sea, hoping someone, somewhere will find it one day.
Which is exactly what it should be. If I want to turn it into something more, then I just need to turn it into something more. I just need to do something.
If I want to write a book, I just need to write a book. I don’t need a blog for that. I don’t even need an agent or a publisher. There are no excuses in the world today for people who want to write. Just do it. Put it out there. See where it goes.
There are plenty of ways you can try to eek out a living at this. PLENTY.
There is no end to what’s possible in the creative space of today’s world. Just don’t expect to make a ton of money off of whatever it is you’re doing. Because you almost definitely won’t.
Even if you’re successful, you probably won’t.
And you’ll fail a lot before you get there. You’ll write stuff nobody cares about. You’ll post things nobody clicks on. You’ll share thoughts and dreams that people will poke fun at. (Internet People can be some of the best, most kind-hearted souls you’ll ever not meet (like Jenny), but most of the time, they’re just a bunch of assholes.)
Don’t listen to them.
It really, really does.
And don’t listen to yourself, whenever your inner Depression Voice is monologuing in your ear about how terrible and worthless you are. Like it was doing to me, just yesterday.
Before I found Jenny’s post.
Which inspired me to keep going.
That she wrote on her blog.
That isn’t dead.
Felicia Day’s book just came out, and I’ve been annoyed ever since I heard she was writing it. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, the idea of some person I’d never met writing a book had me perturbed, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that what she was writing was a memoire. In her mid-30s.
What gives her the right to think anyone would even care about the memoire of someone who’s barely been able to legally drink for a little over a decade? What could she possibly have to share that makes her so important that she could get a book deal over it?
Maybe that was it. She got a book deal to tell her life story, however brief it may be, and I haven’t. I’m 40. I have, like, ones of years more experience than her!
But no, that wasn’t it.
What upset me was the fact that I’m kind of an asshole.
What gives Felicia the right to publish a memoire? Nothing. And everything.
She has the right to do it because she wanted to, and she did. That’s it. What gave her that right? Certainly not me, or her publisher, or her fans. What gave her the right was her own damn self, and her determination to get it done. Writing isn’t some right to be bestowed upon anyone. It’s something you either do or you don’t.
As soon as I admitted that is when it hit me, and I figured out why I was annoyed by her book.
I realized I wasn’t annoyed by her book.
I wasn’t even annoyed by Felicia.
I wasn’t annoyed with her age or her talent, or anything else she has ever done or will do.
I was annoyed with myself.
The only problem I had with Felicia Day was that she’d succeeded where I’ve failed. She took her nerdosity (that’s a word; no need to look it up), and transitioned it into a career through talent, hard work, determination and perseverance. And luck, because there’s always luck.
But it wasn’t luck that made The Guild a hit. It wasn’t luck that taught her how to act. It wasn’t luck that taught her to sing, or write, or produce, or do any of the other hundred or so things she’s great at. All luck did was put her in the right place at the right time, which is all it ever does for anyone. The rest – all the heavy lifting – was up to her. And she did it.
Maybe I’ve never had my luck moment, but if I did, I probably just didn’t notice because I was too busy worrying about what someone else was doing. Or maybe I just don’t have the talent or the drive. I don’t know.
I do know I’ve tried. And I’m still trying. I realized I’ve even been doing a kind of memoire of my own, with these little entries I’ve been posting lately.
I’ll keep on working at it until I’m either successful or eventually get sick or old(er) and die, because I’m not failing by trying. I’m just getting better at what I do while I wait for my luck to get here. It’ll either happen or it won’t, but sitting around and not doing anything while I wait for my ship to come in isn’t going to give me a ticket to board. It’ll just make me the crazy dude who yells at his knapsack and sleeps on a park bench down by the river. Or maybe a van, because Chris Farley was hilarious.
I think that’s the problem with bitter people. They’re so concerned with what other people have that they eventually become fixated on the idea and become either angry trolls on the Internet or possibly Republicans. Maybe both.
Seriously, the key to understanding the modern Conservative is to take everything you learned in Kindergarten about being a decent person, and then do the exact opposite. If, for example, little Melanie wanted to play with the alphabet blocks, she should’ve worked harder to get to them before Jimmy. His mom drops him off early so she can make it to her spin class or whatever, while Melanie has to take the bus because her mom has to get to one of her two minimum wage jobs before the sun comes up because she’s lazy or something. At any rate, Jimmy has the alphabet blocks now, and he’s bigger than Melanie is. What’s she going to do, whine to the teacher to make him share? What is this, Communist Russia?!
If Conservatives really believed that people lived the high life on welfare and food stamps, I think a lot more of them would probably quit their crappy jobs and go on the dole. But they don’t, despite their rhetoric that taxing the rich disincentivizes being wealthy, because some part of them deep down they don’t talk about at parties knows they’re full of shit. Even taxing 90% of some rich guy’s $1,000,000/year income (which no one has ever proposed) would still leave him with a helluva lot more money at the end of the day than anyone on welfare and/or working at or around minimum wage has. Nobody wants to be poor, because everyone knows being poor sucks, even for the phantasmal “welfare queen” bogeywomen the Tea Party people love to talk about, and they damn well know it.
But enough about politics.
The other thing bitter people become are Internet Trolls and YouTube commenters, which are basically the same thing. These people live to tear down the work anyone else does online – especially if who they’re attacking has achieved any level of success. Why? Because they could do better. They could be funnier. They could be smarter. They could be…fill in the damn blank.
But they aren’t.
Like this, but with more resentment.
All they are is bitter that someone else is getting what they feel they’re entitled to, even when they don’t work to put anything out there and make it happen. People who actually create put a piece of their soul into every single thing they make, then they share it with the world. That takes a kind of bravery that usually goes overlooked by people who just consume content rather than create it, but it’s there. Baring your soul to the world is scary, no matter how you do it.
It’s especially scary when you know that there’s an army of bitter, entitled people out there who are just waiting, fingers poised over their rageboards, for you to press the Publish button so they can start keybanging their hate and bile all over your beautiful work. That’s what they do. It’s what they live for, which is why I explained Conservatives first. Because to truly understand the mentality of these sorts of people, you need a point of reference. Like, say, Donald Trump.
You have to give credit to Trump, though. He’s basically trolling the entire nation at this point, like a snickering kid on Xbox. But, you know, with grown-ups who should know better.
If you picture everyone leaving hateful YouTube comments as furious little Donald Trumps, it not only gives you context, but it actually helps a little, since the image of pint-sized Donalds hacking away at their keyboards gives you perspective.
And it helps you to never become that guy.
Like almost happened with me and Felicia Day.
So no, I’m not annoyed with Felicia’s book. I’m not annoyed with her success. Instead, I’m going the opposite route and have decided to be encouraged by it. Just like I’ve been encouraged by Jenny Lawson or Wil Wheaton, or any number of people I admire for what they’ve accomplished. Success isn’t guaranteed to anyone, no matter how many advantages they might have, nor is failure predestined for anyone, regardless of how many disadvantages they have.
I don’t live in or near Los Angeles or New York, where writers have a decent chance of finding work. I live in a small East Texas town, where reading anything that isn’t either in the Bible or on Fox News is how the Devil gets inside you. I don’t have any advantages, but you know what? Neither did Felicia.
She was born in Hunstville, Alabama, which is not all that different from Beaumont, Texas, except that Lynyrd Skynyrd never even wrote a cool song about my state. Pretty much all we can do is wait for someone to sing, “The stars at night are big and bright…” before we all break into a fit of clapping like coked up lab monkeys hitting the buzzer for a fix. (Seriously, give it a try the next time you’re in the Lone Star state. Pee-Wee wasn’t lying.)
And that’s the takeaway for today’s post, kids. Don’t ever let what someone else has discourage you from your own success. Don’t let that bitter monster take over your heart, because that way lies depression, anger and probably some sort of cryptic warning from Yoda that’d make his ears go down when he got to the good part. I don’t know, maybe something like, “Jealousy leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to…YouTube Commenting!” (Which is basically like the Dark Side, if being a Sith was less about choking people with the power of your mind and more about confusing them with your complete failure to grasp the concept of grammar.)
Also, don’t let the trolls get you down. If you’re creating, keep on creating. The only way the bitter people win is when everyone else gives up. If I were a slogan writing type, I’d probably say something like “Ignore The Hate! Just Create!” right about now, but thankfully I’m not. Slogans are obnoxious.
Now if anyone needs me, I’ll be out buying Felicia’s book today.
Because I’m not an asshole.
UPDATE: I didn’t go out to buy it, because I broke a tooth. But I did get it on iBooks; and so far, it’s great. I even went and added Felicia to THE TOP of my list of Nerd Heroes. Go check it out.
Sorry, haters.
I didn’t always want to be a writer. For most of my childhood, I wanted to be an astronaut, which makes sense, seeing as how I’ve never quite grasped the concept of probability. I used to stay home from school for shuttle launches, I’d read every book about space I could get my hands on, and I even owned the Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual. You know, just in case I ever got called up by NASA between snack time and afternoon cartoons one day.
Of course, I didn’t ever become an astronaut. When I hit 9th grade, I got smashed in the face by the Hammer of Algebra, which put the brakes on my journey toward the Air Force Academy. Then, just in case I still had any optimism left in my gangly teenage body, my uncle (a retired AF Colonel) made sure to casually crush any dreams I had left by telling me I was too tall to ever fly, and even if I wasn’t, the Air Force would never let me be a pilot since I wore glasses, like some kind of bespectacled monster. So that was fun.
After that, I flailed around for a little while, bouncing from life goal to life goal. For a while, I was going to be a filmmaker. Then, I decided to be an anthropologist. At some point, I sort of slipped into IT work because I’d always been good at it, years before anyone had even figured out that Information Technology was a thing. Before I knew it, I had a career.
But way back before any of that happened, somewhere around 4th grade, I was already a published writer. I just didn’t realize it until now.
My Other Questionable Decisions
I was around 9 or 10 years old, and attending a fancy private school my parents sent me to for the five or so minutes they had any money to burn on things like a fancy private school for their weird son. I was only there for a year or so, but it seemed longer. And I made some great friends I still keep in touch with to this day.
Time is weird like that, though. I recall my very brief time at Cathedral In The Pines as involving more years than it actually did. If I’m remembering correctly – and I’m probably not, because as I get older, the past tends to grow more and more preferable to the present – I started 4th grade in public school. But after my teacher pinned me to the wall and had some kind of a nervous breakdown while yelling at me for chewing gum I wasn’t chewing, my parents decided they’d spend some of the money they didn’t really have to send me to a better school. (I promise I didn’t “swaller” it, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Name-Was.)
School logo. My artistic skills are AMAZING.
I started at Cathedral a couple of weeks after the beginning of school, which I guess is how long it took for the public school teacher to have a psychotic break, which, now that I think about it, is probably a pretty common thing with teachers after the first couple of weeks of school.
Anyway, I went to Cathedral for the rest of 4th grade and got probably around halfway through 5th grade before I was back in public school. This time, it was because my private school teacher snapped and yelled a sermon at me in front of the class one day because I was obviously going to burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity since I liked Science and didn’t believe radiocarbon dating was an elaborate hoax from the Devil or something. It was kind of freaky.
Looking back, my parents probably should’ve seen my pushing two different teachers toward separate mental breakdowns in as many years as some sort of sign. Maybe with a little counseling, I could’ve grown up to be a well-adjusted, socially competent adult instead of the caustic little anti-social misanthrope I am now. But I was probably always destined to be a Difficult Person. Some things are just unavoidable.
One of my first brushes with authority came from my first experience with publishing, which also happened to be during my 4th grade year at Cathedral. Probably some time after Christmas break, I had the brilliant idea to start a student-produced magazine. I say it was my idea, but I honestly don’t remember. It probably wasn’t. Things just sort of happen when you get together with your friends as a kid, and I’m sure everyone involved has a different memory of how things went down.
At any rate, there were five of us. There was me, my best friend Dave, a couple of other pals named Jamie and Jay, along with a dude named Samit. We all had very specific roles in our capacity as publishing magnates, and I don’t exactly remember any of them.
I’m pretty sure Jamie was responsible for printing, though. I think his mom had access to advanced equipment of some sort, which was probably just a Xerox machine in her office or something. I think Dave was our liaison to the authorities, because he was the good kid who didn’t induce undue psychic trauma in our teachers. I’m not sure what Jay did, but I think he had something to do with the Joke Page. Also, there was Joke Page.
A very accurate reproduction of the Zapped! logo.
I don’t have any idea what I did. I know I wrote something, but I can’t recall what it was. It probably had something to do with Star Wars or Transformers, or whatever I was into at the time. Maybe Laser Tag. Who knows?
Samit was our artist, which mostly meant that he drew pictures of Michael Jackson in every possible context because the dude was seriously into The King of Pop. Like, way more than should be legal. But then again, it was the ’80s. The only people who didn’t like Michael Jackson were Communists and maybe Tipper Gore, because I don’t think that old shrew has ever liked anything in her entire life.
We called the thing Zapped! – with an exclamation mark, so people would know we meant business. We produced exactly one issue.
Between whatever it was I wrote, Dave’s interviews with the staff and faculty, Jay’s jokes, Jamie’s printing and Samit’s moonwalking glitter-gloving, it didn’t take long after we finally put the whole thing together for the in-fighting to start.
Jamie thought he deserved more recognition because without him, we wouldn’t have a printed magazine.
Jay probably argued that his Joke Page was the linchpin of the entire operation.
I’m sure Dave tried to calm everyone down.
As for me, I was most likely just stoking the various fires of everyone’s fury to watch the world burn, while Samit didn’t really care what was going on, so long as he could keep drawing Michael Jackson pictures.
After our little literary supergroup broke up, I think there was talk of a competing magazine. I don’t remember what it was called, but I think maybe Jamie was the Publisher and EIC. He took his mom’s copy machine, recruited some other kids, and got busy with his own pernicious periodical pursuits. Samit was probably on board for MOAR MICHAELS!
At some point, the authorities stepped in and shut the whole thing down. Apparently, our little magazine war had begun causing classroom disruptions, so the world only ever got to read the wisdom of Mrs. Baird one time, thanks to Dave’s interview. Mrs. Baird was our 4th grade teacher, although I’m pretty sure her name wasn’t Mrs. Baird. I think I just remember it that way right now because I’m hungry and have those addictive mini powdered donuts on the brain.
I actually still had what was probably the last surviving copy of Zapped! up until Hurricane Rita bisected my parents’ house with a tree knife. I think it was in a box of My Old Crap that the tree landed on after it cut through the roof and let the angels weep into their storage closet. I might still have it, somewhere. I remember seeing it after the hurricane, but I can’t recall whether I managed to salvage it or if I just thumbed through its water-soaked pages before tossing it in the trash.
These days, we’ve all grown up and moved on, but I’m pretty sure each of us remembers the weeks we spent on Zapped! as being longer than they actually were, more fun than they should have been, and more exciting than they ever had any right to be. That’s how nostalgia works.
It’s funny how the past repeats itself, though. A couple of years ago, we enrolled Trey in a fancy private school during the five minutes I had money to burn on things like a fancy private school for my kid, back when I had a great job before Hillbilly Voldemort came along and ruined everything with his inability to form word sounds with his mouth hole. Thanks to him, money is a lot tighter than it was and the school is expensive, but I don’t mind eating dollar store macaroni in exchange for Trey’s education.
He loves his school and all his classmates, so he gets to stay. And, since Trey is not me, he hasn’t even caused a single teacher to have a mental collapse yet, which is nice because the guy who runs the school is my old Zapped! colleague, Dave. He’s also my dentist, which is sometimes a little awkward whenever he fusses at me for not flossing properly. But he liked Debbie Gibson more than Tiffany back in the day, so what does he know?
Jamie went on to form a band of some sort that I understand is pretty popular around these parts. I’ve never heard any of their music, but I’ve seen them listed at a bunch of different venues around the area, so he’s doing well.
I’m not sure what Jay is doing, but I think he’s up in Alaska. Maybe he’s dog sledding or something, and I’ll hear about him winning the Iditarod one day. That’d be nice.
I haven’t heard from Samit since I left Cathedral, but I like to think he’s still out there somewhere, happily drawing Michael Jackson pictures with a #2 pencil.
As for me, I’m currently a stay-at-home dad. I do exciting things like dishes and laundry between spurts of freelance writing and research work, along with responding to website design requests that ultimately go nowhere after I explain that I work for money rather than exposure. I also play a lot of video games and write stupid stuff on this blog. So there’s that.
Lately, there’s been talk of a reunion of the Cathedral Warriors over on Facebook. I’ll probably go, if it happens. It turns out that a lot of people I didn’t get to know when I was at Cathedral became friends later in life, either in high school or while wandering the random swamps of adulthood. It’d be nice to catch up with everyone, and who knows? Maybe Jamie can ask him mom to print up a special limited edition Zapped! issue.
Hey, a guy can dream.
Got ta tell ya. Ooh!
Growing up as a nerd has never been particularly easy for anyone, but it was particularly difficult for me, as a scrawny little nerdchilde in a small east Texas town where the only good game is a football game, and the only good book is, well, the Good Book. God, guns, football and the baby Jesus. That’s Texas, if you add some cowboy boots and stupid hats.
But what made my experience so awful, or in any way different than that of any nerd growing up anywhere? Well, I did it in the ’80s, for a start. Which was a dark time for nerds living in the Bible Belt.
You can’t do anything in my town without someone invoking the Holy Spirit in some capacity. Whether it’s an opening prayer that repeats the term “Father God” every other word for inexplicable reasons, as if the omnipotent creator of the universe is going to suddenly forget who you’re talking to if you don’t say his name every few seconds to keep his attention, or maybe a closing prayer, or a mid-whatever prayer, or perhaps just a cautionary explanation from one of your teachers about how Science is how the devil gets inside you and you’re going to hell for believing in carbon dating (yes, that actually happened to me). If you’re doing anything in this town, you ain’t doin’ it without Jesus, boy.
My Other Questionable Decisions
Which made liking fantasy and role-playing games during the height of the ’80s Satanic Panic exceptionally fun.
Playing a computer RPG like Ultima would lead me down a dark path to ritualistic animal sacrifice and drinking blood from the still-beating hearts of virgins if someone didn’t set me straight. And don’t even think about D&D, because that combined devil magic with things like math and rolling dice, which was how the demons of Gambling and Reason grabbed hold of the impressionable youth.
If you were a kid growing up in 1980s Texas and you liked that sort of thing, you had to keep it on the down low. Underground. Keep it secret, sort of thing. Keep it safe.
Which makes me think that growing up nerdy in the South was probably a lot like growing up gay in the anywhere. You had to live a lie not only to fit in, but just to avoid getting your ass kicked every other day on the playground.
As for what specific horrors growing up during the ’80s as a nerdy kid in the South who was also gay might’ve entailed, it’s really too disturbing to think about. I’m not even making a joke. Most of them probably didn’t make it out alive, either due to tragic suicides or…well, it’s the Deep South. Draw your own conclusions.
Even today, as an adult still living in the same timewarp city, people routinely try to make me feel bad about being a nerd. For instance, I made myself a d20 keychain when I was making polyhedral die necklaces for my kid’s birthday party. I think it’s pretty nifty, but a hyper-local micro-celebrity happened to catch a glimpse of it in a picture I posted on Facebook, then thought he was being super witty by making a little quip about how of course I would have a “D&D dice” keychain. Because being a middle-aged dude with a raging fanboy hard-on for NASCAR is totally normal around these parts, but rolling dice outside of a casino is just plain unnatural.
A natural 20 saves gas, too!
My stepson’s dad also loves to nerd-pick, which is always fun. He’ll make little jibes at me from time to time that I just ignore, but I know he pokes a few of them at Trey, too. He tells me about them, and it breaks my heart. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I certainly have no right to tell his biological father how to raise his own child during his visitation periods, but that doesn’t make the vicarious stings any less sharp.
I’ve learned to mostly ignore the jibes – and they don’t hurt me anymore, like they did when I was younger – but they’re still annoying. And omnipresent. Like gnats at a picnic.
Getting back to the ’80s, I knew a few other nerds growing up. We were friends and all liked some different nerdy thing, but what we all had in common was The Lie. We all wore masks.
We’d blend in with the “normal” kids as best we could, pretending to give a shit about sports or whatever, or feigning interest in the fad of the day. It was just easier than dealing with the taunts and the bullies, so that’s what we did for the English, which is totally what I would’ve called normal people if I’d known anything about the Amish back before Witness came out.
The real one. My drawing was almost PERFECT, though.
But for most of my friends – and, I think, most nerds everywhere – that mask of normalcy slowly became permanent. Pretend to be something long enough, and I guess you just eventually forget what you were hiding behind it. I believe this is commonly referred to as Growing Up. And it sucks.
We all have to do it, of course. Grow up. But I don’t think that has to automatically mean we just stop loving everything we ever enjoyed as children, just so we can convince ourselves that we’ve matured. Or worse, just so we can convince everyone else that we’re adults who like adult things because we’re adults. Or something.
As a grown up who never grew up, I’d love to take Trey away from this town. This state. This entire region. I want to – and I could – but I still think it’s important that he have a relationship with his father, despite our differences. Moving across the country would make that more difficult, and it’s not something I’m eager to do. If I find the right job opportunity and have to relocate for that reason, it’s one thing. But moving just because I’d like someplace else better has never entered my thought process.
Well, not since I’ve known Brittany and Trey (wife and stepson, for those not paying attention), anyway. Before I met them, I could have – and probably should have – left. Many times. My level of personal fulfillment would probably be a lot higher today had I done so back then, but if I was out living the dream in some distant state seven years ago, I never would’ve met MY ENTIRE REASON FOR LIVING. So I’m fine with how things turned out.
But I still admire the nerds who not only made it out, but who owned their nerdhood with such ferocity that they not only made careers out of it, but helped burn down the forest of intolerance as they blazed their trails across the pop culture landscape.
Felicia Day. Felicia’s name gets its own sentence, because sweet, merciful Zeus, she’s amazing. So amazing that, when I realized she wasn’t originally on this list when I published it, I came back just to add her. AND I’m putting her at the top, before even Lord British, because she’s just that awesome. I just finished reading the Ultima chapter in her book, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), and I had to put it down, jump over to this post, and pencil her in. It’s like she’s a version of me, but, you know, a successful one. She grew up in the Deep South, just like me. She didn’t have anyone to play D&D with, just like me (although I’m not sure if she used to read the sourcebooks for fun and then had to roleplay her own imaginary friends just so she could have someone to play the roleplaying game with, though. Like me. Sad, lonely little me.) She also faced the same religious zealotry and outsider issues I’ve just told you I went through. And that my own kid will have to face soon, if we don’t get out of Texas before it’s too late. In short, because these are supposed to be quick little paragraphs about my nerd heroes, Felicia is the biggest nerd you will ever find – and she’s also one of the sweetest, most driven people I’ve ever not met. I want her to go on to become a major media mogul so she can 1) Enjoy her well-earned success as the benevolent ruler over her own little Britannia, and 2) Hire me for something. Anything. I don’t care.
Richard Garriott is, was, and always will be an enormous nerd. He collects automatons and has an actual dungeon in his house, for pete’s sake. He went to computer camp in high school. He played D&D so openly that more people know him today by his alter-ego, Lord British, than they do by his actual name. Which he changed to Richard Garriott de Cayeux when he got married, by the way. Because he just doesn’t give a shit what you think about the patriarchy, thankyouverymuch. He took his nerdy passions and turned them into computer games and dollar signs. Then he decided to be an astronaut, because why the hell not? And he did it. Went to space. Got the t-shirt. Meanwhile, the proverbial high school bully has probably been off selling cars out by the interstate for the past few decades. Suck it, haters.
Adam Savage is another gigantic nerd. He took his love of model building and special effects and turned them into a career building models for special effects. And then blowing them up. And then blowing everything up on Mythbusters. Now he builds elaborate cosplays and strolls the floor of Comicon every year dressed as everything from a Ringwraith to an unfortunate member of the Nostromo’s crew from Alien. He builds pretend ray guns for fun, then constructs elaborately themed cases to house them in. He hangs out with actors and puts together model kits from the shows they’ve been on. He giggles like an overexcited child at the slightest tingle of his nerd hypothalamus. And he’s awesome.
Jane Espenson was such a nerd growing up that she tried to write a M*A*S*H* episode when she was in junior high. Then, she went to college and majored in computer science – at a time when the male-to-
female ratio in that track was even more alarmingly one-sided than it is today – and linguistics. Because every girl knows the key to popularity is punch cards and diphthongs. She eventually went on to write spec scripts for Star Trek – the cultural touchstone of nerdism – and, you know what else? She helped make EVERYTHING YOU LIKE TODAY. Her work on series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica made serial television what it is today. Without shows like Buffy or BSG proving that serial storytelling was not only possible but preferable to episodic one-shots, we wouldn’t have Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, or any other of a whole great, big list of amazing television. She’s amazing.
Wil Wheaton was freaking Wesley Crusher on Star Trek. You just don’t get any nerdier than that. The character was (unfairly, in my opinion) universally loathed, and it didn’t take long for Crusher Hating to become Wheaton Hating, because some people just can’t tell the difference between actors and 
characters or whatever. After his run on Trek, Wil kind of slipped out of the spotlight. But you know what he did? He went and started working with a company called New Tek on something called the Video Toaster, which you’ve probably never heard of. But you’ve seen what it led to, which is EVERYTHING YOU LIKE TODAY. Non-linear editing, digital compositing, CGI – everything that modern movies and TV is built on was pioneered by the Video Toaster. It was to video what the Macintosh was to desktop publishing. It was that important. Then, after he got done doing that, he decided to screw everything and write some books where he not only didn’t hide from his nerdy tendencies, but celebrated them. And they were a huge success. Now, he’s basically the King of the Nerds, which was probably some popular kid’s idea of a hilarious insult back in the ’80s, but is one of the coolest things anyone could be today. He’s also a super nice guy.
I sometimes wish I could’ve found a way to transition my nerdiness into a career, but I fear that time has long since passed me by. Sure, I’d go help Adam blow things up if he asked. I’d also write some dialog for Jane or a bit of lore for Richard, if they offered. And I wouldn’t hesitate to go play a round of Munchkin with Wil over on TableTop if I got an invite, but none of these things are ever likely to happen. I guess I could sit around, being jealous of their successes and shouting angry things at them – which, judging by their mentions on Twitter, is a frighteningly popular sport – but I’d rather just admire them for what they’ve accomplished that I never could.
Because, while growing up as a nerd has never been particularly easy for anyone, nerds like Richard, Jane, Adam and Wil have made it a whole lot easier than it used to be. Even in the small, timewarp towns of east Texas.
Of course, I’ll continue having to endure the flaccid taunts of impotent, middle-aged bullies who still think the world works like their junior high locker rooms did, but that’s only because they’re too old to know any better. To know that the world has changed.
Whatever.
But at least my kid won’t have to endure the same attacks from his peers, because they’ve all grown up in a world where being a nerd isn’t an insult anymore. Where being smart doesn’t make you weird, where reading books isn’t strange, and playing games doesn’t make you a loser.
Maybe one day, after Trey is old enough to voice his feelings in any legal sense, he’ll be okay with moving, and I’ll take that big first step out into the wider world to see if I can be a nerd success, too. In the meantime, I’ll just keep freelancing and writing things here until that time comes. After all, George R.R. Martin started writing in the ’70s, but didn’t publish A Game of Thrones until he was almost 50. And look how that’s turned out for him.
It’s never too late.
Elementary school is fun. You learn how to share and care, and you get to have a great time being a kid with your friends who are also kids because the opposite sex doesn’t exist yet. Then middle school happens, and the kids who used to be your friends take up arms on the other side of the island before killing Piggy with a rock when he clearly had the conch and everything goes to shit because middle school is the worst.
I spent most of my time between the sixth and eighth grades being bullied by bigger kids, cooler kids, richer kids, and more popular kids. Which was almost all the kids.
Kids who had been my good friends the year before came back from summer break transformed by Izod shirts, Converse shoes, Swatch watches and hormones. The other boys in my school began competing with me in a game I had no idea we were even playing, but it involved things like ape logic and the reptilian brain.
And girls.
My Other Questionable Decisions
Girls screwed everything up. Or rather, their sudden appearance screwed everything up. I’m pretty sure they’d been around the entire time, but they were just other kids before middle school. But after that first bell rang on the first day of the sixth grade, they had become Girls. And life would never be the same.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up a minute. I’ll save my humiliations with the fairer sex for another time. For now, I’ll tell you all about my own personal bullies. For a very brief period of time during the Giant Satellite Dish In Your Backyard Craze of the mid ’80s, my parents had money for the first time in ever, because my dad happened to own a business that sold Giant Satellite Dishes For Your Backyard. Life was good.
We moved into a nice house in the good part of town – which I’d later find out was basically just a nice way to refer to the white part of town, but I hadn’t discovered racism yet – and I got to go to one of the good middle schools – which, of course, I’d soon find out was just a way of referring to the rich middle school. But I hadn’t discovered socio-economic discrimination yet either, so everything was fine. Until it wasn’t.
So many channels!
At this school, it didn’t matter so much if you weren’t the biggest or the strongest kid in the class, as long as you had the right parents with the right last name who lived in the right zip code with the right amount of dollars in their bank accounts. If your parents were rich – and, more importantly, had been rich for some time – you had it made. But if not…
I was scrawny kid. I liked video games and RPGs and tabletop games. I liked reading fantasy books and science fiction. I watched Star Trek a lot. I was (and still am) a huge nerd, and my parents didn’t really have all that much money. We weren’t rich, and definitely were never wealthy. But they took what they had and moved us on up to the East Side (which was actually the West End in my town, but I’m going for The Jeffersons association here, so work with me). They wanted Better Things for their children, so they spent what they had to get us to where we were, even if there wasn’t much left over once we got there.
I didn’t have the latest styles. I wasn’t trendy. I was never cool. And my folks weren’t rich. We were just pretending.
And I was really bad at it.
It didn’t take long for the other kids to sniff me out of the crowd, especially since our newfound status didn’t come with an instruction manual . My mother, for example, had no idea what the cool, rich kids would be wearing on the first, fateful day of middle school.
Which is how it came to pass that I showed up on the first day of school wearing a purple shirt with pink suspenders and a questionable haircut.
My mom was certain my outfit would be trendy, because I guess Sears had a lot of pink suspenders on sale, which had to mean they were popular and not at all because nobody wanted them. So she bought them and I wore them, and…
Well, you can probably guess what happened next.
My entire sixth grade year was just awful. Teased, tricked, hazed, humiliated – you name it, I got it. But it was nothing compared to seventh grade.
I don’t even remember what bizarre medical condition caused me to need crutches that year, because I never broke any bones. I don’t even remember injuring whichever leg it was that I can’t even remember. There was just something wrong with one of them, and the doctor told me that I wasn’t allowed to put any weight on it for some reason. So, I spent a good chunk of my seventh grade year trying to outrun my tormenters while hopping around on one foot while trying to skip-walk through slippery breezeways on the cheapest crutches we could afford.
I fell a lot. People laughed. It was unpleasant.
I was so freaking cool.
But then, something amazing happened. A new kid enrolled at the school who was neither rich nor cool – and he was even weirder than me. Like, seriously weird. Bizarro World weird.
I instinctively knew what I had to do. And it was horrible.
My plan was simple: I would try to transfer my bullies to him, by way of me becoming one of the very tormenters I hated. Because in middle school, it’s either eat or be eaten. And I was tired of being nibbled on.
The kid’s name was Bob, although it wasn’t really. I’m changing his name to protect his identity, because I’m not the jerk today that I was that year in middle school. In fact, I’m not going to name him Bob, either. Bob is a pretty boring ass name, and this kid deserves some pizazz. Let’s call him…Xendlarn. Why the hell not?
Xendlarn was a weird freaking kid. His head was so consistently greasy that we used to joke that he wasn’t allowed in the swimming pool because his hair would leave a ring. He had acne so severe that we couldn’t make up enough jokes about it fast enough. And he talked funny; kind of like a nasally congested robot. Or maybe a cyborg. Who knows?
He was just a weird kid. And, if I hadn’t been so obsessed with not being picked on, I probably would’ve been his friend. I’d probably be his friend today, if we still knew each other and he didn’t hate me. I eventually learned how valuable and wonderful being weird truly is, so all my friends are weirdos. Normals are not to be trusted.
But that’s now. This is then.
When I say he was weird, please understand that I mean he was super freaky. Take, for example, the incident with the Martian baby…
One day in gym class, while I was pretending to be his friend before me and some other jerks did something horrible to him we had planned that I don’t remember, he told me his Big Secret. It was no ordinary secret. It was…weird.
He said he was from Mars, and that his whole family was from Mars. He told me that there was a thriving civilization living underground on the red planet, and that he had personally caused NASA probes to go on the fritz whenever they’d get too close, just so the humans would never detect them.
Oh, and he was a few hundred years old, because that’s apparently how long bullshit Martians live.
He then went on to tell me that he had been grown in a test tube, and that all Martians were grown in test tubes because of course they were. His own children were growing right then, at that very moment, in test tubes back at his house.
I told him to prove it.
He said he would.
Showdown at the flagpole.
The next day, he showed up at school with a test tube. Inside it was a strange, murky concoction that was somehow both brown and green at the same time. Hell, it was so freaky looking, the kid might’ve been telling the truth. But the world would never know, because I murdered his unborn children.
We were out by the flagpoles during that weird not-really-recess-but-still-basically-recess period of time between the end of lunch and the beginning of the next period when he took it out and showed me. He held the test tube in front of him, like some kind of undulating trophy. Inside, the greenish/brownish goop swirled around like partially congealed Jello.
He smiled.
“Told you so,” he smirked – in a really gloating sort of way that just pissed me off.
But I was still curious. I was still a huge geek and an enormous sci-fi nerd, so part of me wondered if maybe this weird kid really was an alien from space. I could be friends with freaking E.T. here. It was something to consider…
…that I didn’t consider, because I looked up and saw all the other little bastards standing around us. They were watching; waiting for something to happen. I could either give in to my curiosity and maybe make a friend to endure the bullies with together – or, I could be an jerk.
I went with jerk.
I faked a brief glance of fascination, then leaned in close to examine the test tube. Then, I slowly reached out my hand and knocked it to the ground. Hard.
The glass test tube shattered on the concrete. The kids around me erupted into laughter. They pointed and made fun, but not at me. Everyone was laughing at Xendlarn. But they were laughing with me.
I’d done it! I’d successfully transferred my bullies to him, and I was in their club now. As long as tormenting this poor kid was fun for them, I would be okay. Just so long as I kept tormenting him, too.
For his part, Xendlarn was furious. Like, homicidal furious. Rage consumed him. I saw it in his eyes, and I didn’t even know what murderous intent looked like. But I recognized it, all the same.
He snarled. Glared. He reached down and grabbed the biggest intact bit of the test tube, like some kind of broken nerd beer bottle. The little bastard wanted to cut me.
He lunged. I jumped back.
He swiped. I swerved.
He threw the gelatinous remains of his unborn Martian fetus on my shirt. And I…well, that was unexpected.
He just started spritzing the shit out of me with the damn thing, like the old priest from The Exorcist with the little ball of holy water or whatever, shaking his test tube at me and covering me in Martian baby goo.
To this day, I don’t know what was actually in that test tube. But I do know that wherever it landed on my clothes, it turned them pink. My shirt: pink speckles. My jeans: pink speckles. The canvas of my sneakers: pink speckles.
DESTROY THE HUMAN! AVENGE THE TUBE!
It happened almost instantly, too. And to make matters worse, I was wearing that damn purple shirt again. I’d shed the suspenders at that point, but we didn’t have the money to just go buying new clothes like some kind of rich family with things like matching towels and seasonally-appropriate attire, so I was back in that Grimace monstrosity. And it was turning pink.
The other kids stopped laughing at Xendlarn – or maybe they kept laughing at him, but also started laughing at me. And now I was still being bullied by the same kids, only I didn’t even have a cool space friend to help share the torment. Because that mother frakker wanted to shank my ass.
That incident ended my brief career as a bully and is, in no small way, one of the reasons I’ve grown up to be such an advocate of the bullied and the tormented. I know what it’s like, and I don’t want to see the bullied become the bullies, just to survive.
Eighth grade was better. I met a twin brothers from Nicaragua who did for me the opposite of what I did to Xendlarn, and put themselves between me and the bullies. They stood up for me in a way that I never knew I could’ve stood up for him, and my last year of middle school was all the better for it.
I never did get to apologize to poor Xendlarn, though. He transferred out of the school at the end of the year, and I’ve never been able to find him. I’ve tried to several times, over the years. I want to apologize, to explain that I was just a scared, stupid kid and should’ve known better, but he was never on MySpace or Friendster, has yet to appear on on Facebook or Twitter, and Google has never returned any results. Sometimes, I wonder if he just went back to Mars.
I like to think that’s where he went, because any other scenario is just too horrible to imagine. I hope he made it. I hope he got through school and went on to become a successful adult despite the nightmare he suffered as a poor, weird kid in that terrible school. I hope my brief contribution to his torment didn’t push him over the edge. I hope I’m not that asshole.
But I know that I was.
I’m sorry, JH. If you’re out there and ever stumble upon this, I’m sorry.
I’m not okay.
It’s hard to admit that, and even harder to do it here, on a blog I only just recently decided to walk away from. People who do not like me (and they are legion) will treat this new post as a punchline to my last one, where I declared my intent to be done with this site. They’ll crack jokes and snicker, and do all the other horrible things Internet People do to make the lives of others a little less bearable.
Which is fine. I can take it. I’ve been dealing with that sort of person my entire life. For a very brief period in the Lord of the Flies middle school years, I was one of those people, and I’ll always regret it.
But now I’m past the point of caring about the opinions of people who just like watching others fail – for the moment, at least. Ask me again tomorrow, and I’ll probably be biting my fingernails and crying in the shower over how miserable they’ve made me feel. And an hour after that, I’ll have moved on to worrying about something else.
Because that’s how Depression works.
Although, I never actually realized that until literally just now, after Wil Wheaton told me that’s how it works.
I remember seeing people talking about this video he recorded recently for Project UROK where he discusses his own struggles with anxiety and depression. I never clicked it though, because I’ve only ever had about as much use for other people’s advice as I’ve had for roadway warning signs advising me that a road constructed below sea level in a flood plain may, in fact, flood.
Because advice is usually just awful. And obvious.
And depression advice is the absolute worst.
Giving happy advice to depressed people on how to not be depressed is kind of like praying to end hunger while you’re throwing away your leftovers. It doesn’t actually help anyone, and really just pisses us off.
But Wil didn’t offer advice. That’s not how he works. Instead, he just talks to you. And me. And anyone else who will listen, then lets us take it from there. He’s a great guy and one of the nicest, most genuine people on the Internet, along with other kind souls who have helped me more than they’ll ever know, like Jenny Lawson and J.K. Rowling. (And Wil’s own wife, Anne.) And all he did was talk about what he’d experienced, which sounded a lot like everything I’ve ever experienced for the majority of my life.
I worry about things. About all the things. All the time.
I’m constantly on edge, and can react completely irrationally in the face of even the smallest adversity. (e.g. walking away from a site I’ve worked on for seven years just because the past few posts haven’t done very well.)
These are things Wil talks about having had to live with, until he got help. His solution was counseling and medication, but he wasn’t advocating either. Because depressed people don’t need advice.
We need understanding.
We need to know that we’re not alone, that other people have been where we are. And then decide what to do about it. For ourselves.
My therapy has always been writing, and it probably always will be. I can’t just walk away from it, even when I feel like I really want to.
After announcing the end of this site, I was inundated with desperate pleas from 2 or 3 thousand people, begging me to keep going. I had one friend basically tell me to screw the world and keep writing for myself, which was probably good advice. But I didn’t listen to any of them, because I tend to disregard advice as a general life rule, sort of thing.
What changed my mind was when Wil talked about overreacting to stupid things when he was depressed, which is me for about 90% of my day. Every day.
It was certainly me when I decided to draw the shutters and bar the door on this site.
It has certainly been me the past few days when all I’ve wanted to do is sleep until I was so well rested that I couldn’t sleep anymore, which just made everything that much worse.
And it was certainly me up until about half an hour ago, just before I clicked on Wil’s video.
But it’s not me right now.
Sure, I’m still depressed. I’ve still been laid off, I’m still unemployed, I still have no decent job prospects, and I’m still plugging away at writing for a site that hasn’t yielded any real fruit over the past seven years – but I’m not stopping. I’m not stopping because I’m not going to overreact to a stupid thing. I’m not going to let a couple of lower-performing posts distort my sense of self-worth so badly that all my motivation slips through a wormhole in my ego like some kind of horrifying confidence singularity.
My child is wise.
I’ll be back with a new post sometime in the next 24 hours. I’m going to continue the little series I started with My Monster Ear, then quit after I posted this one nobody clicked on. (Or, if you’d rather cry than laugh, check this out.)
If you don’t like the posts, then please feel free to continue not liking them. However, if you do like what I do here, please share the posts with your friends. Writing for myself is one thing, but writing to not be read is like eating popcorn without butter. People reading what I write is the reason I do it. And having people actually like what I’ve written is better medicine than any actual medicine I can think of.
I’m not going to say something as dramatic as, “Wil Wheaton saved my life” tonight or anything, because my wife and stepson already did that years ago, and continue to do so on a daily basis. But he did put things into perspective.
And, for now…
I’m okay.
Seven years. I’ve been plugging away at this blog for seven years and, for the most part, it’s been fruitless. Sure, it’s brought some work my way over the years – briefly, even a full time gig – but the law of diminishing returns kicked in a long time ago. I guess I just kept hoping I could power through it and eventually land on something that sticks. But I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
Mostly, this site has been a collection of angry, snark-filled essays on any number of subjects from politics to religion, on down to just stupid stuff that annoyed me on Facebook. People like that sort of thing, but I can’t always be angry. Eventually, it becomes a schtick, and then I’m just going through the motions and writing stupid crap I don’t care about because it’s the only thing anyone ever clicks on.
To date, my most popular post has been about how much I hate ridiculous baby headbands. The absurdity of which pretty much sums up both what people respond to as well as my ineffectiveness as a writer, I think.
Recently, I tried a return to parent blogging, but nobody really cared. Then, I dipped my toes into the icy waters of fiction, and was met with an equally chilly response. Finally, I decided to completely change tack and give silly stories of my lifetime of poor decisions a try. Neither the first post nor the second one drew much attention. I even asked if anyone was enjoying the series or thought I should continue, and received a response of deafening silence. Even someone as oblivious to the intricacies of interpersonal relationships as I am can pick up on what that particular signal means.
So I think I’m done. Game over. I’m out of Continues and down to my last few quarters, and I’d rather not waste them here in this failing arcade.
Of course, this could all just be Depression talking, but it’s got a very loud voice and I can’t ignore it anymore. The harsh truth is that nothing has come of this blog in the past seven years. To continue working on it while clinging to a vague hope that it will suddenly amount to anything over the next seven is just…stupid.
Not that I’m wholly ungrateful or anything. Writing it has helped me through some tough times, so it hasn’t all been for nothing. Part of it even helped me meet my wife and stepson, both of whom rescued me from the depths of misogyny and madness into which I was falling – which really should have been enough. I should have gone out with the win and quit while I was ahead, as Brittany and Trey remain the only parts of my life worth protecting and investing in.
For example, time I spend fretting over the various nouns and verbs I stitch together here is time not spent fretting over where next month’s mortgage payment is coming from while I’m busy being laid off and not working. I’m certainly not providing for them with all the money I don’t make from writing.
It’s also emotionally exhausting. How can I hope to write myself out of Depression when every time I publish something no one cares about, I do more damage to my already cracked and fragile ego than simply not writing anything would’ve?
Every post I write is a bit of myself I’ve excised from some part of my own soul and shaped into words. Every time I press the Publish button, I hope that someone out there will read and like whatever piece of me I’ve cut out to show them. It’s a terrifying, painful process, and the real catch is that the only time the wounds heal is when people actually respond to whatever it is I’ve written. Most of the time, they don’t.
And I’m running out of soul.
I renewed my domain and hosting plan for the year a few months ago, which should keep the lights on until next April. So if there’s anything you desperately want to read, you have some time before the site goes offline.
Well, I guess that’s it, then. Thanks for listening to me crywhine. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s pity party as much as I haven’t.
Have a good one, Internet.*
*The miserable sentiments expressed in this post are subject to change if and when the pendulum of my mood swings back into the less defeatist areas of my subconscious. But for the time being, I’m taking my toys and going home. Like a great big whiny baby.
I was not always the brilliant, acerbic genius I am today. There was a time when I was, in fact, a complete moron. I refer to this period as “all the times before right now”. So, just a second ago when I wrote that I was brilliant, I was just being stupid again. I was a fool back then, three seconds ago. I hate that person.
Of course, there are varying depths to my stupidity, and the farther to the left you go on the Timeline of Me, the deeper the waters get. Sometimes, there are sharks.
My Other Questionable Decisions
There was this one time, for example, when I was but a wee little tyke happily riding in the backseat of the giant green monstrosity my parents called a car. Its scientific name was the Mercury Grand Marquis, which I believe was from the late Cretaceous period, if I’m not mistaken. Or maybe sometime around 1980. I’m bad with time.
Basically, it was a giant green land whale with wheels, because compact cars hadn’t been invented yet. Or maybe they had, but they just hadn’t yet migrated south for the winter, so no one in Texas had ever heard of them. At any rate, I was bouncing around the backseat one summer’s day while my mom was running errands.
At least, I think it was summer. But my older sister wasn’t in the car at the time, which means she could’ve been at school or maybe off at some secret Big Sister terrorist training camp somewhere, learning new and terrible ways to extract information from me when she got home. Maybe both. I dunno.
Behold its glory!
Anyway, I had the whole backseat to myself because car seats also hadn’t been invented yet. Or, if they were around, nobody much cared about them. I was around five years old, so I definitely should’ve been strapped into some kind of child safety device, but this was 1980-something, back when parents and car manufacturers still believed in the concept of natural selection.
For instance, the backseat windows rolled ALL the way down in those days, which is something that I guess changed after overexcited kids were getting too worked up over maybe, like, a McDonald’s sign or something and just started leaping from backseat windows after their parents refused to buy them Happy Meals. McDonald’s used to fry in lard and beef fat back then and the allure of their french fries was pretty strong, so you can just imagine the carnage. I don’t have any concrete statistics on how many children leapt to their deaths from the backseats of cars with fully rolled-down windows in the early ’80s, but it was probably somewhere around 10 bazillion kids, even though the speed limit was only 55 miles per hour (because the higher speed limits of today wouldn’t be invented until Sammy Hagar went on to write his haunting protest ballad on the subject years later).
Cars also had cigarette lighters back in the olden times. If you don’t know what a car cigarette lighter is, it’s the thing that used to go in what you probably call the phone charging hole. It was a little magic wand that you would push down, then wait for it to pop back up all hot and ready to start fires, like some kind of Promethean wonder.
The tip was a little coil of nichrome wire through which high electrical current would run until the nichrome coil became orange-hot and roughly the temperature of the inner core of the sun. Also, I have no idea what nichrome is, but it’s what Wikipedia says the things were made of. It’s also kind of fun to say. Nichrome!
Anyway, from what I remember, they were just made up of a bunch of concentric circles with a little dot in the middle that looked a lot like a fingerprint.
Like, seriously a lot like a fingerprint.
In fact, to the confused mind of a somewhere-around-five-year-old child, they looked exactly like a fingerprint.
You might be able to see where this is going…
We were waiting in the drive-thru line of the bank, which consisted of exactly one line at the time because the idea of multiple lines manned by several tellers had probably been invented, but this was a small Texas town and people only ever went to the bank when they needed to, I dunno, convert their cow pies to US currency or something. So there was a wait.
And I was (still am) easily bored.
That’s when the light bulb went off – and I don’t mean that in the way that you might think. I meant, it actually switched OFF. My brain shut down and, while it was rebooting, some kind of catastrophic redundancy subroutine ran in its place which convinced me that cigarette lighters were probably how fingerprints were made.
Let’s just stop and think about that for a second.
Here I am, sitting in the backseat of the car, staring at my own fingers – which clearly already contained fingerprints that I somehow could not see – and a cigarette lighter. I don’t know why I didn’t think I already had fingerprints, but it might be because the Satanic Panic hadn’t hit yet and parents hadn’t started having their kids basically booked and processed down at the county jail just in case some goat-horned devil worshiper ever kidnapped them one day and somebody needed to identify the body. So I had no experience with fingerprinting, and was left to wander in darkness on the subject. But whatever the reason, I was convinced that I did not, in fact, have fingerprints.
So I looked back at the cigarette lighter.
A plan was forming.
I was not a smart child.
I stuck the branding iron back into the socket and pushed it down. I remember very clearly knowing on some level that what I was about to do was very wrong and would likely get me in trouble if my mom were to find out what I was up to, so I gently rested one finger on the lighter’s handle. The little bastards would eventually pop up when they were hot enough to melt tungsten steel, and there would be a very audible click when it happened that I had to suppress.
So I did.
A few seconds later, I felt it try to pop up. Naturally, I held it down a little longer. You know, just to be sure.
I slowly lifted my finger from the handle and allowed it to gently spring up with nary a whisper. Then, I pulled it out of the socket and turned it around.
Its hypnotic orange glow held me entranced for a moment. Then, I lifted my left hand and stuck out my thumb…
That’s when the world went dark.
I don’t know why I didn’t expect it to hurt, but it probably had something to do with how I was an idiot. Pressing superheated death metal directly against tender, somewhere-around-five-year-old flesh was always going to lead to tears, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even consider it, because I wanted my dang fingers to have fingerprints JUST THAT BAD. Like all the cool kids or whatever.
It should be noted here that at the very instant I touched the lighter to my skin, I knew I had made a huge mistake – and one that I’d undoubtedly be punished for. Seeing as how I was already being punished enough by the fundamental laws of the universe and various paingods, I didn’t think getting grounded would be very fair, so I remained silent.
I, as a small child, probably with at least a second degree burn on his thumb somehow remained quiet through the ordeal. I don’t remember how I didn’t cry out, but I do remember that there was a very distinctive smell coming from the end of the lighter and my thumb that distracted me. I couldn’t let my mom catch a whiff of it, lest she instantly recognize the smell of burning kinderflesh. Which is when those fully roll-downable windows came in handy…
LEARN FROM ME!
My thumb eventually recovered, and I still have a thumbprint, so those scenes in movies where spies and criminals burn them off are probably a bunch of crap, which I guess you could take as your learning experience from this story.
If you look really closely, you can see a bit of a splotchiness to my left thumb to this day, where bits of it are a little, I dunno, shinier than others. I assume this is scar tissue from the burn or something, because my right thumb remains splotch-free. Then again, maybe I just have thumb cancer.
Is that a thing?
Hi! My name is Kristian, and that’s me over there on the left; or rather, it’s how my nine-year-old stepson sees me. Ok, well technically, it’s my version of a picture he drew of me, because he draws better than I do and I have no idea what I look like as a drawing. Apparently, this is how.
I look pretty typical, if a bit long in the torso. But that’s probably just a dad thing. And also cookies, because I eat a lot of cookies. Cookies are awesome.
Anyway, look closely at my smiling mug. Pay attention to my ears. Specifically, the one that looks like it has a big chunk missing. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just because of my unsteady hand and unfamiliarity with drawing tablets and Photoshop.
It’s there because I have a chunk missing from my ear. My once beautiful, perfect ear.
However, no one knows exactly how it happened that my ear went from the very epitome of earish perfection to the deformed monstrosity it is now. No one even knows when it happened. I sure as hell don’t.
I was so cute. WITH PERFECT EARS.
See, here’s me as a kid. Don’t I look happy?
That’s because I was a pretty happy kid. I had a great childhood, filled with wonder and adventure and all sorts of the kind of fun you could only have if you were a kid in the ’80s. I remember when microwaves became popular, and how nuking my first bag of popcorn changed my life forever. I’m not sure why they even still sell Jiffy Pop, because popping it involves some pretty heavy lifting on the shake-shake-shake front, and the end result is a half-burned, half-soggy mess of ruined popcorn dreams. At least the big aluminum foil bubble still looks cool, I guess. So there’s that.
My Other Questionable Decisions
But I’m not talking about the ’80s today. It was a weird decade, filled with equal parts scientific wonder with things like the space shuttle and computers, and confusing bewilderment, like the inexplicable success of Cats. I’ll never understand why that play was ever so popular, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with grown-ups doing all the drugs Nancy Reagan demanded I just say NO to. So I did.
Thanks, Nance!
Somewhen in the early ’90s, I was getting ready for school one morning. I was probably a sophomore in high school or sometime around that. A junior, maybe. Honestly, my high school years kind of run together like soggy pudding invading the green peas on a poorly-divided cafeteria food lunch tray. But it was either ’91 or ’92, at any rate.
While innocently styling my hair into some kind of hideous ’90s grunge helmet, I noticed something in the mirror.
MY EAR.
Horror.
It had a giant chunk missing out of it, and I had no idea how it had happened. I’d never noticed it before, and I didn’t remember any recent injuries involving the delicate cartilage of my perfectly formed lobes, so I went into a bit of a panic. Maybe this was part of those puberty changes I’d heard so much about, and I could only hope to look forward to further deformations as time went on. Maybe it was ear cancer. I didn’t freaking know; I was just a stupid kid.
Of course, I didn’t immediately ask my parents about it due to the fact that EVERYTHING about your body is embarrassing when you’re a sophomore or junior in high school. For all I knew, this Quasimodo ear development was just an extension of the hairy palms syndrome I’d heard about, and I didn’t want to risk having that discussion. Instead, I quietly went into the living room and grabbed my current school picture off the side table by the couch.
In the way of moms everywhere, my mother had been using the same frame for years, while just putting the current picture on top of the previous year’s, all the way back to my KinderPhoto baby pictures. (All of which eventually turned a weird reddish-orange color, of a shade I can only describe as Oompa Loompa Trumpian. Not quite John Boehner orange, but close.)
I looked at the oldest picture, and my ear was whole.
I looked at my Kindergarten picture. Intact ear.
First grade, second grade, third grade…my ear was wholly present and accounted for in all of them. Until middle school.
I’m not sure which grade it was, but somewhere between 6th and 8th, my ear got the chop. And I still have NO IDEA how it happened.
I’m the kid on the right. Notice how much of my ear ISN’T missing. Yet.
Somebody knows, though. I suspect my dad has an idea, but has thus far refused to reveal his secrets. However, in my mind, I’ve constructed an elaborate scenario in which he either allowed me to do something stupid, or actually convinced me to, and the end result was my mangled hearing hole. Maybe there was something to do with juggling knives, or perhaps fireworks were involved in some capacity. I have no idea, but I do know that of all the possibilities, my dad knowing about my injury and concealing it from my mother to avoid maternal persecution is probably the best candidate.
But I may never know for sure.
All I know is that I didn’t make it through adolescence unscathed by the scars of war. I’ve just had my memory wiped, or something. Maybe I slipped through a tear in the fabric of spacetime and fought alongside the Resistance in a post-apocalyptic alien world and led my people to freedom before they wiped my memory for the safety of the galaxy or something. No one can prove that I didn’t.
Don’t look at me. I’m hideous!
I’m hoping that one day, my father will sit down with me and tell me the story of the time he dared me to ride my bike off the roof and bounce it off the trampoline before landing into a kiddie pool he’d lit on fire or something, but until then, I’ll just keep soldiering on with my monster ear.
Surprisingly, my wife doesn’t seem to mind it, although she recently got new glasses, so that could change at any moment. Or maybe she secretly hates it and just doesn’t have the heart to tell me, but one day when she’s had enough of my crap and she’s spewing forth an endless litany of my failures as a man, the ear monster will come up. And I’ll cry.
For now, all I can do is keep a watchful eye on my son’s lobes and make sure he never has to suffer the same indignities as I. Well, at least until he wants to start shooting flaming arrows down the hallway for science, or maybe learn how to make muriatic acid “bombs” or whatever. Because some things are worth the risk.
LEARN FROM ME!
Depression lies.
That’s the takeaway line from supportive types on the Internet, and they’re usually right. Depression makes everything seem worse than it is, like when the house lights come up and you see who you’ve been dirty dancing with all night looks less like Patrick Swayze or Jennifer Grey and more like dear god, what is that thing. Or maybe you check the mirror, and that’s you. Either way, it’s kind of like that.
Except when it isn’t.
Depression is at its worst when it tells the truth. Sure, it does it with as much cruelty and malice as non-sentient emotional states can muster, but it does sometimes tell the truth. And that’s when it really stings.
I’m forty years old. I’ve worked every day of my life since I was 15, not counting days off and sick days or, as companies like to call them in the Orwellian corporatespeak of 2015: “wellness” days. I’ve built computers, sacked groceries, sold software, did work study in college, became a computer tech and a webmaster, jumped into journalism as a web editor, then went back to IT as a system administrator. And I’ve been laid off twice.
The first time, I was hired back six months later after the powers that be realized what a mistake they’d made by hiring robots to curate the news. The second time was a couple of months ago, when Hillbilly Voldemort used the layoffs resulting from my company merging with an outsourcing (or offshoring as they like to call it now) firm in India as a means to purge the roster of any threats to his power. I call him Hillbilly Voldemort because he’s evil and from the deep and scary backwoods of Arkansas, although Voldemort actually had some talent and I feel like it might be giving him a little too much credit. But Hillbilly Hufflepuff doesn’t have the same ring to it, and besides, the Hufflepuff kids were nice. This guy wasn’t.
But my depression isn’t about that; not really. I was already miserable at the job, as Voldemort continued failing upward along the managerial ladder. Once he was moved into my group and began his sycophantic crawl to the top, a great job quickly went down the tubes. Everyone knows the type, so I don’t really need to go into details. In short, he’s a bully, who yells and curses and berates everyone around him into submission, never lifts a finger to help with any actual work, and holds so many meetings to justify his job that you eventually develop an acute phobia toward conference calls. He and I had…Conflicts.
So no, I don’t miss the job. On call 24/7 and endless unpaid overtime are no fun for anyone. (I added it up once, and had accumulated over two months worth of unpaid hours in a six month period. I stopped counting after that.) I don’t even miss the paycheck, as we’re getting by just fine for the time being. I should be happy, really.
But I’m not.
I’m forty years old and work(ed) in a youth-oriented field that is increasingly being outsourced to cheaper countries. Companies don’t want to hire a 40-year-old and pay him a decent salary when they could either hire a kid straight out of college for virtual pennies, or ship the job over to India for actual pennies. Or rupees. Whichever.
Not that I want to go back into IT, mind you. It’s boring. The quality that makes me such a good hire – that I can diagnose and solve problems faster than anyone else I’ve ever worked with – also means I’ve pretty much mastered the trade. There are no new surprises, no interesting puzzles to work out, and nothing rewarding at the end of the day. A career in IT is a lot like housework: you’ve only ever done your job right if no one else realizes it. If nothing breaks, if everything runs smoothly, then that’s because you’re doing it right. And when something does break, well…it’s all your fault, even if you’ve told Susan over in Accounting to stop clicking on that thing a thousand times if you’ve told her once. But nobody cares.
I’m forty years old and I have no idea what I want to do with my life. The thought of jumping back into the corporate world of jellyheaded managers and overworked employees fills me with something like depression, if depression were somehow even more crippling and horrible. Dread, I think maybe fits. DREAD.
I’ve come to the conclusion that far too many people have jobs that don’t actually need to exist, where their contributions to the organization are minimal at best, whose sole purpose in life is to hold team meetings and generate reports all day to look like they’re doing something. These people make the lives of everyone actually trying to get some work done miserable, and they’re everywhere.
Instead of going back to work, I’d really just like to become Independently Wealthy, as I’ve heard good things. However, the closest I’ve ever come to putting my money to work for me was that time I fixed a wobbly chair by folding a $1 bill and sticking it under the too-short leg. It did not produce any additional revenue.
People tell me I should write full time, which is both cute and obnoxious. If I could make a living by writing, I would. So would most of the other working writers I know. But the sad truth is, work comes sporadically when it comes at all. And when it does, it pays only slightly better than a kid selling Grit. Very few people even want to read anymore and no one wants to have to pay for the privilege. And what would I write, anyway? I’ve no talent for fiction (see?), and no one is exactly beating down my door to give me money for blog posts. There’s no market for me, for what I write.
Depression tells the truth.
And that’s where I’m at. I’m forty years old, with no ambition and no drive, having had every last ounce of motivation and enthusiasm crushed out of me by the corporate grind mill over the past 25 years. I know what I want to do for a living, but there’s no making a living at it. I know what I don’t want to do, but it’s the only thing I have experience in – and nobody’s hiring. Especially not in my little luddite corner of southeast Texas.
I’m no good at anything else. I learn fast enough, and have enough self-confidence to honestly say that I’d probably be good at most any job I tried my hand at, but I only have experience in the career path I chose years ago, which leads inexorably to a dead end. How do you jump into a new career at 40? How do you take an entry-level job for entry-level pay when you have a family to support? You don’t, that’s how.
So I’m stuck. Completely. Even if I could easily change careers, I have no idea what I’d pick. If I could snap my fingers and automatically have years of experience in a field and get hired by a great company, I have no clue what that would be. I feel like my life has become that bit in Say Anything where John Cusack is explaining his career plans to whatsherface’s father. I don’t want to buy anything or sell anything or process anything. Or deal with the computers that do the buying and the selling and the processing these days. I don’t want to deal with office politics. I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want.
The problem isn’t knowing what I don’t want to do; it’s finding out what I do want to do, then finding a job that lets me do it. Which is completely unrealistic in today’s world, so I’d settle for something that I can simply tolerate. But I have no idea what that is.
If depression would just lie to me, it’d make me feel better. Instead, it just tells me the truth of what I already know. I know what a great employee I am. I know how my Puritan Work Ethic makes me get more done in less time than other people. I know that I’ve always been the top performer at every job I’ve ever had. I know that going the extra mile and working harder than everyone else isn’t rewarded by the meritocracy that doesn’t exist. I know such effort is always only ever exploited. I know there’s no getting ahead by being honest. I know success isn’t dependent on what you know or even who you know, but by how well you play The Game I’m no good at. I know what I am good at, and I know that I hate it.
But that’s life. At least I got an actual crisis during my mid-life crisis, so my big thrill isn’t buying a penis mobile; it’s just being able to pay the mortgage. For a house I don’t like, in a city I hate, in a state I loathe, in a region of the country I despise. So there’s that.
In an ideal world – the world of the movies or any given sitcom – I’d pack up the family and we’d move across the country for a fresh start. We’d find someplace we love (I’m looking at you, New England), I’d get a job working with great people, and my kid would go to wonderful schools in a terrific community filled with nice people. But that place doesn’t exist.
And I can’t move.
I have a nine-year-old stepson (my reason for living) who needs to be able to see his dad, and moving across the country would make that hard. And it’d involve a fight nobody wants to have, and that I’m not willing to put my kid through regardless. So I’m stuck in a town with no jobs in my career, where people think the Confederate flag really does represent their “culture and heritage” and reading is how the devil gets inside you. It’s always hot, there are always mosquitos, and nothing ever changes. Even when people really, really want it to. (More on that here.)
I wish I could make this blog into a living. Or at least figure out some way to transition it into something that pays a livable wage. But I’m no Jenny Lawson or Allie Brosh or Matthew Inman. I’m just me, and I’ve no talent for marketing myself or even writing well enough to have any sort of broad appeal. It’s just another dead end.
Like my career.
And everything else I’ve ever tried.
But I’ll keep going, because the only thing I’ve ever written that’s worth a damn was this one sentence in a throwaway essay I published on the first anniversary of a divorce that would’ve consumed me if I hadn’t met Brittany and Trey (my wife and stepson, for those new to the party). It’s short and to the point, and it’s worth remembering. Because while depression is a powerful thing, hope and perseverance are stronger. I think.
The only difference between a sad ending and a happy one is where you choose to stop the story.
Keep going, kids.
I did not want to write this. I really, truly did not want to write this, so much so that I actively tried not to write this. I went to sleep last night, not writing it. I woke up this morning and kept not writing it. But some stories just want to be written, even if the writing of them is painful and unwanted. They can be insistent.
So I’ve written it. It’s short, and it hurt, but it’s done.
Promise me one thing, though. If you read this, read it with Neil Gaiman’s voice in your head. Because it was very much in mine as I wrote it, even if my words don’t come anywhere close to his.
You might need to read it twice, because I’ve no talent for narrative. And sometimes, that’s just how grief works.
Three delicate knocks strike a door in the early morning hours; the latch clicks after the second one and the door is open by the third. A man slips in, walking with soft steps to the same chair he left last night. He reaches over the bed’s railing as he sits.
Two hands meet. One is old and rough, wrinkled from age and leathered by work. The other isn’t.
Fingers intertwine. The covers stir. Eyelids peel open. Tired lips smile.
“You’re back.”
The man leans forward in his chair, tightening the grip of his hand’s embrace. He sighs and says, “We don’t have long.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“It’s ok.” Another hand emerges from the bed, cupping itself over the others. “I don’t want to go, either.”
Forced grins. Awkward laughter.
“How’s Mary, Chief?” asks the man in the bed, whose name is Peter, but who likes to be called Hoss.
“Bossy, Hoss.” replies the man in the chair, whose name is also Peter, but who likes to be called Chief. “As usual.”
Hoss smiles. “That’s why you’re marrying her.”
“She called me at the hotel this morning, you know,” says Chief. “Wanting to know if I’d ironed my underwear before my flight.”
“Iron your underwear?”
“I know. Who does that?”
“What’d you tell her?”
Chief shakes his head. “I told her I did. But she didn’t believe me.”
“Had you really?”
“Of course not, but we’d have gotten into a fight about it if I had.”
Hoss just stares, letting his eyes ask for an explanation, rather than his words.
Chief sighs, and leans back in his chair. “Remember that time Mom asked me to clean out the garage, and we got into a huge fight about it because I already had, but it didn’t look like it because we had so much stuff in there?”
Between coughs, a weak laugh. “Yeah,” says Hoss. “You just started throwing boxes onto the driveway and she was running around in her nightgown, screaming and trying to catch stuff rolling out into the street.” He pauses and shakes his head. “And I was just trying to calm both of you down.”
Chief laughs. “See? Now if I’d just lied in the first place, I wouldn’t have gotten so mad when she thought I didn’t do what I hadn’t done.”
“You always were stubborn.”
“Yeah, but so is Mary. It balances out.”
Hoss starts coughing again. A machine goes ping.
“What was that?” asks Chief. “Should I call the nurse?”
Hoss shakes his head. “No. It just does that sometimes. I think it’s letting me know I’m not dead yet.”
More awkward laughter.
“When’s your flight?” asks Hoss.
“Couple of hours.”
“You need to get on the road soon, then. Traffic gets bad in the morning.”
“I can come back next week. I just have to close on the house.”
“It’s ok, Chief. We had our time. You’ve got a life to get back to.”
“Yes, but –”
“And I don’t.”
“But –”
Hoss lets go of Chief’s hand. “But nothing. I know you love me, and you’re here now. And that’s enough.”
Chief pulls him back, gripping his hand even tighter than before. “I can close on the house any time. They can wait.”
“No,” says Hoss. “They can’t. How long have you been trying to sell that place? Now somebody finally wants to buy it, you’re gonna go sell it to them. You deserve it, Chief. You and Mary. I like her.”
“Even if she makes me iron my underwear?”
“Because,” Hoss smiles, “she makes you iron your underwear.”
“Mom never made me iron my underwear, you know.”
Hoss smiles again. “I’ll tell her you said thanks for that.” He squeezes Chief’s hand one more time. “When I see her. Now, get going.”
An old and wrinkled finger pushes a call button. Nurses file into the room, doctors trailing behind. Forms are signed. Permissions given. Tears shed.
And then, it’s time.
Chief lowers the railing and lies down, cramming into a space that isn’t there. He wraps his arms around Hoss, pulling him close to his chest.
“Remember how we used to snuggle?” he asks.
Hoss smiles through his own tears. “Just like this,” he replies.
“Just like this,” says Chief.
They hold each other for more time than it seems, which doesn’t seem like enough. Then, Chief closes his eyes and nods toward a doctor. The doctor nods back.
A syringe emerges from his pocket.
And then, it’s done.
Hoss, still clinging to Chief’s chest, begins to fall asleep. “I love you, Papa,” he says. “I love you so much.”
Chief squeezes as hard as his old muscles allow. “I love you more, son.”
“No,” sighs Hoss, his voice thin. “I love you the most.”
“I love you more than that,” says Chief.
“No. I love…” his voice trails off, and his body grows still. His hug loosens. And he’s gone.
A machine goes ping. A nurse switches it off.
The old man lies there for what some might say is too long, but nobody says it. The nurses and doctors leave the room. They can come back later.
Chief, whose real name is Peter, but who misses being called Papa, pulls his son close to him one more time. One last time.
“Remember,” he says, “how we used to snuggle?”
And he cries.
*************
I don’t want to write about Charleston. There are plenty of other people out there who are – and I’ve said plenty myself on social media – but adding to the growing cacophony of blognoise in the face of such evil just isn’t my thing. Whenever tragedy strikes, I feel like a whole lot of people jump on it for the sake of getting their slice of the nation’s attention, and it all just feels too much like capitalizing on suffering for the sake of pageviews. Not gonna do it.
Not directly, anyway. I’m going to write about what I woke up to yesterday morning, but I don’t give a shit about Dylan Storm Roof other than to point out that his name sounds like a D-list villain in the back pages of some long forgotten C-list superhero comic. And this. I’ll say this about him, which is something I’ve already said on Facebook that I think bears repeating.
Dylann Roof didn’t go crazy and decide to start murdering black people in a vacuum.
“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”
He isn’t an aberration, kids. He’s the end result of a pervasive worldview that a whole lot of you subscribe to.
Dylann Roof isn’t crazy. He’s the “southern pride / strong conservative beliefs” fantasy realized.
He’s a by-product of the hate spewed by pundits and social media. He’s the end result of the proliferation of the divisive rhetoric preached by angry white men. He’s what happens when fervent belief comes together with virtually unrestricted access to the unlimited supply of guns we keep wanting to make it easier for people to buy and openly carry in this country.
He didn’t suddenly snap.
He was built.
No, I’m not saying that any of you Rush Limbaugh fans out there would ever pick up one (of the undoubtedly many guns you own) and start killing people. But the things some of you believe in, the worldview you espouse, the policies you believe in and the casual racism you don’t even see yourself engaged in LEADS TO THIS.
To people like this. People who will take to heart and act with conviction upon the same ideals you subscribe to.
He’s just an extremist. And evil. In the way of all extremists.
So does attacking a black church and murdering nine people make Dylann Roof mentally ill?
I don’t know. But while I tend to agree that extremism is a mental illness, you don’t just get to trot “crazy” out whenever a white dude kills a bunch of people and then ignore it for everyone else. Like suicide bombers or any terrorist anywhere. Or any revolutionary, for that matter.
If you believe in something strongly enough, you act on it. It’s extremism, plain and simple.
The question is, does extremism attract crazy people, or does it create them?
And that’s all I have to say about that. Oh, and the guy totally looks like Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber, but that seems like a cheap joke to make at someone else’s expense. Fortunately, I don’t really care about laughing at this loser. So here you go:
Sorry, but sometimes you just need a joke after a nightmare. Might as well be at this asshole’s expense.
Now with all that out of the way, I’m not going to write another word about Charleston after this paragraph. If you want to know my thoughts about mass shootings, you can read them here. If you want to know how I feel about guns, you can go check that out here. I’m not going to twist a nightmare into a political positive for My Side. I’ll leave that to the pundits and politicians, who will all say things like, “After this tragedy…” before distorting it to prove whatever point they’re trying to prove. Sorry, kids, but what happened in Charleston wasn’t a tragedy. It was just mass murder. The tragedy is that WE LET IT KEEP HAPPENING.
So that was my day yesterday. It was the nation’s day. And it sucked.
But then something amazing happened.
At around 10:30 last night, I had a sudden craving for waffles and grease as usually happens to me on days ending in -y, and it was Trey’s last night home before heading to his dad’s for the next two weeks of summer, so I let him stay up late and the two of us hopped in the car and drove to Waffle House.
We walked in and sat down in our usual booth, next to the bar where lonely people sip coffee. And there was a lonely person there, sipping coffee. He smiled and raised his cup to us as we sat down. I smiled back and nodded as I sat down. Trey smiled, then gave the man a little wave and said, “How are you?”
Conversation ensued.
The man’s name was Pete. He was a weathered soul, with a thick face and a loud voice. He rode a duct-taped old bicycle and was, as he described, “basically homeless” and living “in a cubby” somewhere nearby. He smiled a lot and wore a cowboy hat.
He and Trey talked back and forth between bar and booth, the old man getting louder and smiling more as Trey got louder and kept smiling back. I don’t remember everything they talked about, but the events of the day were lightly touched upon in a vague way. I hadn’t told Trey about them, and neither did Pete. But they did talk about what makes people different, and why people who get mad about our differences are stupid.
Eventually, the conversation slowed and we turned our attention to our waffles and our grease. When Pete stood to leave, he came by our table and reached out his hand to shake Trey’s. I can’t remember what he said to the boy, but I’ll always remember what Trey said back to him, because it’s a value I’ve worked really hard to instill in him, and I was proud.
He said, “People like all different things, and it’s nobody’s business what I like or you like. And it’s not our business to bother about what they like, if nobody’s hurting anybody.”
At that, Pete smiled and exclaimed to the universe at large that Trey had a grown head on a kid’s body. Then, he shook my hand and told me I was doing a good job. And then he paid for our meal.
Old cowboy Pete. Sipping coffee alone at the Waffle House, virtually homeless and riding a duct-taped bicycle paid for our meal.
I might’ve woken up to the Charleston shooting this morning, but I’m going to sleep tonight after a black man showed kindness to white strangers. Something to think about, America.
We all walked out together, where we shook hands again and smiled, and it was all one of those Perfect Moments you read about that happen sometimes, but that never happen to you.
This one happened. And I can’t think of a better end to a horrible day than that.
God, I hate Supermoms.
You know the type. They always have the perfect plan for the perfect day with their perfect children that goes perfectly as planned, as documented by perfect Instagram pics and Facebook posts. They always have An Answer for everything, and a Tsk-Tsk Comment for anything. And they’re all full of crap.
Let’s take what just happened to me over on Facebook, for example. Yesterday, Trey – who is nine years old – suddenly decided that he needed Play-Doh in his life RIGHT NOW, so we went to the store and he picked out a playset. The one he decided on was something to do with a Sweet Shoppe and cakes or whatever, because I didn’t really care as long as he was buying something that made him happy. I mean, it’s Play-Doh. It’s not like I was taking him down to the gun show of the week to pick out his umpteenth pew pew phallus or anything. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, nothing. Because it’s freaking Play-Doh. But earlier today, I noticed that one of the tools in the set kinda/sorta totally looked like a penis, then posted a pic of it over on Facebook, followed by a quick Vine to the tune of “I Just Had Sex” because I thought it was funny. Of course, this particular tool made the Internet rounds well over a year ago, which I immediately mentioned in the first comment on the picture, but that didn’t stop a Supermom from swooping in to tongue-cluck my post.
I was told that this was “all over Facebook a few months ago” which should’ve been warning enough for me to stay away from the playset. I tried to make a joke that nobody remembers random Internet things from over a year ago, because really, nobody does – as evidenced by the endlessly recycled Obama Myth Of The Day memes constantly posted and re-posted by my crackpot Tea Party friends and every old person on the Internet. But anyway, I was sternly informed that, when it comes to toys her child wants, she remembers. (Never mind that my child didn’t want this particular Play-Doh set a year ago. He suddenly wanted it last night for mysterious reasons known only to himself, and I’ve got enough to keep track of just remembering where I put my damn car keys five minutes ago than to worry about memorizing every last inane detail about every toy ever made on the planet.)
So sue me if I can’t recall which toys released in the past decade may or may not have included a penial shaft extruder in their big boxes ‘o fun. I guess Supermoms are just better at that sort of thing than I am.
Which I guess maybe is easy when you’re a helicopter parent with a toddler, but once your kid is capable of earning and saving his own money and making his own decisions on what to buy with it – and when what he wants to buy is mother humpin’ PLAY-DOH – then, well… You tend to step back and let him make his own lifestyle choices.
This particular Supermom is not ordinarily a supermom, mind you. Most of the time, she just likes to antagonize me (which is probably all that was happening here). Still, it was a good example of how actual Supermoms behave all the damn time, so I’m going with it. Sorry, Kristy!
With actual Supermoms, it’s not just the occasional dip into the passive aggressive Facebook pool, though. Supermoms – as a general rule – are just out to make every other parent look like a jerk at any given opportunity. It’s their whole purpose of existence, really. Because I’ve seen the kids raised by Supermoms. I’ve interacted with them. I’ve seen them play with other children. And they are, almost without exception, horrible little shits.
Brats. The whole lot of them – and that’s just the moms. Their kids are basically the same, but with less Facebook and more SCREAMING.
Look, I get it. We all love our kids and we all want everyone else to know how much we love our kids because we tend to love them so damn much, it hurts. I really do understand that. But you can love your kid and profess your love for your kid without being an asshole to other parents about it.
You don’t need to tear down other moms and dads either directly or through passive-aggressive “observations” you make behind clicking teeth and manicured talon nails. Trying to prove how far above other parents you are doesn’t actually make you a better parent. It just makes you obnoxious.
And controlling.
And kind of an asshole.
I love my child. I even call him my son when he’s “just” my stepson, because I don’t make distinctions over accidents of blood. He’s a child with four parents, who all love him. You can take your “step” labels and shove them right up your taxonomic piehole, for all I care. I love him as if he’s my own son because, to me, he is my own son. And I’m just as proud of him as you are of your kids, and as much as supermoms say they are of theirs.
I even talk about parenting a lot. For example, here’s something I wrote on how to be a stepparent. I post tons of pictures of my kid. I brag on my kid. I make blog posts about my kid. I buy him things. I make things with him. I plan and execute elaborate birthday parties for him with celebrity guest appearances. I play with him, I listen to him, I grow with him. I do all these things, and I never feel like I’m doing enough.
And that’s the real difference between Supermoms and the Rest Of Us. They have it all figured out. They know what’s best. They know what they’re doing with their organic, gluten-free, hand sanitizing, free range, essential oiling, locally sourced, vaccination-averting parenting style. They have that shit locked down. Best Parents Ever. Pro at Parenting. GOLD STAR.
Which, I think, is the exact opposite of what makes a good parent. Or at least a normal one.
The rest of us never think we’re doing enough for our kids, or that what we are doing is the thing we should be doing. We fret over every decision, and wrestle with every major choice because we don’t actually know what the hell we’re doing. None of us do. Our parents didn’t, either. They made it up as they went along, and just pretended to have all the answers to the questions we’d ask them when we were kids. Now it’s our turn, and nothing’s changed.
Sure, we have Facebook and Mommy Blogs and hundreds of thousands of people telling us The One Right Way to raise a child today, whereas our parents just had Dr. Spock and a wooden spoon – but it’s all still bullshit.
Kids don’t come with instruction manuals, because kids aren’t robots. They’re not all the same.
I know my kid is well-behaved, caring, sensitive, and very empathetic. He’s kind and outgoing, gives to others and cares about people. He doesn’t act up in school, all his teachers love him, and he gets good grades. HE IS A GOOD KID.
But is that because of me? I don’t think so. I recognize that my wife and her ex-husband just won the genetic lottery when he was born. I’m sure some of my influence has influenced him, but mostly I just think he’s a naturally good kid. I’ve known him since he was two years old, and he’s always been a low-maintenance child. I AM LUCKY, AND I KNOW THIS.
I also know that none of my experience with my own child qualifies me to cluck my tongue at other parents and tell them The One Right Way to raise their children, based on what I’ve done with The Greatest Kid Ever To Walk The Planet. (That’s a true fact. No need to look it up.) I honestly don’t know what I’ve done. I’ve just loved him the best I know how, and taught him the best I can. He’s had to do the heavy lifting though, because in the end, every kid is his or her own person. And every child is different, which means every kid will react differently to the same things. Which means…
What worked for me will not work for you.
What worked for you will not work for me.
Pass this on to any Supermoms you know. It’s a short, open letter to the entire Übermutter Community. I think it might do some good.
Dear Supermom,
You are not a Supermom. You’re just a parent like the rest of us. The only difference between us is that you’re sure of yourself, and we’re all consumed by self-doubt. Which means we’re always trying harder to be better, while you’re just going to keep doing what you’ve been doing, because you’re right. You’ve always been right, and you’ll always be right.
Isn’t that right?
Sincerely,
Regular Parents
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
There’s a festival in China that you’ve probably never heard of, that you really need to hear about. And then shout about, because sometimes social media slacktivism can make a difference. In this case, it’s about the only thing any of us can do, and it looks like it’s working. Or at least has a chance.
The festival in question takes place in Yulin, China and involves eating dogs. And that’s about it.
There’s a lot of alcohol involved too, apparently, but mostly it’s about eating dogs. And puppies. And people’s pets.
That’s right. In order to meet the demand of this ancient Chinese festival (which it’s not – but more on that in a minute), people go around snatching up pets and puppies and basically anything that goes Woof, then stuff them into cages. I’m purposefully not showing any pictures from the event in this post because, trust me, you don’t want to see them. (Instead, I’m only showing adorable pictures of my own dogs. Which is heartbreaking enough.)
But to give you an idea, imagine watching one of those Sarah McLaughlin commercials right after your dog just died. And your boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with you. And your house burned down. All at the same time. That should come close to the empty feeling of utter hopeless and despair seeing pictures of this nightmare would leave you with. The only thing missing is the revulsion and disgust.
And anger.
Now, I know that some people eat dog meat. I know it’s traditional food in some cultures. I get that. I think it’s horrible and wrong personally, but a lot of people think the same thing about me eating steak. Others feel the same about pork, yet this country has a freaking Dads and Hipsters infatuation with bacon. Different strokes for different folks, or whatever.
But the Yulin Festival isn’t about eating dog meat. It’s about passing off a VERY RECENT “festival” as an “ancient tradition” when it’s anything but, while snatching up and murdering family pets in order to fuel it.
You see, dog eating is common in Yulin. It’s sort of their claim to fame, for some reason I don’t understand any more than you. But they’re proud of it, and a few years back decided to do something to PROMOTE the region and its dog meat. So they created a dog eating festival, because it’s China and of course they did.
This isn’t some ancient spiritual or cultural observation. It’s not some sacred event. It’s fucking marketing. That’s all.
It’s hard to pin down exactly when the festival started, but the earliest it could’ve been was the mid to late ’90s. More accounts tend toward the mid to late ’00s. Either way, it’s hardly ancient by any definition, up to and including Hollywood’s ridiculous cut-off age for leading female actresses.
In recent years, there has been a growing swell against the festival on social media – and it looks like it’s working.
Of course, it’s China and China just doesn’t give a fuck. China does what China wants, but the pressure being put onto the government as a direct result of social media outcry (#StopYuLin2015 on Twitter, for instance) is having an effect. The average Chinese citizen is opposed to the festival now, and with efforts from organizations like Humane Society International, there’s a very real chance that this festival can finally be stopped.
Or at least driven underground to such an extent that 10,000 dogs aren’t needlessly slaughtered for the 500,000 pounds of dog meat the festival has gathered in the past – from strays, from pets. From puppies.
PUPPIES.
I don’t care if you share this exact post on your Facebooks or your Twitters, but please do SOMETHING. Tweet the #StopYuLin2015 hashtag. Share one of the articles I’ve linked to here, or just post a status about it on your own. Anything.
Too often, “awareness” campaigns are bullshit. We all know what cancer is, after all. We don’t really need to raise awareness for it so much as we need to raise a fucking cure, but we still pour millions of dollars and hours into such campaigns every year. But in this case – with this stupid, senseless, puppy murdering festival of bullshit – awareness is EXACTLY what’s needed.
Because you probably never heard of it until just now. I hadn’t heard of it until Emma Caufield tweeted about it, which led me to Ricky Gervais’ campaign against it, and now I’m writing a post about it, so I can help get the word out in my own small way.
And the more people who hear about it, the more people will spread the news. And the more people spread the news, the more people will start talking about it. And the more people start talking about it, the more people will start screaming for it to stop. And the more people start screaming for it stop, the greater the likelihood that it will stop.
So make like Jamie Lee-Curtis and scream.
PLEASE.
Click here to sign Humane Society International’s petition to #StopYuLin2015.
This past weekend, there was another shooting in America. This one was in Dallas, Texas. At police HQ, of all places. The gunman sprayed the building with rounds from an assault rifle and planted explosives before fleeing in his van, presumably to go back to his home down by the river. He never made it though, because a police sniper took him out and all was again right with the world. Somehow, he managed to neither kill nor wound anyone in his lunatic attack, which was nice.
Minutes after it was all over, Texas Governor Greg Abbott displayed a profound insensitivity to sensitivity by immediately signing a new open carry law for the state, allowing the open carry of handguns in addition to “long guns”. Then, just to make sure everyone knows how ‘Murica he is, he tweeted a picture of himself doing a little shootporn down at the gun range. Because yeehaw Texas and freedom and whatever.
We’re a classy lot here in the Lone Star state.
Of course, open carry is complete nonsense.
Now let me tell you why…
I’m a bit of an aberration here in Pew Pew Texas, because I not only don’t like football, but I’m not a big fan of firearms, either. That doesn’t mean I’m some bleeding heart liberal socialist communist or whatever the Tea Party loonies like to label people who sometimes engage their brains in activities other than chanting about God, Guns and Jesus. I’m just a pragmatist, is all.
Stay classy, Greg.
I don’t disagree with open carry on an ideological level. As an idea, I think it’s fine. Makes sense. No problem.
But way down in the mucky muck of reality, it kind of falls apart – but not for the reasons everyone always like to talk about. Guns aren’t the problem – well, they kind of are, but only because we already have so many of the damn things.
Conservatives always like to jump on the idea that someone is coming for their guns. Mention anything related to gun control, and it’s their default stance. “FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!” they shout, not realizing that Charlton Heston was never really that great of an actor, and starred in a lot of really bad junk over the years. But that’s not the point.
I’m not advocating taking anyone’s guns away. It’s just not a practical solution anymore, because we have too many damn guns in this country already, and we don’t know who has them or where they are to begin with. The laws – or, more accurately, enforcement of the laws – has been so lax that really, it’s anybody’s guess. So we couldn’t exactly take your guns away, even if we wanted to. And if we took all the ones away that we do know about, there would still be a crap ton out there that we don’t know about, which is when you get into the, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” territory. And it’s true.
So let’s just dispel that idea right quick. I don’t want your guns. Nobody wants your guns. Obama has been about to come for your guns since 2008, and you still have them. Nobody cares about your pew pew phallus. Seriously. Get over it.
The problem I have with open carry has nothing to do with the guns themselves, or even the types of guns. I don’t give a crap about assault rifles and magazine sizes. I really don’t.
The problem with open carry is simply open carry.
It’s stupid.
It’s actually pretty simple to understand, when you cut through all the media jibberjabber on the topic. It has to do with crazy people going on shooting sprees – but not because open carry will allow crazy people to go on shooting sprees, because crazy people are going to go on shooting sprees whether open carry is a thing or not.
The problem is desensitization.
There’s a popular picture going around with two identical armed men, and you’re supposed to decide which one is an open carry activist and which was is the mass murdering psychopath. The whole point is that you can’t, because they’re identical.
But that’s not the problem with open carry.
We already can’t tell the crazies apart from the sane people, regardless of who has a gun and who doesn’t. Because Crazy doesn’t wear a nametag.
“He was a nice guy. Kept to himself. Last person you’d ever expect.”
So if we can’t tell who is crazy and who isn’t, then why does it matter who is openly armed and who isn’t?
Simple: because we’re not used to seeing crazy people armed to the teeth, walking down the street. Because we’re not used to seeing anyone armed to the teeth, walking down the street.
The problem with open carry is that, once we are used to seeing heavily armed people strolling through Bed, Bath and Beyond to pick out a new toilet seat, we’re no longer alarmed by heavily armed people buying toiletries.
And we probably should be.
If a crazy person wants to walk into a shopping mall with an assault rifle strapped to his back and start shooting up the local Hot Topic, having an open carry law is only going to make it easier for him, because nobody is going to think twice about a heavily armed mall shopper anymore. Nobody’s going to be worried about it, because hey. It’s just a dude with an assault rifle, checking out some wicked cool t-shirts and crap. See it all the time. No need to call security.
Oh, sure. I hear the NRA and the entire state of Texas collectively gearing up to bring the “But if everyone is armed, everyone is safer” counter argument, which is just ridiculous.
Yes, you can find isolated cases of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun, but they’re statistical anomalies. For the most part, people who own firearms never have to use them in self-defense, or any other kind of defense. They’re just security blankets for the timid. They make people feel safe and powerful, without anyone having to actually work to become safe and powerful. There’s no effort involved to attain it and it feels good, so the whole thing has a particularly American appeal.
I get that.
“Why does everyone keep calling me Nick?”
But it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, we all know the TSA doesn’t make us safer, but most people (for some reason) still like having them there, because it makes them feel better. The illusion of safety is often more effective than actual safety, at least in the all important area of making paranoid, frightened people feel safer.
Still, you know what happens when a bad guy with a rapid-fire, semi-automatic assault rifle starts popping off shots in a crowded theater? A lot of people get shot. But do you know what happens when a bunch of good guys with guns start shooting back at the bad guy with guns, at the same rate of fire? A helluva lot more people get shot, that’s what.
Because life isn’t a movie. You are not a gunslinger. You’re probably not even a very good shot. I’d wager that most gun owners are barely competent with their weapons, even if they have great marks at the gun range. Paper targets don’t shoot back. Paper targets aren’t alive. Because paper target are fucking paper targets.
People tend to vastly overestimate their own skill level at everything. Think you’re a great shot with your gun? Awesome! Good for you. Now think about all the terrible drivers you know who think they’re good behind the wheel. Still confident?
Look, I get the appeal. I understand that open carry makes a kind of sense from an Idea perspective, but ideas aren’t reality. This isn’t the Wild West, after all.
Hell, even the Wild West wasn’t the wild west. People didn’t go around quick-drawing and having showdowns at high noon in front of the salon all the damn time. What you’re thinking of is THE MOVIES.
Which aren’t real.
People carried guns around in the old west because the old west was a pretty damn hostile place, which had a lot more to do with things like (rightfully) pissed off Native Americans and wildlife and actually having to hunt animals in order to eek out a substance-based living in an environment that wanted to murder you. You needed a gun in the old west, to shoot that rattlesnake what tried to scare your horse, or maybe pop off a few shots at those varmints what done come too close to your land the other night. It was a tool as much as it was a weapon, if not more so.
Today, you don’t really need to worry about getting snakebit down at The Gap, on your way to suck down some Chick-Fil-A at the Food Court. So you really don’t need to arm yourself for the battles that don’t lie ahead.
You don’t even need to worry about other humans, for the most part. Statistically, you’re not very likely to be the victim of a violent crime – and, even if you are, it’s not very likely that having a gun on your hip is going to stop it. Not when your attacker is already going to have his openly-carried weapon drawn and pointed at your squishy bits before you even know what’s happening.
All open carry does is push the world closer into a danger zone that doesn’t actually exist outside of advocate’s fever dream delusions. But it will, thanks to the open carry asshats.
Want more gun deaths? Open carry will get you there.
Want more cases of good guys with guns shooting bad guys with guns? Open carry will get you there.
Want to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that all of your dire warnings of the dangerous world outside your doorstep come true? Open carry will fucking take you there.
It will take us all there.
Whether we want it to or not.
So please, Rest Of The Nation. Don’t follow the example of the nice folks here in Crazyland, USA. Just ignore Texas. Don’t let our insanity be your guiding force. I beg you. Because I don’t want to live here forever, and I’d like to be able to move one day. Preferably to a state that isn’t bugfuck for guns.
Don’t mess with Texas, sure. But please, don’t let Texas mess with you.
I love you, America. I don’t want to see you fall in with the wrong crowd.
Like Texans.
UPDATE: Apparently, Texas isn’t leading the charge on open carry, which just seems weird. The popular talking point seems to be that Texas is (was) one of only six states that specifically prohibited (mostly because white people with guns were scared of black people with guns) the open carrying of handguns. But it turns out it’s a little (a lot) more nuanced than that.
The deal with Rachel Dolezal has nothing to do with Caitlyn Jenner, or transsexuals in general. Or transracials, if that’s even a thing. I kind of think it is, although mostly it’s to do with culture rather than skin color – but then again, so is most racism these days. But more on that in a minute. For now, let me just try to convince you to stop comparing the two like they’re at all alike, or thinking you’re making a clever joke as if thousands of other people haven’t already beaten you to it on Twitter.
The main thing that separates Jenner from Dolezal has to do with the lack of willful deception on Jenner’s part. He didn’t pretend to be a woman for years, getting paid to talk about the struggles of being a woman in a man’s world, or sell the hardships of his life to local women’s groups. Dolezal, on the other hand, did exactly that.
She rode her white privilege upbringing until she hopped on board the minority train, taking advantage of everyone around her by deceiving them all into believing she grew up knowing the struggles of a poor black woman. She didn’t.
She made them up.
She lied.
Caitlyn Jenner did none of these things. Maybe he lied to himself as Bruce, maybe he lied to his wife – but if suppressing one’s desires for the benefit of your marriage is deception, then everyone celebrating more than a day or so of marital bliss is guilty of being filthy, lying scum. At any rate, he stopped that. His marriage ended, and he let go of whatever was holding him back from doing what he’d always wanted to do. I honestly don’t know the details or the timeline, and I really don’t care. I just know that Bruce Jenner didn’t lie to anyone to become Caitlyn. He didn’t cheat anyone or exploit a system set up to help others by engineering it to help only himself. He just did his thing. Which is now her thing. Because that’s how it works.
But Rachel Dolezal didn’t transition into being black. She never became black. She never said, “Hey, I was born a privileged white girl, but I identify more with black culture, so that’s what I’m going to be from now on.” And she totally could have said that. It would have been fine. People do it all the time.
On both sides.
For every Eminem, there’s a Ben Carson.
Because race in America isn’t actually about skin color anymore. That’s still there, sure – but only as an easy identifier of The Other. But as long as a black dude acts “white” enough, even racist white folk will embrace him. Same with white people who are more comfortable in black culture. Or millions of American kids in suburbs across the nation who have more love for Japanese pop culture than they do for anything from here at home.
Certainly, hardline racists still exist – but there are less and less of them every day. They’re dying off, as old and rotten bigots tend to do. In their place are the new, gentler forms of racism. The kind that doesn’t think black people are inherently Less Than just because they’re black, but because they haven’t been raised right. Unless they have, of course. Raised to assimilate into white culture. To be little Ben Carsons. Well spoken. Articulate. One of the good ones, as they say.
Which is all bullshit, of course. But it’s the reality.
It has its limits, though. Because there’s still a lot of white people who find black people icky in some way, and while they can tolerate a few of them swimming in their neighborhood pools, they can’t stomach the idea of a whole bunch of them frolicking poolside and swimming in the same water as the white folk. So they call the police and then McKinney, Texas happens.
But getting back to Rachel Dolezal, I really do think she just self-identifies more as black than she does as white, for probably a million reasons that are none of my business. The problem isn’t that she’s a white girl who would rather be black. It never was.
The problem is that she’s a white girl who pretended she had always been black, and who then took advantage of her invented blackness to game and exploit a system set up to help advance the very real struggle of actual black people who actually grew up black in a white man’s world.
The problem isn’t her race.
The problem is her lie.
So just to sum up, there is absolutely nothing resembling any kind of correlation between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Except for the that idea that people can be born one way, and then grow up to become something else.
People do it all the time, and we commend them for it. A poor black kid makes it in the system and becomes a famous neurosurgeon, transforming his cultural identify from an underprivileged perspective to one of privilege and power, and we applaud him for it.
But when a white woman tries to do that in reverse, people snub their noses and cluck their tongues.
The harsh reality that a lot of people are going to need to accept is that we’re moving toward an increasingly transhumanist society. Technology will emerge in the near future that will begin with genetic manipulation, then move into cybernetics and nanotechnology until humans aren’t exactly human anymore.
Wearable tech will give way to implantable tech. Implantable tech will move into cybernetic limbs and organs. Genetics will wrap around all of it and keep it warm, like a comfy blanket.
But it will happen.
My nine-year-old son has a very real chance of living to see the face of humanity changed. Black people becoming white people. Girls becoming boys, with all of the organs and Y chromosomes that come with it. Augments. Cyborgs. Crazy science fiction right now, to be sure. But it’s coming.
So one day in the distant future, when your great granddaughter brings home a half man / half machine cybernetic hermaphrodite with glowing red eyes and tight dreadlocks, maybe you’ll look back on the day when you thought a man wanting to be a woman was scary. Or that a white person might want to be black.
And that’s probably the real issue here, when you stop to think about it. Apart from people capitalizing on the natural WTF reaction a lot of people have at the knee jerk, what has really cooked people’s noodles is the idea that a pretty little white girl would want to grow up to be a black woman.
Which is, I agree, a pretty fucked up thing.
The question, I mean.
And the people asking it.
Stop being that person.
Look to the cookie!
The Witcher 3 came out recently, to rave reviews. People are calling it one of the best roleplaying games ever created. A bunch of my friends won’t shut up about it. Everyone says it’s a must buy for anyone with even a passing interest in the genre.
I’ve been playing RPGs since there were RPGs. I live and breathe fantastical settings and cryptic die rolls. I’ve played every major computer RPG and franchise that has come along. Every Ultima. Every Wizardry. Might and Magic. Hell, I even (in)famously played through the Gates Baldur, both 1 and 2. I also played the first two Witcher games, so why haven’t I bought the third one yet?
Because I don’t care. (UPDATE: I could not have been more wrong about Witcher 3. I relented and picked up a copy, and it has literally consumed my life since I first hit Play. It’s that good.)
I just don’t. I mean, I want to care. I want to get excited about an open-world RPG with fancy polygonal sorcery and authentic beard-growth whatevers, but I just can’t. I think it’s a function of getting older, which seems a little weird at first, but really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone.
At some point in the aging process, people just stop giving a shit about new shit. It happens with music, for sure. In every generation, there comes a point when the people from the previous one stop liking the music of the current one. We call it noise. We make fun of the lyrics. We point to “real” music, from “back in the day”. It’s a thing. It happens.
So why shouldn’t it be the same with games? I mean, I’m still interested in The Witcher 3. I still want to play it, eventually. And it looks like a terrific game – but I just haven’t worked up the urge to buy it. Maybe when it goes on sale. Maybe when I have the PC to run it. Maybe, maybe, maybe… one day.
But for now, I’m more interested in old games. Or new games that are really just old games that no one has played yet because they weren’t made until just now. Games like Technobabylon (or anything from Wadjet Eye, really) or Ron Gilbert’s upcoming Thimbleweed Park are good examples. Pillars of Eternity is another great one. These are all games that are happening today as if the intervening years between THEN and NOW never really happened.
Doom never happened, and the FPS never took over the market.
Quake never happened, and 3D, polygonal everything never came to power.
Open world sandbox Everything Is The Same, Thanks Ubisoft design philosophy never happened.
Free to play never happened.
DLC never happened.
These are games that are continuing the design and visual aesthetics from classic games as if all the trends that led to the shitty shitty shit shit games of today never took over to dominate the industry.
Technobabylon is a great point and click adventure, complete with crunchy pixels and driven by a compelling narrative.
Thimbleweed Park is Maniac Mansion 2.0. And really, that’s all you need to know. (Ok, maybe 3.0, if we count Day of the Tentacle. Shut up, smart ass.)
Pillars of Eternity took the ideas behind the Infinity Engine and actually made them good. (Although I’ve slowly come to realize that I never hated the Infinity Engine itself, just anything Bioware ever did with it.)
Old games made today. Same design philosophies. Same aesthetics. Same small teams. Same focus on narrative and experience. Brilliant, all the way around.
The problem with keeping the radio dial set to the oldies station is that there are only so many old songs to listen to. There’s a finite number of classic records, just like there are only so many classic games to play and replay. Eventually you run out, and then you’re either forced to just continue replaying the same ones over and over, or abandon the hobby altogether since you can’t stand the boneheaded, DLC and DRM and microtransaction nature of modern gaming.
So I play a lot of old games, and I’m always looking out for new old games. Or new new games that do something daring and completely different, which almost always happens in the Indie scene. Basically, I spend a lot of time on GOG.com, grabbing old games and new indie titles from small, risk-taking studios that just don’t give a shit about what makes a “good” game.
Speaking of GOG…
I see that Steam has started its annual Summer Sale again, which always has incredibly good deals on a lot of great games. And I don’t care.
It also has really bad deals on a lot of really awful games, the majority of which are almost always “Early Access Roguelikes”. Really, there are so many of the damn things on that platform that it should really be classified as its own genre. Darkest Dungeon is good. It’s fun. It’s worth it. But buying enough crappy games to finally find that one glimmering needle in a shitstack the size of Kentucky isn’t.
And then there’s the DRM problem. Digital Rights Management is stupid, and it’s invading every corner of the world. Non-entertainment (movies, music, games) DRM started with Keurig’s coffee pod copy protection, which was so easily defeated by cutting the RFID tag off of an approved pod and then gluing it next to the sensor in the machine, that Keurig backpedaled on the whole thing. But it’ll come back, in some form or another, just as soon as they figure out something even more horrible. Then there are cars with their proprietary computer systems and everything in between. Recently, even farm tractors – yes, FARM TRACTORS – got their own version of DRM to prevent Farmer Joe and Cousin Jed from tinkering with, fixing, or otherwise doing anything with or to their tractors that was not officially sanctioned and approved by the John Deere company. It’s madness, and I’ll have nothing to do with any of it.
Especially with my games.
On any DRM-friendly platform, you can buy all the games you want, but you don’t really own them. Not in the traditional sense. Lose your net access because you got laid off and can’t afford the luxury of clicking around the world wide web at 2 am in your underwear anymore? Say goodbye to your games, bucko. You need to stay connected, because you have to check in with Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo/Steam/etc… whenever you want to play something you own, just to make sure you’re still you. Or something. (And yes, I know you can “Go offline” in one form or another on most DRM platforms, but you still have to check in with the servers every so often, or you’re out of luck.)
At least old copy protection methods were creative, even if they were as equally ineffective as modern DRM.
Never mind that every DRM game (and movie, and song, and anything else) is usually available on the seedier side of the Internet the same day it’s available to honest customers. Often, it’s available to the pirates even sooner. Because DRM doesn’t work. Copy protection doesn’t work. Never has, never will. Unless, of course, companies can convince people that needing always-on Internet connections to constantly poll some server in Nebraska every few seconds is a good idea. Which they kind of already have.
But people want to be honest. Why take a risk of some law enforcement raid to your basement, when you could just buy the game and keep everything legit? Make your games available, affordable, and fair, and people will buy them. Some asshats will still copy them, but they were probably never going to buy them anyway. Because they’re asshats.
Another problem with DRM and not really owning your games has to do with what you can do with them after you’ve bought them. Enjoyed the game and now you’re done with it? Hated the game, but think your friend might like it? Having a garage sale because your unemployment has run out and you need to sell some shit to avoid eating lukewarm grits for the rest of your life?
TOUGH SHIT.
In all of these scenarios, you can do exactly nothing with all the games you’ve purchased on a DRM platform. Let your friend borrow a game? Can’t. Give a game away to someone else? Sorry. Sell your used games? HAHAHAHAHAHA! NOPE.
That’s why I love GOG.com – because I actually own the games I buy there. I can download all of them and stick them on a backup drive someplace, so if I ever lose my net connectivity for any reason, I’ll still have my entire library of games to play whenever I want. But that’s just the most obvious reason.
The other one has to do with sharing. Now, this one can be a touchy subject – but it’s meaningful. When I say “sharing” and the year is a post-Napster 2015, I need to clarify that I don’t mean Torrenting my games out to the world. I mean something much smaller, and much more personal. And sensible.
Let’s say I go to the Redbox and rent a movie. Or hell, let’s pretend it’s 1995 and I go to Circuit City and buy a DVD. Then, I come home and sit down with the family, whip up some snacks and pop Jurassic Park in the old DVD player and…enjoy the movie. Together.
Now let’s time warp back to 2015 and let me try that with a game. Let’s say I go to the Redox and rent a game. I can play it on my Xbox. My kid can take it in his room and play it on his. Everything’s fine. If I go to Best Buy and buy a game, it’s the same thing (minus any Ubisoft U-Play bullshit “functionality,” of course). But what if I buy a game on a DRM platform?
TOUGH SHIT.
Sure, you can kinda/sorta “share” games on most platforms. Steam even has a family sharing option, which is nice. But two people can’t be playing the same game at the same time, because then the universe would collapse in on itself and everyone would die or something.
But you know what I can do with GOG.com? I can buy a game, then I can install it on my kid’s computer and we’re both pew pewing each other in Unreal Tournament inside an hour. No need for multiple copies. No need for multiple platform accounts. No need for any of the bullshit.
I don’t know why we think games should be any different from everything else.
Do we have to buy multiple copies of the same album to listen to music together in the car on a long road trip? Nope.
Should I need to buy two copies of the book I read to my kid at bedtime, since two people are experiencing it at the same time? Nope.
Is there a limit to how many family eyeballs can watch the same copy of the same movie at the same time? Nope. (Well, actually…Microsoft is working on that one.)
My point is, I’m not out there throwing free copies of my games into the ether for every spotty-faced kid on the net to ravenously download off Pirate Bay or whatever. And neither are most people who buy DRM-free games.
But I do sometimes want to share the games I enjoy with members of my own family, and I should be able to do that. They’re my games now. I bought them. I paid for them. I downloaded them. I shouldn’t have to worry about my account getting hacked or accidentally violating some arcane bit of a 500,000 word EULA I never read, so that my account gets locked and I lose access to my entire library. I shouldn’t have to worry that one day, whatever platform I’ve gone with will shut down and take all my games with it.
That’s the only business model I want to follow. And I’m not going to help companies try to insert a whole bunch of clauses and dependencies into any of those three steps.
Sorry, Steam.
I launched a new site redesign today. And nobody noticed.
Well, that’s not entirely true. A bunch of people noticed; I can see the analytics data, after all. It’s just that nobody cared. Which is pretty typical for the Internet, I guess. And this site. And maybe blogs, in general. Most blogs, anyway.
I’ve been plugging away on this site since 2008. Seven years and over 300 posts and 500,000+ words later, and exactly nothing has come from it. Sure, I got my wedding ring for free, which was nice. I also got a job out of it, that I eventually left for a “better” job which was pretty great until Hillbilly Voldemort came along and started casting the Cruciatus Curse at the start of every morning meeting. And then my position was outsourced to India, so that was fun.
I’ve also received a few Cease and Desist notices that I’ve mostly ignored, and nothing ever happened. Couple of “slander” threats by people who don’t know what libel is. Bunch of angry tweet replies, some emails, and lots of spam. So much spam.
But nothing significant has ever happened. Sure, sometimes I’ll post something that gets some traction. People share it, click Like and whatnot, and I get a huge spike in traffic for a few days, and then nothing happens.
My marriage proposal was a hit, and then nothing happened.
My hometown commentary was pretty popular, and then nothing happened.
My Harry Potter room refurb was pretty well received, and then nothing happened.
My post on “ridiculous baby headbands” eventually became Google’s top search result for the topic, and then nothing happened.
I’ve even written the occasional short story or two that people kind of liked, but I was never very good at narrative, so I wasn’t surprised that nothing happened.
But that’s just how blogs go. You work on something you think people might like, or that’s at least an honest one-way dialog between you and the rest of the world, then you put it out there and…nothing happens.
Traffic climbs or it doesn’t. People comment or they don’t. Likes are given or they’re not. Shares almost never happen. It’s just how it goes.
But it makes wanting to keep doing this sort of thing really, really hard. Which isn’t something I think most people get.
It’s not easy to create something and put it out there for the rest of the world to tear apart, but it’s what people who need to create things have to do. We want to “make good art” as Neil Gaiman says, so we try our best to put something good into the world, and then…nothing happens.
It’s hard to tell if it’s because our art just wasn’t very good, or if whatever we made just got lost in the white noise of trillions of gigabytes worth of data buzzing through the air at any given moment. Maybe the stars hadn’t been properly aligned at the time, the seventh son of a seventh son hadn’t been born yet, or maybe the prophecies just never were true to begin with. Maybe it’s all of these things. Maybe it’s none of them.
Maybe I just suck.
I probably just suck.
Whenever I post something new, hitting the Publish button comes at the end of a lot of work and worry. It’s an instant relief, mixed with a tinge of excitement that this time – maybe this time – will be the one where Something Happens. But it almost never is.
I usually just end up riding the pleasure wave of Having Written for as long as I can, only to come crashing into the craggy shoreline of self-doubt whenever what I’d hoped would happen doesn’t happen. Then, I wallow in the mud of self-pity for a little while until I get bored and start the whole vile process over again.
Every time.
Some people are able to make a career out of blogging, although I honestly don’t know what black magic is involved in that sort of thing. Someone like Jenny Lawson writes a terrific blog, it gets noticed, and she becomes The Bloggess – one of the nicest, most read people on the Internet. Then there’s everyone else, stuck out in the collective limbo of our mutual efforts. Floating, grasping, slipping. And nothing ever happens.
In case you couldn’t tell, this is the Wallowing In Self-Pity phase I mentioned earlier. I’m just sharing it this time, so you’ll know what it feels like.
I’m not quitting, though. Even if it sounds like I should. Even if I really should.
The wallowing will pass, the doubts will clear, and I’ll come back once more and write something new again, then hit Publish again and wait again. And maybe next time, something will happen.
Next time.
Having recently been laid off thanks to the slithering machinations of a functionally illiterate middle manager (henceforth referred to as Hillbilly Voldemort) snaking his way up the corporate ladder before taking advantage of a merger with another company to purge the ranks of any threats – not that I’m bitter or anything, mind you – I’ve been feeling fairly useless. It’s an altogether unnatural sensation for me, and I don’t like it at all. So, after I got tired of doing things like shooting flaming arrows down my hallway in a scientific experiment to see how best to set off motion detecting track lights with a high-speed arrow (I’m not entirely without Dangerous Ideas when I’m feeling bored and useless), I decided to do something productive.
It all started with a nasty, unused bathroom to which we’ve left the door closed for around a decade now. The toilet never did work right, and the faucet was spotty at best, so we just kind of ignored the whole thing like it was some kind of elephant graveyard Mufasa warned us never to go to. And time took its toll.
We’ve used it off and on, mostly as a storage closet for hiding Christmas presents and the like, because it is a shadowy place and The Child never ventures into it. But now that I have oceans of time on my hands, I decided to get it back in proper working order. All while having absolutely no plumbing or home improvement skills whatsoever, of course. It’s how I roll.
Here’s what the bathroom looked like when I cracked open the ancient door and found myself stepping through a portal to Hell. It really was awful, and disgusting, and a whole lot of other adjectives my editor would probably cut out, if I had an editor here. But I’m self-editing these days, and I think I’m growing as a person. Or whatever. Let’s move on.
The sink was entirely useless. Apart from the basin being an unholy graveyard of mineral deposits and Nagini knows what else, the faucet was completely non-functional. With it having had what I would discover later to be an incessant drip, the various nasty things in the hard tap water of Beaumont, Texas had left their mark by completely clogging the works. Turning the valves accomplished exactly nothing. No water. No pipe gurgles. Nada.
I tried to prise the nozzle doohickey loose to clean it, but it was no use. I have the combined strength of a 7-year-old schoolgirl and about half a dozen Smurfs, so that just wasn’t happening while there was so much buildup acting as cement. I then attacked it with a wire brush and some CLR cleaner, which is supposed to be powerful stuff, but the faucet only pointed at me and made fun.
That’s when the hydrochloric acid happened.
After dipping the spigot into an acid bath – the fumes from which smelled like a dead man’s farts – I was able to dislodge the mineral buildup and clean things properly. Soon, I had a fully functioning faucet again, although the sink was still a mess. And that’s when I discovered the aforementioned incessant drip.
I attacked the sink with the best cleaning product known to man, which is something called Bar Keeper’s Friend, which I was somehow still allowed to buy even though I’ve never kept a bar in my life, and I’m certainly not on familiar enough terms with of the few I have been to that any of them should deign to call me friend. Nonetheless, I purchased it and after a lot of furious scrubbing, the porcelain finally started becoming white again.
After that, I added “compression valve stem repair” to my list of life skills, which was nice. I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow managed to turn the water off to my house, then dislodge the very stubborn valve stems, take them apart, find the bits and bobs that needed replacing, supply the new parts and put everything back together again without anything exploding. And the leak was gone.
Next, I attacked the toilet, which still has a very slow leak because the new flapper isn’t making a watertight seal. I’ll probably fix that soon enough, just as soon as I figure out how. But I got it back into a working state and cleaned the heck out of it with my new Bar Keeper’s Friend friend, so it’s all pretty and shiny and fully functional again.
After that, I cleaned everything out that we’d tossed in there over the years, and I was done.
Or so I thought.
Later that night, I started feeling bored and useless again, and had a brilliant idea around 2 am one when I couldn’t sleep because I was feeling bored and useless again.
The bathroom is a little half-bath off of our master bedroom – which makes it sound a lot fancier than it is. I live in a small house, so the “master” part of the master bedroom just, I think, means it has half a bathroom stuck to it. A toilet and a sink, and not much in the way of space. Very cramped.
Or cozy.
Like, say…a cupboard under that stairs!
Ten points for Gryffindor!
To say that my wife is an avid reader would be akin to saying fish are often in the habit of being in water, and she deeply loves J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Like, a lot. Way more than should probably be legal in most states.
With that in mind, I decided to transform the bathroom into a reading nook / vanity for her to get all tarted up in. (I think that doesn’t mean anything awful, but I’m not British. I’m just going with the Potter theme here. Roll with it.) There was no other choice than to turn it into her own little cupboard under the stairs, but with less stairs and more toilet.
I went to the used bookstore and bought a few Harry Potter books, along with supplemental materials such as Fantastic Creatures and Quidditch Through The Ages. Then, I murdered them in the spines. At my kitchen table. With a paper cutter.
I then used some clear wallpaper paste and began slapping the pages onto the wall, to cover it with Harry Potter books. It wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds though, because paperback book paper has a tendency to be rather on the thin side, which lead to more than a few ripped pages as I fought the great Air Bubble War of 2015 with my straightener.
However, I eventually found the right amount of wallpaper paste to combat this. If I used what would be the correct amount of paste for actual wallpaper, the pages would misbehave in the worst way and usually rip before the end. If I used what I thought was too much, then they would go on straight and flatten correctly, but shrivel and bubble up as they dried. Therefore, the correct amount of wallpaper paste to use when papering a wall with book pages is Way Too Much.
Using way too much paste meant the paper would go on straight and flatten, then not do anything awful while it dried. I suspect it has something to do with the pages absorbing more moisture from the paste or something sciencey like physics or whatever, but regardless of the reason, using way too much worked. So that’s what I did.
And then I bought a lot more tubs of paste than I’d planned for.
Eventually, it all started coming together, but the walls were literally walls of text, which I broke up as much as I could with title pages and then with the pages from the supplements that contained illustrations, but it still wasn’t quite enough. I managed to find a really neat deck of Harry Potter playing cards at another book store, which I was able to slap up on the walls for some added pop (or whatever the term is that actual interior designers use). I added the book covers too, which also helped.
But then, the irregularities of the book pages meant that the top of the room was left a bit jagged, with some pages going all the way to the ceiling while others stopped short. This, I overcame with a bit of red fabric trim I picked up at the craft store for about six bucks. It worked perfectly.
The paste interacted with the book pages (and the underlying paint beneath) as it dried, and ended up adding a nice yellow tint to them, which I thought was a happy accident. Something about yellowed book pages just speaks to me on a primal level. I don’t know why. I’m just weird, I guess.
For the finishing touches, I went to the dollar store and picked up ten LED candle lights for 5 bucks (2 per $1 pack). I used fabric glue sticks (because the glue dries white, to match the candles), and melted on some dribbly bits to make them look more authentic. After that, I suspended them from the ceiling at varying heights by way of transparent monofilament line.
I put my wife’s un-murdered Potter books on the window sill behind the toilet, then I draped her Gryffindor scarf over the valance and added a couple of coffee pictures, an actual candle, and our son’s (version of) The Elder Wand to the top of the toilet tank.
A friend of mine sent me Harry’s wanted poster, which she graciously surrendered to the cause. It is now hanging on the inside of the door.
Over on the countertop by the sink, I added a coffee pot, along with a couple of jars of ground coffee and sugar, and a bowl of her favorite flavor of creamer. Having her morning coffee is every bit as important as brushing her teeth or anything else one does in the bathroom in the morning, so it seemed a natural fit. Plus, she can brew up a cup whenever she wants to hide out and read undisturbed.
I still need to add a pair of Harry’s glasses somewhere in the room and, I think, a small Hedwig (if I can find one), and that should just about do it.
This was actually a very affordable project. Apart from the plumbing and restoration issues I had to contend with, the whole Harry Potter makeover aspect was done on the cheap. The books cost me about $25 at the used book store. The wallpaper paste was about $40 (which would’ve been cheaper, had I bought the big tub to begin with), the trim was around $6, the candles were $5 (as were the batteries to power them), and the string was another $5 or so. The towels, candles, canisters, etc… were all purchased at the dollar store. Where 100 pennies go a long way.
All in all, everything was done for less than $100.
Wingardium Leviosa!
Not charging for labor, of course. Which only Harry would be able to afford. With his bank vault full of gold.
Here’s a full gallery of more photos of the room, if you’re interested.
Now get out there and make something!
I wrote a kind of “simulated” Life: The Text Adventure the last time I was laid off. So now that I’ve been laid off again and have some free time, I upgraded it to an actual text adventure. (Mostly as an experiment to see if creating a real game is something I’d want to do.)
Have fun!
Playing on a mobile device is not recommended. I’m not even sure if playing in a web browser on your computer is recommended, but the game’s embedded below if you want to try it.
If you’d rather play it on your computer as its own thing, you can download the game file here. (Right click to save it someplace, then grab a copy of Quest to open it.)
I know I’m mired neck-deep inside the cozy bog of nostalgia right now with my ongoing Life Bytes series, but it’s not just because I retreat to the past whenever the present gets too real. I’m also just really, really tired of modern games. Sure, they have great production values and being able to see the ear sweat dribbling down a polygonal Kevin Spacey’s perky lobes is impressive, but it’s not very fun. Or imaginative. Or magical.
Magic. That’s what old games had, and I’m not sure why. But I think it was because of the legitimate pixel art created at the time (versus the rash of indiecool hipster “pixel art” games of today), the simple MIDI music, along with all the other various limitations older PCs had when compared to the damn near supercomputers gamers use today.
Limitations breed creativity like alcohol and power outages breed hurricane babies. Limitations are part of the creative recipe; without them, you just end up with the McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets version of whatever it is you’re making. When you’re constrained by time, technology or budget, you have to be creative. You’re forced to, if you want to create anything remotely interesting. A good example of this can be seen in the Star Wars movies – and not just because all of my metaphors have become Star Wars metaphors lately.
Back when George Lucas was making A New Hope, he didn’t have much in the way of a budget, and most of the technology he needed to create the visuals he wanted didn’t exist. So he had to be creative, and he had to hire creative people who could come up with interesting new ways to tackle existing problems while inventing new methods of solving entirely new problems. It’s what led to the creation of Industrial Light and Magic, which would go on to become the gold standard of effects houses for decades. However, once the time came to make the prequels and CGI was around to make life easier, the “blue sky” effect took hold, and the magic was lost.
When you can make anything with no real limits to guide you, you’ll more often than not end up making a whole lot of something without any soul. And that was the real problem with the prequels, much more so than any of the more common hate that has been piled upon them from day one. They were artificial, and they just felt fake. They looked fake, despite the photorealism and quality of the CGI work. There just wasn’t any spark to them, and that all comes down to a lack of limitations. And the happy accidents that come from them. (The prequels are actually a lot closer in tone and style to what Lucas originally envisioned for A New Hope, before he had to scale his vision back to accommodate what it was possible to achieve at the time.)
When you’re creating a CGI world, there’s little room for happy accidents. Everything must be modeled, textured, and animated by hand. Yes, there are simulations running for things like cloth and physics, but you still have to craft everything in exacting detail. Whereas when you’re rigging up an effects shot with a model spaceship and a camera, you might accidentally forget to light it one way, or your tracking is off slightly – but either of these things have the potential to radically influence the final shot, because they sometimes work out better than what you intended. In CGI, the only thing that tends to happen with rendering errors are fairly horrific caricatures that are the stuff of nightmares.
It wants to eat your soul.
My point is, constraints force creative thinking. Limitations imposed upon a project often lead to unexpected outcomes, where an accidental result is superior to the intended one. And you just don’t get that sort of thing in multi-million dollar game projects where every single element is developed and scrutinized by committees, focus groups, and marketing departments. As a system, it just isn’t designed to put out quirky, innovative content. By its very nature, all it can do is produce homogenized results, with maybe a sprinkle of flavor juice on top to distinguish one game from a hundred others.
For example, take the UI out and show me a random screenshot of Call of Duty next to one of Battlefield, and I sure as hell couldn’t tell you which was which. Even with games where more flavor juice has been added, the end result is almost always barely distinguishable from similar games. That’s just how the process works.
But it wasn’t always like this. (And still isn’t, in the indie scene – but more on that in a minute.)
Back when things like EGA and VGA made a huge difference, or when you had to carefully budget every CPU cycle and byte of memory to get your game running on typical PCs of the time, you had to think very carefully about every decision. Do you want to sacrifice the visual detail of bitmapped space ships for the scalability of primitive polygonal ones? Does the digital sound really need to be at this sample rate, or could we get by with a little less quality? And how important is rendering individual forks to Britannia anyway, Richard Garriott?
Along the way, each of these sorts of questions can lead to creative decisions that improve a game beyond whatever would’ve resulted had the limitations not been there. By selecting polygons over bitmaps, the entire style and tone of a game can change, and you get X-Wing rather than Wing Commander. By ditching the digital sound files altogether and going with MIDI, we got iMuse. I still don’t know about the forks, though. Richard is a madman.
Fast forward to the present day, and developers are always crying about budgets – and for good reason. Just let the credits on something like Grand Theft Auto 5 run, and add up the salaries of all the people who worked on it for a half hour or so, until your hand cramps up and your computer crashes from not being able to count that high. It’s a problem.
Of course, budgets have always been a problem – but the bigger problems of the past were usually technological. Back when you had a 5-10 person team working on a game, most of your budget was spent on solving technical issues than it was in paying out staffing costs. How can we stream full motion video off a single-speed CD-ROM? What will it cost us in CPU and memory to make our characters bigger and give them more expressive animations? Is it even possible to make an adventure game with 3D characters?
For each of those problems, a game resulted. The 7th Guest was the first to try tackling the FMV issue, and they figured it out. LucasArts iterated on the SCUMM engine until it could produce the characters of Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. And it was precisely because of the limitations of early 3D polygonal characters that Grim Fandango was even conceived.
I often wonder what games would be like today, if we were still making them as if all the years after 1995 never happened. I think there’s still a place for those game today, that could run on any computer made in the last 20 years or so, that would be developed within the limitations of older hardware, with all the design philosophies present back in that golden age of game design (which led directly to all the modern games that keep recycling those ideas today). But am I crazy for thinking that? Naive, maybe? Probably.
But maybe not.
Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick don’t seem to think so. Or maybe they and all their Kickstarter backers are equally crazy and naive, because that’s exactly what they’re doing with Thimbleweed Park. They’re making another Maniac Mansion; or rather, they’re making another game that they could’ve made back in 1987 if they hadn’t been busy making Maniac Mansion. And they’re doing it right.
So many indiecool games today go for a retro pastiche that I guess is hip and cool and down with the kids or whatever, but the pixel art of something like Super Time Force (a great game, by the way) doesn’t look anything at all like the pixel art of the games whose visual memory it is trying to evoke. Games like that, in “retro style” are the Disney version of history: prettied up and made palatable to modern tastes while still being reminiscent enough of the source material for the associations to be made. But beyond the surface of the surface, there’s really no connection. There’s nothing wrong with these sorts of games, but I crave the genuine article much more than some 20-something’s hipsterized, “rediscovered” version of it.
Behold its big-headed glory!
Which is why I’m so excited about Thimbleweed Park. It’s genuine. It’s real. It’s exactly the sort of game I’d expect to have played back in the late ’80s, or that I would play now through DOSBox or SCUMMVM. It’s not a modern take on a classic game; it’s a classic game made today. Nothing more, and sure as hell nothing less.
I genuinely hope Thimbleweed Park is a great success for Ron and Gary, because I think there’s a definite market for a new LucasArts. Double Fine and Telltale have kind of been serving in that role for a while, but for as great as their games are – and I’m even including Tim Schafer’s sublime return to the point and click adventure that is Broken Age – they’re modern games, made with modern budgets and modern production values. With modern design ideas.
What Ron and Gary are doing is different. They’re making a game just like they would’ve made it back in the golden age, which could very well pave the way for them to create a small studio to keep making games like the 2000s never happened (which, incidentally, I would give my left arm to work at.) They have a very real chance of creating a new version of that old LucasArts magic: a studio that keeps inventing within limitations, that keeps creating and innovating outside of committees and publisher demographics reports. That keeps doing exactly what Lucasfilm Games was doing back in 1987. And never stop again.
Wimpy object editor is buff.
There was a certain, ineffable magic to the games LucasArts produced back when they were still Lucasfilm, on up through the name change until…things changed. By today’s budgetary standards and team sizes, there’s no reason that we couldn’t have a LucasArts of the past today. Small teams, small budgets, limited technology. Brilliant writing, innovative design, solid gameplay. It’s do-able and supportable. It’s even financially viable, because people still want those games; we just can’t get them anymore.
The problem with listening to the Oldies station on the radio is that there’s a finite number of songs. Nobody is making new oldies. Sure, there’s new music and some of it is terrific, but when you limit your catalog to just songs made from this period to that period, you’re eventually going to run out of things to listen to. Or games to play. Or you’ll just keep replaying the same ones over and over again.
Which is exactly what a lot of us have been doing for years now, and we’re ready for something new. That’s also old. And brilliant.
Good luck, Ron.
I love adventure games. Always have, always will. This chapter isn’t about adventure games, though. It’s about the two companies that defined the genre, and how different from one another they truly were.
This all goes a little sideways toward the end, by the way. You might need a tissue.
You have been warned.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
All of my gaming memories are adventure gaming memories. Or something like that, anyway. Ok, maybe not all of them, but most of them. Especially the oldest ones. The best ones.
As I mentioned way back in Chapter Whatever, Maniac Mansion was the first game I remember playing on my first IBM-compatible PC, which was basically just Bob’s PC from Bob’s Computers ‘N Stuff or wherever my parents found the thing, but I loved it all the same. After Maniac Mansion, most of the games I remember are adventure games and RPGs, with the occasional flight sim or RTS thrown in for good measure. Because I believe it’s important to be well-rounded or something.
Anyway, way back in the heyday of the point and click adventure, there were two companies synonymous with quality: LucasArts and Sierra. Except that Sierra sucked and only losers liked their games!
Of course, that wasn’t remotely true. But it was considered The Great Rivalry back in the day, and you had to choose a side. Or at least pretend to choose a side, which is all most people did. I played all the games from both companies, but my heart always belonged to LucasArts. Or Lucasfilm, before it got all fancy and started putting extra capital letters in its name.
After Maniac Mansion, the first game I truly remember loving was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – but I already talked about that in Chapter Seven, so we’ll move on to The Secret of Monkey Island. Except I’ve already talked about that one, too. Crap. I’m starting to feel like all of my gaming memories are adventure gaming memories.
It’s true, though. I deeply, deeply loved LucasArts as a company. Like, probably more than is legal. Don’t believe me? Go read my love letter to them. You’ll get the diabetes.
I could spend this whole chapter waxing nostalgic for my favorite LucasArts adventure games, but there’s not much left of that poor dead horse I keep beating on, so I’ll skip straight to Sierra.
Or rather, what made Sierra adventure games different from LucasArts adventure games.
Because they really were different.
First, they were kinda racist as all hell. Seriously, go back and play a Police Quest or two and tell me how many minorities didn’t work at Sierra back in the ’90s. I guess it shouldn’t be too shocking though, seeing as how they eventually crawled into bed with Daryl Gates. But it was always there, from the stereotypes of Leisure Suit Larry to the stereotypes of King’s Quest, Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight, and almost everything in-between.
Of course, it was a different time, I guess. That excuse gets used a lot. It was also more likely less-intentioned racism so much as it was just the comfy casual racism of the ’80s and ’90s suburbs. I mean, black people just talked like that, right? Hispanic people always sound like Speedy Gonzales, don’t they? Gay dudes are always aggressively feminine and sassy, aren’t they?
It was dinner table bigotry. And it permeated almost everything Sierra did, which always bothered me, even before I really understood it.
Second, they weren’t funny. Sure, they had a couple of comedy series like Space Quest and Larry, but by and large the Sierra games told “serious” stories by way of ridiculously one-dimensional characters and lots and lots of really awful puns. Or really great puns, I guess. It probably depends on your tolerance for puns. I have none.
Third, they didn’t keep up with technology. Sure, they cranked out more games than LucasArts, but their over-reliance on their outdated AGI and SCI game engines really showed when put next to a LucasArts game. While the latter was pushing the envelope of what was possible with detailed animations and visually expressive characters, Sierra was content to stay with the same blobby, amorphous faces of its barely animated characters. Although, to be fair, they relied on character portraits during conversations for expressiveness. So there was that. It’s something.
Fourth, they killed you. A lot. And often in really stupid, unpredictable ways that some game designer thought was funny because they could make a pun out of it. Honestly, if you’ve never played an old Sierra game, you just don’t understand how much those bastards loved their puns. In contrast, LucasArts games never killed you. And if they did, it was entirely foreseeable and preventable and dammit, just get Guybrush out of the water before he drowns, ok?
Along the same lines, Sierra games were usually horribly broken, design-wise. In theory, this added to the challenge of completing a game, but in practice it just led to frustration and anger. See, in most Sierra games, there’s no plot funneling. You can easily pass through a one-way section of the game with no way to return, only to find out hours, days, weeks, or months later (this was during the dark ages before god invented Internet walkthroughs) that you needed to do something or pick something up way back at the start of the game that you wouldn’t ever need until the end of the game. And you’d be screwed. Restore/Restart/Quit!
Fifth, they were still fun. Even if they had no real right to be, judging from all the griping I’ve just been doing about them, they were still fun games. Being a space janitor was fun. Being a frontier pharmacist was fun. Getting RPG peanut butter in your adventure game chocolate in the Quest for Glory series was fun. Yeah, the games were a little racist and had bad graphics with cringe-inducing writing and endless nonsensical death sequences, but they were still a good time. Somehow.
Now, take every point I just made, flip it around, and shoot it back at LucasArts, and you have the basic idea of what BBS and Usenet flame wars were like back in the late ’80s, through the mid-’90s. Sierra fans liked the challenge of dying. They liked getting to the end of a game, only to realize they couldn’t complete the story because they forgot to pick up the snozberries hidden in the back of a random desk drawer in the third screen. They liked the art style. They dug the lack of animation. Everything LucasArts did was too slickly produced, too overly polished. Too mainstream and dumbed down for the masses.
Holy shit. Sierra fans were hipsters before hipsters were cool.
One thing I will always remember Sierra doing that LucasArts never (to my knowledge) did, is an odd little thing. It’s kind of stupid, actually. But that’s how memories work. The weird things tend to stick to the mental velcro in your braincase, while everything else just sorts of slides off like a fried egg on a teflon pan.
What I remember most are the Christmas cards. Or one, really. Sierra used to put out these little holiday greetings every year, but the one from 1992 has stuck with me the longest. And I have no idea why.
I was a senior in high school that year, so maybe the pivotal moment of graduation gave it more meaning? Somehow, I doubt it. Maybe I was going through some shit, and the card just hit at the right time to get me all sentimental or something. Who knows?
Well, I do. Now that I think about it. And it had nothing to do with 1992, except that was the year they released it, and it was the year I showed it to my grandmother. She loved Christmas, and really got a kick out of the little digital card. The snow, the music, the cheery candle and the fireplace. The deer. It was just a warm little fuzzy of the holiday season, and she really dug it. So I’d show it to her every year after that, and every year she would enjoy it like she was seeing it for the first time.
I was incredibly close to my grandmother.
She died shortly before her birthday nine years later. I only got to show her that stupid Christmas card 9 times – if that, since I’m sure I missed a year or two while being Young And Stupid – but I still watch it every year and think of her. I mix that warm holiday fuzzy with the bitter melancholy of age, and I miss her. And the ’90s. And the ’80s. And all the years of my life that are gone, along with all the people who have left with them.
Which pretty much defines nostalgia, I guess.
And why we need it.
Always.
I need a hug.
Ugh. I normally try to make these things at least a little bit funny, but this one took a turn. Sorry about that. The next chapter will have more fart jokes or something. I promise.
Next time: Fart jokes! I guess.
This latest entry is all about one of my favorite game developers of all time. I was going to start with them anyway, but a shocking discovery I made earlier today just cemented the idea, and I had to go ahead and write this entry up as soon as possible.
If you’re coming here from Twitter or somewhere else that might’ve linked to this page for My Absurd Alternative Guardian Theory, you can click here to skip straight to it. Of course, you’ll miss out all of my AMAZING INSIGHTS into one of gaming’s most important companies, but whatever. It’s cool.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
I could easily start my discussion of The Big Three with LucasArts or Sierra, but while I’m on the subject of the Upgrade Treadmill of Perpetual Torment, Origin seems the most logical choice. You see, back before every game released required a new GPU or some other upgrade to run at its highest settings, Origin Systems was already in the nasty habit of making gamers upgrade at least one part of theit PCs in order to play whichever new game they put out. Whether it was upgrading to a VGA monitor for Ultima 6, or adding more RAM for Ultima 7, or upgrading all the things for any given Wing Commander game, no single company put more people on that damn treadmill back in the ’90s than Origin.
Ultima 7, for example, (my personal favorite of the series, by the way) was every bit as much of a resource hog as it was a revolutionary roleplaying game. Because Richard Garriott is a madman who insisted on simulating the entire world of Britannia right down to the individual knives and forks on a peasant’s dinner table, the game was an absolute beast on anything less than a really good 486 with a whole heaping helluva-lotta RAM to back it up. And even that wasn’t enough, because the standard memory management of DOS couldn’t even handle it. So naturally, Origin wrote their own system, which they very rightly named the Voodoo Memory Manager. And it was insane.
Without getting too much into nerdgasm technobabble, the standard DOS memory manager of the ’90s could only access 640k of RAM by itself. Every other game on the planet that needed more memory at the time would use something called Protected Mode to access additional RAM, usually through an extender called DOS/4G. But not Origin. Oh, no. Since Austin, Texas is a place of lunatic genius, Garriott and company tapped into something called Unreal Mode because they were crazy people.
It caused all sorts of problems for people, which were usually solved by custom CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files or even separate boot floppies to keep their machines from loading standard memory management files like HIMEM and EMM386. And even then, with all of that sorted out, the game could still bring a beefy machine to its knees.
Until you upgraded.
Which we all did. Every time. Because it was totally worth it.
Origin dominated the “high end” side of game development, with what I guess would be considered the AAA blockbusters of the ’90s, before sneaky bastards in three piece suits realized how much money there was in gaming and came in to ruin everything. And they did ruin everything, starting with Origin.
Back in the early ’90s, Origin was creating worlds by pushing the envelope in ways no other developer had even thought about, which was great for gamers but also fatal for the company. They were operating at a time before the technology existed that they really needed (namely, CD-ROMs as the standard storage medium instead of floppy discs), and they were creating games on a scale that prohibited their continued self-publishing strategy. In short, you can’t go from making games with a handful of people to giant teams without absorbing a huge loss to payroll – which alone, might be sustainable. But before CD-ROMs brought the increased data storage needed by the amazing, detailed games these big teams were creating, Origin was hit with a second gut punch of production costs. As in, physical production. When you’re trying to cram enough data into a game that could easily fit on one CD-ROM, but that requires at least half a dozen high density floppy discs, your manufacturing costs tend to shoot up.
And Origin couldn’t sustain that. No company could. They couldn’t create the games they wanted on the scale they wanted and still be profitable without help, which is when the Devil went down to Austin, looking for a soul to steal.
That devil was named Electronic Arts, and the soul it stole was Origin’s.
At first, EA was a saving grace. Origin increased its staff even more, bumped up game budgets, spent more time doing bigger and better things, and everything was peachy keen and nifty neato. Until it wasn’t.
As any bean-counting suit is wont to do, EA eventually cracked down on Origin’s growth, which is when things went pear-shaped. Origin slowly stopped being Dreamland and became just another corporate jungle. Teams fought for budgets over other teams, games siphoned resources from other games, and the general shitty nature of office politics slowly poisoned the company.
The details of all of this have been well documented by people smarter than me, but the short of it is that Origin would’ve either died without EA, or it would’ve had to stop making the games it wanted to make and scaled itself down into obscurity out of necessity. Because they were ahead of their time, Origin needed EA. But once time caught up to what Origin had already been doing for years, EA didn’t need Origin.
So they killed it.
But even before all of that happened, the guys at Origin weren’t stupid. They knew what signing that contract at the crossroads meant, even if they couldn’t come right out and say it. But you can see it, even today. Because the enemy in Ultima VII: The Black Gate isn’t the Fellowship or even the Guardian. It’s Electronic Arts.
Back before EA started calling themselves EA with their “Challenge Everything” creepy kid-whisper campaign of nightmare splash screens, they were simply known as Electronic Arts. And their logo consisted of a cube, a sphere and a tetrahedron.
Seems harmless enough, right?
If you’ve played Ultima 7 (and if you haven’t, this guy did a great playthrough of it, in a similar style to what I did with the Baldur’s Gate), you might recognize these shapes from the Blackrock Generators the Fellowship built around Britannia to prepare the world for the coming of the Guardian through the Black Gate. The Guardian was an evil, malignant entity who descended upon peaceful Britannia to conquer and enslave its people. But he didn’t go the way of brute force. Instead, he whispered into the ears of a few people. These people, in turn, created the Fellowship as a quasi-religious alternative to the Eight Virtues that the Avatar (the player) represented. At first, the people of Britannia flocked to the Fellowship, who were actually doing a lot of good in the world. Of course, it was all just window dressing to mask their true intent while they slowly and covertly positioned pieces on the chessboard for an eventual endgame of betrayal and tyranny.
Seeing any parallels yet?
The entire story of Ultima VII is the story of EA’s acquisition of Origin. It was inevitable, unavoidable, and ultimately their downfall. But it was a necessary thing at the time, and the good it did for the company before things took a turn helped Origin create some of the most memorable and influential games in history. (Here’s another take on the whole U7/EA thing, if you don’t want to take my word for it.)
The Guardian
Despite EA having had no faith in the project, Richard Garriott created the first commercially successful MMORPG with Ultima Online. (So successful, in fact, that it basically killed Ultima 9…but that’s another story for another time.) Wing Commander 3 brought the first Full Motion Video to gaming that didn’t suck, with actual Hollywood talent and production values. (But let’s just not mention the movie.) Wing Commander: Privateer was the X series before there was an X series. (Itself a new take on Elite, which had been long gone by then.) Bioforge was one of the first games to use pre-rendered 3D backgrounds with realtime 3D, texture-mapped polygonal characters, paving the way for the entire survival horror genre. (Think Resident Evil, but with aliens and robots.)
So yeah, Origin was Britannia and EA was the Fellowship, which also kind of means Richard Garriott was Lord British and Don Mattrick was the Guardian. If you’re into metaphor and symbology or whatever.
That’s just one theory, though. I have another.
Earlier today, I was going to address my secret shame of never having actually played Ultima 5 by actually playing Ultima 5. I downloaded a copy off my GOG.com game shelf, then snagged the Combined Bonus Pack of manuals and artwork, reference cards, etc… To bring myself up to speed on everything that had been going on in Britannia up to that point, and to gently massage my nostalgia gland, I opened up The Book of Lore that shipped with the game.
Then, I found this on page 23:
Look at that face. JUST LOOK AT IT.
Tell me that isn’t the Guardian. Just look at the face of this nameless blacksmith and try telling me he’s not the evil red muppet man from Ultima 7. You can’t do it!
Because he IS the Guardian. Or, at least he will be. Eventually.
See, I have an alternative theory about the Guardian’s origins that have nothing at all to do with either Origin or Electronic Arts. My theory takes place entirely within the established fiction of Ultima’s canonical storyline. And it goes a little something like this…
The unnamed blacksmith pictured in Ultima 5’s Book of Lore is actually Naughty Nomaan, from the town of Jhelom. In Ultima 5, he wasn’t much more than a generic vendor without much to say. But by Ultima 6, Nomaan had become a serious man of virtue by winning the Rune of Valor in a contest held by the town’s mayor, Zellivan.
Presumably uplifted by his victory, Nomaan tried his best to shed his “Naughty” moniker. Holding the Rune of Valor – on of the Eight Virtues – put Nomaan a little closer to the Avatar, who was himself the embodiment of the those Virtues. Unfortunately, Nomaan lost the rune after he accidentally dropped it in the Sword and Keg tavern, where it was quickly snatched by a rat and carted off into the walls.
When the Avatar comes plodding into Jhelom in Ultima 6, Nomaan is naturally excited to meet this man he not only admires, but also with whom he shares what he feels is a common bond through their valorous deeds. He confides to the Avatar that he dropped the rune and tells him about the rat, confident that the physical embodiment of the Eight Virtues will help him reclaim it.
Of course, that never happens. The Avatar just uses Nomaan’s information to locate the Rune and keep it for himself, since he needs it to, like, save the world and stuff by using it at the Shrine of Valor, along with the Mantra of Valor because of the RPG Law Of Threes. (Also, he can’t get the rune without the help of Sherry the talking mouse in Lord British’s castle, who was a character inspired by a former girlfriend of Garriott’s, but that’s too much subtext for me to parse on an empty stomach, so we’ll just ignore it for now.)
Betrayed by the Avater, Nomaan reverts back to his Naughty Nomaan ways, and quickly falls in with the wrong crowd, who probably have something to do with one of Mondain’s Gem of Immortality fragments or maybe Minax’s evil something or other, because those two really screwed things up for everyone else back in the ’80s. But whatever. The specifics have been lost to time, with the end result being that Nomaan’s hatred of the Avatar eventually becomes so great and eats at him for so long that he slowly transforms into the creature known as The Guardian by Ultima 7.
Need more proof? Fine. Just check out this official tarot card from Ultima 9, depicting the virtue of Valor. What’s that look like to you?
I rest my case.
Next time: The Great Rivalry…
I
t’s been a while since Chapter Six. Sorry about that, but I got distracted by my Baldur’s Gate 1 and Baldur’s Gate 2 bonus features, along with retrospectives for both First Person Shooters and Star Wars games. (Which you should totally check out, by the way.)
But now that I’ve finished the Baldur’s Gate features and written the retrospectives up to the same time period (through 1996), it’s time to get back to the main series and bring it up to speed so that everything lines up. Going forward, new bonus feature updates will come after new chapters in the main series. I promise!
Well, unless I start playing more Pillars of Eternity, that is. Which is a phenomenal game, by the way.
For now, just sit back, grab your favorite ’80s snack and read through this latest entry as we say goodbye to 1989 and enter the Nifty Nineties. (Nobody actually calls them that, do they?)
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
My first real computer brought me into the digital age before anyone even knew what the digital age was. I had a dot matrix printer and a word processor called PFS: First Choice, with a white-on-blue interface that made me feel like Doogie Howser whenever I’d write anything with it. I made random banners with Print Shop and used up reams of tractor-feed paper in the process. I dialed into BBS systems where I could finally go to the Files section and download things. Very, very slowly.
But mostly, I played games. Back then, PC gaming was all about the three staples: Adventure, RPG and some other category I’ll just call Random Shit. And 1989-1990 was a great time for Adventure games.
After Maniac Mansion, I got my hands on Lucasfilm’s next game (no, I didn’t mean to say LucasArts; they weren’t a thing yet), which was an odd little beast called Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. The game itself was pretty wacky, with a storyline involving tabloid journalism and aliens, but the weirdest thing is how I hardly remember it at all.
Maybe it’s because the story went over my head, with all sorts of grown-up jokes that my virginal young mind was incapable of grasping. Maybe it was that I never got very far in it before the next game I obsessed over came out. Or maybe it was just all the damn mazes in the game. I remember those…and I really, really hate mazes.
For whatever reason, I don’t have many Zak-related memories outside of Saved By The Bell and some horrific ’80s nightmare commercial about someone called Zack The Lego Maniac that used to run incessantly during my after-school cartoons. Yeah, I watched after-school cartoons in high school. And I watched before-school cartoons in high school because that’s when G.I. Joe came on and screw you, don’t judge me.
But I do remember Lucasfilm’s next game.
I remember it hard.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was not only the last Indy movie (not counting Crystal Skull, which I’m not even going to get into right now), but it was also a couple of PC games. There was the Graphic Adventure, which is the one I’m going to talk about, and there was the Action Game, which was an abomination of both God and Nature that’s best left forgotten to the mists of time. Seriously, it was awful. Forget what everyone says about Atari’s E.T. game, which was actually not that bad for an Atari game. There are plenty of better contenders for the title of The Worse Game Ever Made, and the Last Crusade Action Game is one of them.
The Graphic Adventure, on the other hand, was amazing. The box even shipped with a copy of Henry Jones’ grail diary, complete with doodles and scribbles, and coffee stains. And for a kid who both idolized George Lucas and wanted to grow up to be Indiana Jones, it was the perfect addition to an already fantastic game.
Sidenote: Games often used to include little add-ins that were sometimes used as copy protection (the grail diary was vital to solving a puzzle in the game, for example), but were just as often included as part of immersing the player into the limited graphics of the game world. These little additions were called Feelies, and they started with the text adventure kings, Infocom. Their games, being all text, benefited greatly from these little touches, and Infocom had the most elaborate feelings around. From including the Wishbringer stone itself from Wishbringer, to a Don’t Panic button and a ball of fluff in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Infocom nailed the feelies space, but they weren’t the only ones who did it. Richard Garriott fought to include a cloth map of the world in every Ultima box, along with other trinkets like an Ankh, a coin, or a moonstone. I miss these things, as they were great collectibles before anyone had ever heard of charging triple the price for including similar items in so-called Collector’s Editions of games.
Several things happened to me after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released, but the most pivotal was Ninth Grade. More specifically, it was The Algebra Teacher From Hell who was later quietly dismissed from the school district after vast discrepancies began appearing between students performing very well on standardized tests while failing his class miserably. He was kind of a jerk.
And, while I didn’t get an F, I didn’t get an A either, which was just as bad. I had, up until that year, been determined on going to the Air Force Academy, becoming a pilot, then transitioning into NASA where I could become an astronaut. But you don’t get into the Air Force Academy with crappy grades in Algebra, and you certainly don’t get in after your uncle – a retired Air Force Colonel – tells you that you have no chance of ever becoming a pilot because you’re too tall and wear glasses, which is something that also happened that year. So yeah, with my dreams crushed by both a jerk teacher and a hope-murdering uncle, I floundered.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. But then Last Crusade happened, and I decided I could be Indiana Jones.
I was a weird kid.
Ah, Venice.
And it never happened. I did end up minoring in Anthropology in college though, so I got kind of close. But there’s more to the Last Crusade than my dreams of tomb raiding. While I did want to be Indy – because, honestly, who wouldn’t want to be Indy – I also thought I might enjoy making crap up for a living, like George Lucas did. So I decided I’d also be a filmmaker.
Which also never happened.
Because life is endless parade of constant disappointment.
But anyway, back to the game.
I played the hell out of the graphic adventure. It hit all the right notes from the movies and then some, without ever deviating wildly from the source material, like so many licensed games tend to do. Also, the end sequence where Indy has to get through the trials to claim the grail was hilarious – but only if you died while doing it. I’m not going to spoil the joke though, so you’ll just have to play it for yourself.
However, shortly after Indy and a handful of other games, something strange happened. I discovered that my amazing PC wasn’t quite so amazing after all, because someone went and invented something called VGA and sound cards.
Which is when I took my first steps upon the Treadmill of Perpetual Torment us gamers call Upgrading Your PC. And it sucked.
I had to save all my pennies to buy a VGA adapter AND a VGA monitor, which took way too long for my impatient teenage brain to endure. It eventually happened though, and the first game I remember playing was Prince of Persia. It had decent PC speaker support, so I didn’t miss the sound card all that much, and the VGA graphics were beautiful to my naive young eyes.
These brilliant phone cases are from Maya Pixelskaya. Click the picture and check out her store. She does wondrous things.
I mostly sucked at the game and never managed to complete it, but it was a masterpiece of design that fell firmly into the Random Shit category of PC gaming. It was an action game, but not really a sidescroller. It was a platformer, but not really. It had sword fighting, but only kind of. But on the whole, all the random pieces fit together to form a brilliant time-waster.
But it didn’t hold me over for long, because all the pretty VGA versions of other games coming out also started shipping with sound card support. I couldn’t stand the fact that I was missing out on the AMAZING MIDI MUSIC and crackly, low-sampled digitized sounds of all these great games. Fortunately, I didn’t end up having to buy the sound card myself, because Santa left one under our Christmas tree in 1990.bAlong with a copy of The Secret of Monkey Island.
And my world was forever changed.
Again.
The Secret of Monkey Island was a revelation. From the opening notes of its brilliant soundtrack, to its razor-sharp dialog and inventive puzzle design, it was everything I loved about gaming back then. I’ve always been a huge fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World, and Monkey Island was that ride, given digital life. There had never been a greater surrogate for a player than Guybrush Threepwood, the bumbling pirate wannabe who had no idea what he was doing, and the jokes were just phenomenal.
Sidenote: The Secret of Monkey Island would come back up way later in my life, after I learned that the girl I was seeing had also been a big fan of the game when she was younger. She’d played it with her brother, who was tragically killed in a car crash when the driver of an 18-wheeler fell asleep at the wheel. It was a special game to her for that reason, and it was a bond we shared from our childhoods. Naturally, when it came time to propose, I knew I had to somehow include it when I popped the question. So, with a little help from Ron Gilbert and the ScummC community, I modified the intro to Monkey Island 2 and used it to ask my wife to marry me. (I wrote about it here, if you’re interested.)
After Monkey Island came Ultima VI: The False Prophet, which was a game that dominated my time until I’d completed it. Richard Garriott had never crafted a more detailed world simulation, even if some of it was a little crazy. (Seriously, Richard. What were you thinking with the containers?)
The most important thing about U6 was that it brought me back to Ultima. After being unable to play the fifth game in the series when my Apple ][ clone lacked sufficient RAM, I hadn’t set foot in Britannia since 1985. Or maybe ’86, depending on when I actually finished Ultima IV. At any rate, it’d been away from my second home for far too long. And Ultima VI really did feel like coming home.
Which leads me to a shocking confession. I’m one of the biggest Ultima fans on the planet, and I’ve never played Ultima V. Like, ever. It just skipped me, and I skipped it. I really do need to go back and play it, but transitioning back into the world of Ten Million Keyboard Commands is hard when you’re used to modern conveniences like actual user interfaces.
I briefly considered doing a write-up of a Ultima 5 playthrough for another bonus feature, but Noah Antwiler already covered that ground in a pretty spectacular fashion. If you’ve never checked out The Spoony One’s Ultima series, you really should. Here, gather your party and venture forth to this handy link. You won’t be sorry.
I had no memory of banishing Lord Blackthorn when this intro told me I did. I HAVE BEEN LIVING A LIE.
So there you have it. My secret shame. I never played what many people consider to be the best Ultima, simply because I couldn’t run it at the time and nobody had bothered to tell me about the Upgrade Treadmill of Perpetual Torment back in 1988, so I didn’t even realize I could’ve just bought more RAM.
Which was probably a good thing, in the end. The Apple ][ was on its way out anyway, and if I’d never been forced into getting an IBM clone back in ’89, I might not have grown up to be the amazing nerd I am today.
So there’s that.
Next time: The Big Three!
(Spoiler alert: It’s LucasArts, Origin and Sierra.)
With the digital release of the Star Wars movies coinciding with my continuing Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek series, I thought it would be fun to compile a retrospective look back at every Star Wars game ever made. Like, ever. On the planet.
There will be a LOT of bad game here, but there are also a lot of great games, too. I’d wager that Star Wars has produced more games than any other licensed property, but I’m not a betting man and there’s all that Star Trek business to consider. Still, if it’s not the most prolific of gaming-related IPs, it’s certainly one of the most. And it’s worth covering here.
BONUS FEATURE: Star Wars Games
The Complete Life Bytes Series
I grew up with Star Wars. My story of growing up geek without Star Wars would just be growing up normal, and it’d be as boring as it sounds. The films of George Lucas colored my childhood in ways I never understood at the time, and continue to affect me to this day, despite my less than positive reaction to the prequels or any of that Clone Wars business.
I still love Star Wars. I will always love Star Wars. And these are the games I played (most of them, anyway) that helped me live Star Wars.
I’m going to add to this list as I add to my FPS Retrospective, whenever I post new chapters in the main Life Bytes series. Right now, this list and the FPS cover all the way to 1996. Once I post the next few chapters of Life Bytes and also get it up to 1996, I’ll come back and add to these retrospectives as the main series gets to the years in question.
And now, with all that out of the way – Let’s get started!
This was the first Star Wars game ever produced, for one of the most influential video game consoles ever made, the Atari 2600. There’s not much to the game, but it was actually one of the best looking titles on the system. The gameplay basically consists of flying your Snowspeeder-shaped blip around and attacking giant elephant-shaped AT-ATs with your pew-pew lasers.
There was no tow cable action, unfortunately, because no one had invented the third dimension yet. The game takes place entirely on a two-dimensional plane, so you couldn’t fly your little blip around one of the Walkers if you wanted to. Instead, you get to ineffectively pew-pew them until you see a weak spot appear in the form of a color-cycling square. Then you pew-pew that square and save the galaxy.
Or maybe just Hoth. Or actually, Hoth falls anyway, so all of your efforts are for naught. Which doesn’t really matter, since the game just get progressively more difficult until you eventually lose and give up on life. I dunno, it’s probably a metaphor for the US job market or something.
Pew pew pew!
The second Star Wars game to grace the world and the Atari 2600 was a ridiculous bit of cash-in crap that made even less sense than Jar-Jar Binks. It has two basic phases. In the first phase, you’re flying the Millennium Falcon and shooting TIE Fighters while the Breakout-style force field is still active.
This lasts until it doesn’t, which I guess is when Han Solo and hist Ewok terrorist cell blow up the shield generator on Endor. Once it goes away, you enter hyperspace for some reason (even though the Death Star is right there. Once that happens, you then get to play Breakout proper and chip away at the space station with your laser guns until you expose the core. Hit that and the whole thing blows up. Then you do it again. And again. And again.
It wasn’t very much fun to play, and didn’t feel anything like Star Wars. At least the Empire Strikes Back kinda/sorta felt like you were maybe possibly reliving the opening events of that movie, but this Return of the Jedi tragedy was just a mess of nonsense wrapped up in the barest of Star Wars theming. It was pretty much crap, and if you never played it, you didn’t really miss anything.
Kill it! Kill it with a horseshoe!
The third game for the 2600 was this phallic bit of WTF called Jedi Arena. The idea was that you and another Jedi were squaring off against each other by way of slapping balls with your penises. Or lightsabers. I think maybe they were supposed to be lightsabers. And the ball was one of those laser pewing remote drones thing Luke practices with on the Millennium Falcon in the first movie.
The idea was the one Jedi was the top while the other was the bottom. Then, you’d wave your dicksabers around while trying to deflect whatever was being shot out of the ball in the hope of making it hit the other guy. Do this enough and you wear down his shield, then the ball shoots all over his smug Jedi face.
Of course, Lucasfilm would have us believe we were deflecting laser blasts with our lightsabers in an epic confrontation between two Jedi masters using the force and martial skill gained from years of study and mediation to overcome the challenge of our rivals.
But come on. It was dicks and balls.
And that was pretty much the game as I remember it. But I was a weird kid.
Let’s sword fight!
This game. Oh, god. This game was AMAZING. The cabinet came in two flavors: a sit-down version, and a traditional stand-up cabinet, but both were equally awesome. Vector graphics finally gave us all three of the glorious dimensions we’ve come to expect in gaming, and the whole thing felt more like Star Wars than any of the other games the preceded it.
It consisted of three parts, and you could choose Easy, Medium or Hard mode at the start of each game. The first part had you facing off against wireframe TIE Fighters in your wireframe X-Wing, while trying to pew-pew them with the lasers on your S-Foils (which were locked into attack position, naturally) and avoid their giant Koosh balls of doom. No, I don’t know why you got to shoot lasers and the TIE Fighters shot fuzzy death balls at you, but whatever. It was the ’80s. Cocaine was probably involved. Best not to question it too intently.
The second part took place over the surface of the Death Star, where you shot at and dodged gun towers that rose up to throw more spiky death balls at you. After that, you got to the third part, which was the actual trench run from the first movie. You had to dodge more death balls while avoiding the obstacles that appeared above or below you on your high-speed run toward the exhaust port. Eventually, you’d shoot you torpedo into the design flaw as Obi Wan told you to use the force (in digitized speech, no less), the Death Star would blow up, Han Solo would congratulate you and you’d do it all over again until you ran out of quarters.
There were home versions of this game made, but I choose to ignore them on account of how they all suck.
I have you now.
Released as a conversion kit for exiting Star Wars: The Arcade Game cabinets, The Empire Strike Back arcade game isn’t nearly as cool as the regular old Star Wars game was. It is a lot more blue though, which was kind of cool back when most every vector game was very green-heavy. But other than that, it’s pretty much a cheap imitation of the much better game released two years earlier.
Like its predecessor, it has multiple stages and difficulty levels. The first stage has you speeding around the surface of Hoth, looking for Probe Droids. You have to pew these droids with you laser guns, but you also need to pew their transmissions. Yeah, somehow your laser guns can interrupt their radio transmissions by way of shooting the little wave things that ascend to the top of the screen as you fight. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but yeah. It was the ’80s again. Let it go.
The next phase was probably the most fun, as you actually got to fight AT-ATs and use tow cables. You could either shoot their weak spot and blow them up, or just shoot a tow cable at them for an instant trip-kill. (There was no flying around the AT-AT and wrapping its legs up, though. The tow cables were basically the smart bomb of the game, and you had a limited number of them.)
After that, you went into space in the Millennium Falcon and shot at some TIE Fighters for a bit before ending the game in the final, epic stage of…dodging asteroids. No pew-pewing, no exploding giant space stations of murderous intent. Just dodging asteroids. It was pretty lame.
Wait. When did the Falcon get blue lasers?
Not having lived in Japan in 1987, I didn’t get to play this game until years later, through emulation. You’ve probably never played it either, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The game is very…Japanese, for lack of a better word. It’s Star Wars, sure. But it’s the kind of Star Wars where Darth Vader often transforms into a giant scorpion or a shark. And Luke has black hair. And all of the characters in the movie get kidnapped and taken to different planets by Shark Vader, so Luke has to go rescue all of them.
This version of the game never made it to the Nintendo Entertainment System, which is probably for the best. I’m not sure my childhood could’ve handled a shapeshifting Vader, or an English-speaking Chewbacca.
I can’t really prove this or anything, but I’m pretty sure there’s a special sort of drug known only to Japanese game developers that allows them to create the hallucinogenic acid trip games they so often produce. Why do mushrooms make you a giant in Mario? What even is Pac-Man? Why was it called The Legend of Zelda, when Link was the protagonist? And what the hell were the Octoroks supposed to be, anyway?
Ah, well. No sense trying to understand it. You can probably track this game down on your own if you really, really want to play it. But I don’t recommend it.
Darth Scorpion?
This is the first game based on the first cartoon that was based on the movies. Except that it wasn’t, because it took place before the first movie, which was actually the fourth movie, but the first three movies hadn’t happened yet even though George Lucas kept telling everyone they’d been written for years, so it’s basically just a big jumbled mess of stupidity and confusion.
The cartoon, I mean.
And the game.
The idea is to help C-3PO and R2-D2 escape from some group of green blobby thugs called the Fromm Gang, for some reason. You do this by pushing on-screen buttons to move the droids around (because direct control of the characters was just asking too much), and throwing magical exploding death pebbles at bad guys. There’s also some light “hacking” by way of R2-D2 accessing various terminals and, well, that’s pretty much the game.
I never really played much of this, as I didn’t have any of the systems it was released on. I had to play it whenever I was over at a friend’s house who had a Commodore 64, and even then I usually just played the Ghostbusters game.
It had a marshmallow man and everything!
Just say no, kids.
I don’t know anything about this game, as I’d never even heard of it until I started compiling this retrospective. It’s a “vector-style” game that runs on a computer I’ve never heard of and I don’t…Here. Just watch this, and we’ll move on.
We’ve survived the ’80s video game crash and have moved on to the last of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s glory days. I’m not sure what took so long for a Star Wars game to make it to the system, but the first one released for the console was called – you guessed it – Star Wars, and it involves Luke running around doing some Star Wars stuff. I’m not exactly sure when the game is supposed to take place, since it end with the destruction of the first Death Star, yet has Luke using a lightsaber and Force powers throughout the game, but screw it. Who cares?
It’s a typical side-scroller of the era. Luke hacks at things with his pixelsaber, jumps on platforms and saves the day. Between planets, you get to fly the Millennium Falcon and pew-pew some TIE Fighters until you eventually get to the famous trench run scene and blow up the Death Star with your X-Wing.
It’s a pretty lackluster game. Nothing fancy about it, but nothing horrible, either. There aren’t any Shark Vaders here, for example, but it is really, really hard. You get 3 lives and 2 continues, and that’s it. Die six times and it’s game over, start over, them’s the breaks, kid.
The sequel was released the same year, and I’m combining these entries together because The Empire Strikes Back is pretty much the same game as Star Wars, except with snow in place of deserts and Cloud City instead of the Death Star.
They’re worth a look for completionists, but you’re not really missing anything by skipping them.
You forgot your power converters, Luke.
The first Star Wars game on the Super Nintendo was Super Star Wars, because every game on the Super Nintendo just had to have the word Super in front of it, for some reason. It’s the first Star Wars console game that’s actually any good though, so maybe the Super actually fits in this case.
It’s an action side-scroller, but with really great graphics the likes of which we’d never seen before in a Star Wars game. You got to play as Luke, Han and Chewbacca at various stages, pew-pewing and lightsabering your way through Jawas and Sandpeople, the Mos Eisley cantina, all the way through to the Death Star.
The controls were responsive, the animation was fluid, and it all had a very over the top sort of balls-out, in your face presentation of YOU WILL FEEL STAR WARS OR DIE going on, which was nice. Blasts from your laser guns were very pew-pew, and Luke’s lightsaber even made a nice trail when he flailed it around.
I’m combining the sequels with this entry because, as with the NES games, the SNES Star Wars games are basically the same thing, in different settings. You get more lightsaber time in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but the gameplay and presentation are virtually unchanged from Super Star Wars.
All three are very fun games, and worth a look for either completionists or just fans of good action games from the early ’90s era.
Feel the full power of 256 color pewing!
I’m not sure how to describe these games, as there’s really nothing else quite like them. If you were around PC gaming in the early to mid-’90s, then you remember the emergence of CD-ROM drives and all of the horrible, awful, dreadful, miserable Full Motion Video they brought to the gaming party with them. Seriously, almost all FMV games were bad. Just. Bad.
Rebel Assault was different, though. Sure, it had some FMV cutscenes here and there, but it was mostly FMV as a game, if that makes any sense. The flying sequences were streaming FMV animations with crap overlaid onto the screen that you could control. One way to describe the effect would be imagining a computerized version of that old battery-operating kid’s toy where you moved a race car horizontally as the “road” scrolled underneath it. That’s sort of what was going on in the Rebel Assault games, except the paper road was a heavily compressed bit of Full Motion Video, and the little plastic car was a spaceship.
There were also some ground-based bits to the game, which mostly involved keeping your guy in cover, then popping out to pew pew FMV Stormtroopers. It was really kind of goofy, but also pretty fun. And I mostly hate FMV, which you’ll read more about when we get to Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight.
The Rebel Assault games streamed so much data from the CD-ROM that you really needed at least a double-speed drive to keep it from stuttering all over the place, which really annoyed me at the time because I was stuck with a crappy single-speed drive until I was able to afford an upgrade. If you can manage to track down a copy and actually get it running today, it should be nice and smooth for you.
Hard to say if I recommend playing these games or not. A lot of the technology that went into building Rebel Assault was incorporated into later LucasArts games, so it’s at least worth a peak from a technical standpoint. But Star Wars fans can probably take them or leave them.
Zoooooom!
THIS. This was the game every child of the ’80s had been dreaming about for a decade. This was the game that put us in the cockpit of an actual X-Wing fighter and let us do things other than fly around on rails and shoot at the Death Star. It had a storyline and missions. Wingmen and objectives. Power management, shield controls, weapons systems – and you could even lock your own S-Foils into attack positions whenever you felt like it.
X-Wing had it all. Authentic movie sound effects, an interactive iMuse soundtrack, polygonal flight-sim graphics, cutscenes. Everything was here to relive all the days of playing make believe with your action figures and playsets. It was a dream come true for everyone with the computer to run it, and if you didn’t have a computer that could run it, you went out and bought one so you could. It was THAT good.
Still is, too. You can pick it up for a steal for $9.99 over at GOG.com and it plays perfectly on modern machines.
Nobody thought it could get any better than X-Wing, until it did. But more on that in a minute.
ERMAHGERD!
The Sega 32X was an add-on to the Sega Genesis that I never had, so I never played this game. From what I can gather, it’s basically the Star Wars Arcade game with better graphics and two-player support or something. I don’t know. If I can track down a copy, maybe I’ll play it and add to this entry. Until then, watch this and then we’ll move along.
Take everything I said about X-Wing, crank it up to eleven and you have TIE Fighter. This game is everything X-Wing was and then some. Including a host of upgrades, TIE Fighter really differentiates itself by being the first game that let you play as the evil Galactic Empire. Except the game didn’t present them as evil, because evil empires never think they’re evil.
In what was a surprisingly involved storyline, the Rebel Alliance were portrayed as terrorists sewing the seeds of chaos and destruction in an otherwise orderly and civilized Empire. As a TIE Fighter pilot, you had no shields (until you got better ships), so an entirely new gameplay dynamic was introduced. Your lasers fired a lot faster, but you died a lot easier. And you weren’t just blasting X-Wings and Y-Wings and XYZ-Wings, either. There was as much internal danger from defectors and traitors within the Empire as there were assaults by the Rebels, so you got to fight a bunch of other TIE Fighters, too.
Featuring improved graphics and sound, more complex and varied mission types and a really great storyline involving extra mission objects for the Emperor’s Super Secret Boy’s Club, TIE Fighter was somehow even better than X-Wing, and it remains one of the best Star Wars games to date on any platform.
You can grab it for $9.99 from GOG.com, and you really should go do that. Now. Seriously. I’ll wait.
ERMAHGERD, ERMAHGERD, ERMAHGERD!
(This entry was excepted from my First Person Shooter Retrospective, because I’m lazy.)
Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Dark Forces is not Star Wars Doom. It never was, no matter what that so-called “friend” of yours told you that time before you never spoke to him again. Yes, it’s a first person shooter. Yes, you pew pew bad guys. No, you’re not a Jedi. No, you don’t have Force powers or a lightsaber. Yes, you run around and shoot things. But that’s not all you do.
What separated Dark Forces from Doom was more than just an impressive Star Wars veneer. (And it was impressive. Each map had its own texture set, for example, with very few surfaces recycled between levels.) Whereas Doom was all random corridors and arenas designed to make good game-spaces, Dark Forces tried to create game-spaces out of actual places. Sure, they were limited by the technology (which was slightly more advanced than Doom’s, with room-over-room architecture, actual 3D objects for many elements in the world, the ability to look up and down, jump and crouch, etc…), but LucasArts did its best to at least try and recreate the feel of a, say, the inside guts of a Star Destroyer.
Dark Forces also had an actual story, with cutscenes sprinkled between briefings, mission objectives, and lots of flavor text. It also had puzzles. Lots and lots of puzzles. Too many puzzles, really. And some of them were just ridiculous.
There was this one bit in a detention center where you somehow had to figure out that you needed to find a secret room that would let you enter the elevator shafts you didn’t know you could go into, which would then allow you to cross over the tops of the elevators you didn’t know you needed to carefully position, just so you could access an area you didn’t even know existed. There was a lot of trial and error. And rage quitting.
It’s still a lot of fun today, and you can grab it for $5.99 over at GOG.com.
A long time ago, in a bathroom far, far away…
I never liked this game, but a lot of people did so I’m probably just a snob or something. Coming from a PC, this Nintendo 64 game just felt clunky, slow, confused and just generally not very good. It follows the story of some dude named Dash Rendar as he runs around fighting the Empire and doing random Star Wars crap for hours.
The best part of the game is right at the beginning, when you get to fly a Snowspeeder around Hoth and finally – after over a decade of waiting – get to deploy tow cables to trip AT-ATs by flying around them in circles until the fall like the clumsy robot monster elephants they are. That part was a lot of fun.
The rest of the game? Not so much. It’s filled with padding and confusing, uninspired level design. I remember lots of trash being involved. As in, actual trash. I think an entire level takes place in a trash maze or something, but I’ve tried to block it out. I remember fighting some kind of assassin droid and then there was a bit with Lando Calrissian and I really have no idea. I just didn’t like this game at all.
You mileage may vary, though. If you can find a copy and an N64 to run it on, give it a whirl and see for yourself. Maybe it’s a great game. What the hell do I know?
Dash Rendar? Who comes up with Star Wars names, anyway?
Coming up: Full Motion Jedi action!
I did not like Baldur’s Gate. In fact, I hated Baldur’s Gate. Like, a lot. I tried playing it when it was released, and I couldn’t get into it. I tried playing it again after The Entire World said is was amazing, and I still didn’t like it. I tried playing its sequel, but nope. Same thing.
Then, very recently, I went back and played them again, determined to complete each game and see if they finally clicked with me. The results were kind of hilarious. (Check out what happened for yourself: Baldur’s Gate 1 and Baldur’s Gate 2.) I still despise the first game. It’s a disjointed, broken mess and I don’t care what anybody says. The sequel makes significant improvements, and I actually enjoyed playing bits of it, but ultimately came down on the side of still hating it. It’s like it can’t decide whether it’s an open game or a fixed narrative on a linear path because it’s constantly bouncing back and forth between the two. And both games are way too in love with their own writing, especially when you consider the fact that story is really nothing more than Defeat Evil Bad Guy. Repeatedly.
And so it was with great trepidation that I gave in to peer pressure and decided to try Pillars of Eternity. I didn’t expect much from it, seeing as how it’s the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series and all of the Infinity Engine games in general. But a funny thing happened when I loaded it up. I freaking LOVED it.
I’m not even sure how this game so good, as it certainly doesn’t have any right to be as spectacular as it is. First, it’s a low-budget indie title funded by Kickstarter – something which almost always goes horribly wrong. Second, it uses Unity. Which, while nice for cross-platform portability, is a fairly awful engine that performs somewhere between a three-toed sloth and a narcoleptic garden snail when it comes to optimizations. Third, it faithful recreates the Infinity Engine, albeit with a contemporary sensibility. And finally, it’s the aforementioned spiritual successor to a game I hated. And yet, it’s AMAZING.
So what does Pillars of Eternity get right that the Baldur’s Gate didn’t? Pretty much everything.
I made a tiny ragemonster with self-image issues.
For years, I thought something was wrong with me for not liking the Baldur’s Gate games, when it seemed like every other self-respecting geek on the planet loved them. Then, along comes this game and I realize that it wasn’t the Infinity Engine I hated, nor was it the style of RPG that Baldur’s Gate unleashed upon the world (there’s a fairly big difference between pre-crash RPGs and post-crash RPGs; before the dearth of significant RPGs in the mid ’90s, think Ultima-style games, with Baldur’s Gate (along with basically every Bioware RPG that followed) making up the post-crash landscape). It turns out, what I didn’t like about Baldur’s Gate had nothing to do with the style or the engine. What I didn’t like about Baldur’s Gate was that Baldur’s Gate just wasn’t a very good game.
But Pillars of Eternity is a great game.
First, the writing in PoE is actually good, as opposed to the scattershot narrative structure of the BG games, along with the fairly ham-fisted punches it takes at the language. When BG tried to be funny, it fell flat. When it tried to be dramatic, there was no sense of urgency. When it tried to inspire, it bored. Granted, RPGs have never had the most intricate of stories, but a story is never about the plot. A good story isn’t about what happens; a good story is about the telling. And Baldur’s Gate just failed on all counts. It introduced major characters just before it needed them, which led to a lot of sudden appearances of characters in the late game you were expected to care about, but didn’t. It left out key plot elements until it decided they were important, then forgot about them again. It was just…a mess.
Pillars, on the other hand, has created a vast, dense world filled with excruciating detail – and then it doesn’t tell you about any of it. At first, I faulted the game for this, as it’s a new and unfamiliar IP with foreign themes and concepts players aren’t familiar with, so we need a cipher to run the new information through. This is kinda/sorta done with your character being new to the game’s location, but the narrative still expects the character to be familiar with some general themes that the player isn’t well versed in. As a result, the beginning of the game is an overwhelming cacophony of names, places, gods, souls, history and lore that will go entirely over the player’s head…until it doesn’t.
I attacked my friend after he made a comment about my ears.
And that’s a key point about what makes PoE’s narrative structure so superior to Baldur’s Gate’s. It rewards exploration and patient uncovering of new details that are slowly sprinkled into the mix, like adding a bit of flour to a whirring stand mixer a little bit at a time. Eventually, the dough thickens and you can start dumping it in faster, which is when this stupid baking metaphor ends and the game really picks up. Suddenly, at some point during your journey, everything just begins to slot into place, the narrative gears engage and the great machine of the plot starts moving. It’s skillfully done, and something to admire.
Second, there is no D&D in PoE. And, while you can certainly spend a very long time in character creation, it’s not because you’re fretting over a million stats and numbers like BG forced upon players. Instead, you’re considering options in PoE. The various character classes play vastly different from one another this game, and each in turn can play very differently from even other characters of the same class, depending on the skills and talents the player chooses. It’s not about numbers numbers, math, math, math in Pillars. It’s about character and organic development, which is a definite plus. The spell casting system also makes sense now, because…well, if you want to know what I think about D&D’s lunatic approach to magic, go read my Baldur’s Gate 1 feature. But for now, I’ll just say that I like PoE’s approach much, much better – even if the end result is almost (but not quite) the same.
Third, the environments in PoE aren’t static. Yes, they’re pre-rendered just as they were in the old Infinity Engine, but Obsidian has infused them with motion here and there. It breathes a sense of life into the backdrops that elevates them from being pretty pictures your characters walk around but never really fit into, and lifts them up into being actual environments you explore. This was a major gripe I had with the Infinity Engine, back in the day. I liked my environments to at least feel real, even if they weren’t. I came from the Ultima-era of world simulation, and being dropped into the Look But Don’t Touch static landscape of the Infinity Engine was just painful.
These things are like Choose Your Own Adventure books. And they are AWESOME.
Fourth, PoE never feels like a slog. There are fetch quests, sure. And tons of sidequests, but none of it ever feels like filler. In contrast, Baldur’s Gate 2 had entire, vast sections of required, linear progression that was nothing but padding. (The fish people come to mind, along with the whole of the Underdark segment.) In PoE, the sidequests are interesting, and exploring new areas to complete them actually feels like exploration. There’s a risk/reward mechanic to charting new areas, as there’s almost always something new to discover, along with a quite likely encounter of Things That Will Murder You.
Fifth and finally, the scripted party members in PoE aren’t obnoxious, useless twats – and they’re entirely optional. You can build your own party of mute lackeys who will do your bidding, if you want – which is what I expected to do, after my hatred of all things Imoen. But I haven’t. I’ve kept my scripted party members because they’re not annoying. They don’t jump in to stop my game and suddenly crywhine at me every five seconds about this sidequest or that drama. They banter, sure – but they don’t interrupt gameplay to do it. And when they have something new to talk to me about, the game lets me know by gently placing a chat bubble on their portrait rather than wresting control from me until I click through incessant dialog that is both poorly written and badly executed. Pillars knows when to be concise and when to be verbose, and I actually find most of my party members interesting.
There are a bunch of other things PoE gets right that Baldur’s Gate didn’t. Things like variable speed control for when you want your party to move their asses across the map without having to go make a cup of coffee or read all the Harry Potter books before they get there, and being able to click inside the Fog of War to move into unexplored terrain is a definite plus. Party management is easier, the Stronghold is actually a fun diversion, pathfinding actually works, rest-spamming isn’t an issue, unused party members can still be useful, new classes that breathe life into old tropes, etc… The list is long, and probably better covered by other people who write about such things for a living. Just know that the improvements are vast, and worthwhile.
In short, just shut up and go buy Pillars of Eternity. If you’ve ever liked RPGs, you will love it. Even if you hated Baldur’s Gate or any/all of the Infinity Engine games – especially if you hated them – you owe it to yourself to play a game that finally gets it right. And boy, does Pillars of Eternity ever get it right.
Get Pillars of Eternity DRM-free for $44.99 over at GOG.com.
UPDATE: I am suspending this feature until I’ve fully completed the game. Pillars of Eternity gets significantly more complex with interwoven narratives that I’m going to have to detangle by playing through all of them before I can weave them into a singular, cohesive narrative. I’ll leave this post up for now, but don’t expect any new chapters until I’m done with a game so dense, I might never be done with it.
After finishing my Baldur’s Gate series (which you can read here and here), I decided it would only be fair to play a modern take on the classic genre. As luck would have it, just such a beast exists. It’s called Pillars of Eternity, from Obsidian Entertainment. By all accounts, it’s Baldur’s Gate without all the annoying D&D bits tacked on, in an entirely new setting. Ratings for the game have been through the roof, so I’m eager to see what all the fuss is about.
However, I’m going to take a different approach to this series than the one I took with Baldur’s Gate. Instead of writing it from my perspective as the player, I’m going a little experimental here and writing this one as a sort of novelization of my adventure from my character’s perspective. I have no idea if this will actually work, but it seems like it’ll be fun to try.
BONUS FEATURE: Pillars of Eternity
The Complete Life Bytes Series
As with the other “bonus” features, I’ll probably try to keep all of the Pillars of Eternity entries on the same page for ease of reading and sharing, and because I’m not interested in generating a bunch of extra pageviews by forcing readers to load a new page for each chapter. That said, if (when) this starts to run too long, I’ll probably break it up into a few parts, with several chapters in each one. We’ll just have to see as it goes.
If you enjoy this little experiment, please let me know by sharing a link or two with your friends, or dropping off a comment if you have something nice to say. If you hate all of this or just don’t have anything nice to say, please let me know by not doing any of that.
And as always, you can pick up your own DRM-free copy of Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition for $44.99 from GOG.com.
Oh, and before any purists get mad at me, this it not intended to be a serious, exhaustive retelling of my Pillars of Eternity adventure. It’s something…different. You’ll see. And if you like it, come back tomorrow for the next chapter. I’ll be posting one per day until it’s done.
Born into eternal servitude, the Orlan called Jeet has known nothing but pain and disappointment his entire life. As a result, he has grown – for lack of a better word – into a tiny, ill-tempered bundle of explosive rage. Each muscle in his diminutive body remains perpetually tensed, as if he’s a coiled snake preparing to strike at anything that comes near. Doesn’t much matter what.
Having spent most of his life being regularly traded amongst various noble families who had no idea what they were getting into at the time, Jeet eventually won his freedom after a particularly eventful dinner service wherein his last master made a rather unfortunate comment regarding the Orlan’s ears and then suddenly found himself being murdered with a soup spoon while Jeet towered over him, laughing manically. OK, maybe not so much towered as he just sort of…closely loomed. With malice.
After fleeing his master’s palatial estate, Jeet finds himself alone and on the run. Dodging the city watch and ducking into alleyways, he eventually makes it out of the city and into the rough wilderness of the surrounding area. Once far enough from the city lights to not be noticed by any authorities who might be looking for him, he swats a stinging beetle away from his face and emerges from the undergrowth.
Exhilarated by the rush of freedom, he sticks out his thumb and hitches a ride on the next caravan passing by. The other travelers avoid making eye contact with him on the long road to Gilded Vale, either out of an innate sense of self-preservation on their part, or just because no one feels like kneeling down. It could go either way, really.
As the caravan rumbles its way along the bumpy dirt road, Jeet breaks out in a cold sweat.
Must be the adrenaline, he thinks to himself after the rush of his escape subsides. But soon the sweating grows more severe, and his hands begin to shake. The rest of his body follows, and he loses consciousness.
Noticing the convulsing body gyrating on the floor in front of her, another passenger calls out to the driver of the lead wagon.
“Hey, stop!”
The driver turns around, glares, then yells back to the young woman.
“Piss off, Calisca! I don’t stop till Odema tells me to stop. You ain’t the boss here!”
Jeet begins to shake even more violently than before.
“Look,” shouts Calisca. “We got a man back here having some kind of attack and he needs help. Stop the wagon!”
The driver starts to shout a couple of colorful metaphors at Calisca when he’s interrupted by a scream.
“Look out, you idiot!” she shouts, pointing at the road ahead.
The driver turns around to see a tree has fallen across the roadway. Panicked, he pulls hard on the reins to slow the horses and manages to bring the wagon to a halt just before they crash.
“Well, shit,” says the driver. “There’ll be no end to her bitching now.”
The rest of the caravan slows to a stop behind the lead wagon, and a large man with an impossibly red mustache jumps out of the last one.
“What’s all this then?” he asks, approaching Calisca.
“This one here just started having a fit or something,” she replies, pointing at Jeet’s twitching body. “And asshole up there didn’t want to stop the caravan until we almost crashed into that tree.”
Odema looks Jeet over, then nods and strokes his chin. “Rumbling Rot, I’d guess. Gonna need some spring berries.” He motions to the rest of the caravan to pull off the road. “We’ll make camp here tonight.”
The rest of the travelers pour out of the wagons and set up a few makeshift tents just off the road. By the time the fire’s going, Jeet has regained consciousness and stopped convulsing.
Caravan Master Odema addresses the group, warning them of dangers in the nearby ruins before turning to Jeet. “And you. You’ve got a touch of Rumbling Rot, probably from all the damn beetles around here.” He nods toward Calisca and says, “You go with him and find some spring berries, then come back here. He needs a tonic or he’ll be dead by morning. Keep him alive tonight, if you can. And for pity’s sake, don’t go wandering off too far. We don’t need to be stirring up the locals.”
Calisca nods, then flashes a smile at Odema, “No promises.”
“Um,” says Jeet, his voice still shaky from the almost dying a minute ago. “Can’t you just go get the berries for me? I’m kind of dying here.”
Calisca rolls her eyes and takes a knee. “Don’t be such a baby, little Orlan,” she says, patting his head. “You ain’t dead yet.”
Jeet’s eyes narrow, and he feels the adrenaline start surging through his veins. “Call me little again and I’ll cut out that pretty tongue of yours.”
Calisca just laughs. “Of that,” she says, “I have no doubt.” Pushing up off the ground, she gets back to her feet. “If you could reach it.”
Jeet grabs his axe and starts to lunge at her before he’s snatched from behind by Odema’s massive hand.
“Calm down,” he says. “She meant nothing by it, Jeet.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot of things,” replies Odema. “Like how you need to catch up to Calisca if you feel like still being alive in the morning.” He points to the edge of camp. “Better run.”
Jeet takes off at full speed, which is approximately half the speed of a dwarf and roughly one third the speed of human. Calisca slows her pace to let him catch up. But just a little.
“Damn you, woman!” shouts Jeet as he closes the gap. “Slow down. We ain’t all got legs as long as yours, you know.”
“Talk louder,” she says. “We ain’t all got ears as big as yours, you know.”
I am going to murder you so hard, he thinks to himself. SO HARD.
After finally catching up to her at the edge of camp, Jeet and Calisca make their way into the surrounding forest. It is alive with the sounds of nature, which is really just a nice way of saying Things That Want To Eat You. Jeet tenses up and grips his axe a little tighter as they push deeper into the darkness.
In the distance, a wolf howls. Then another, a bit closer. And then another, a lot closer.
“Get down,” says Calisca as she lowers herself into a crouch. She looks over at Jeet and sighs. “Or, you know. Don’t.”
“What you mean, don’t?”
“I mean you don’t really need to, now do you?”
“That another short joke then, is it?”
She smiles. “Yup.”
SO. HARD.
A tree branch cracks in the shadows ahead of them. Calisca puts her finger to her lips and draws her sword. She points in the direction of the sound, and motions for Jeet to stay on her left while they work their way forward. Another crack, and then a growl. Low and menacing. Calisca raises her sword. “NOW!”
She runs forward, the polished steel of her longsword shimmering in the darkness as it goes down, then dripping with blood when it comes back up. “Jeet! Go for the side!”
The wolf lunges at Calisca, blood pouring from the gash she put in its chest. She brings her sword across her body just as the wolf knocks her back, gripping the blade with her left hand to form a makeshift shield. The wolf bites at it, trying to get to her neck.
Jeet lets out a roar that sounds more like a small dog when its tail gets caught in the door than a proper battle cry, but his fury makes up for it. His axe cuts through the air and lands squarely in the wolf’s rib cage, as it yips in pain and rolls off of Calisca. She’s back on her feet faster than Jeet has ever seen anyone move. But he’s faster.
With his axe firmly planted in the wolf’s tender flesh, Jeet leaps onto its back and begins slashing at it with his dagger. The wolf stumbles and cries out as it falls, then grows silent until the only sound left is the squishing noise coming from Jeet’s blade as he continues stabbing and ripping at the wolf’s hide.
Calisca tries to pull him off, but jumps back when he takes a swipe at her arm.
“Jeet!” she shouts. “It’s dead. Stop!”
He doesn’t hear her. Blinded by fury, he continues slicing at the wolf’s motionless body until there’s very little of it left. The adrenaline starts to fade. He slows his pace, before stopping with the knife jammed firmly into what used to be one of the beast’s eyes.
Calisca looks down at Jeet, covered in blood and almost panting. Or maybe growling.
“Are you…” she starts, taking a step back as she speaks, just to be safe. “Are you all right?”
Jeet just sits on top of the wolf, catching his breath. Eventually, he looks up and smiles.
“Oooh!” he shouts, grinning happily as if nothing at all crazy just happened. He points over Calisca’s shoulder. “Berries!”
Scrambling off the wolf’s bloodied carcass, Jeet runs up and starts snatching handfuls of berries from the nearby bush. Calisca looks on, mouth agape.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she begins. “But are you in any way stoned right now?”
Jeet looks up, his hands stained red from either wolf’s blood or berry juice. It’s impossible to tell which. “What do you mean?”
“Are you feeling alright?”
“Oh, I’m good. Only I nearly died twenty minutes ago and then nearly died again just now. And I’m still dying if I don’t get these berries back to camp and get Odewan or whatever his name is to make Rot juice outta ’em. But yeah, I’m downright peachy. Thanks for asking.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” she says. “It’s just. The way you went after that wolf.” Jeet nods, a flash of recognition passing over his face. “Ah, that. That’s decades of pent up frustration, that is. Nothing for it but to let it out, if you know what I mean.” He points his dagger at the tangled heap of fur and viscera that used to be the wolf. “Better a wolf than a man, I wager. Not that plenty of men don’t have it coming.”
“Are you going to be all right now?”
“I don’t see why not.” He shrugs and holds up a little sack. “I’ve gots me berries, old Wossname will make up my cure juice when we get back, and then we push on to the Vale, happy as pies.”
Calisca’s eyes narrow, either from suspicion or confusion. “What do you mean?”
“What? I means we’ll be on our way is all.”
“I mean about the pies.”
Jeet’s eyes widen. “Pies? You mean back at camp? I love pies!”
Calisca blinks. It’s confusion for sure this time. “What? No. I mean — ”
“No? Dammit. These rot rumbles are giving me a terrible appetite.”
“No,” Calisca stammers. “I mean, yes. We have pies at camp, but no — ”
“Oooooh! What kind? I could just murder a good meat pie. You got any pheasant?”
Calisca looks around for support, and finds comfort in a nearby rock. She sits down. “No, listen. I mean…you know what? Forget it. Yes, I think we have pheasant. Or squirrel, if not. At any rate, there’ll be something to eat when we get back. Which we should do now.”
“Ok, but do you think I gots enough berries?”
“You only need a few.”
“I’ve got a sack!” His smile is all tooth and pride, beaming from beneath the beard.
“Yes, I see that.”
“We should head back,” he says. “Follow me.”
Calisca pushes herself off the rock and moves ahead of Jeet with one large step. “No. You follow me. We need to collect some water first.”
“What for?”
“For the tea.”
“What tea?”
“For the tea Odema is going to make for you.”
Jeet stops and shakes his head. “Oh, no. I don’t like tea.”
“It’s not regular tea. It’s made with the berries.”
“So it’s berry tea?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, that’s more like a juice then, innit?”
“What? Yes. No. I mean, sure. Whatever. Can we please just go now?”
They make their way to a nearby riverbank, where Calisca spies some empty water skins lying on the ground. She stops and puts her hands on her hips. “Damn Sparfel. I knew it.”
Jeet looks up at her and shrugs. “Knew what?”
“Sparfel was supposed to bring back the water, but he’s obviously wandered off to go do whatever it is he does when he goes off alone into the woods at night. Like we don’t all know.”
“What does he do?”
Calisca cocks her head to the side and smirks. “What do you think?”
Jeet’s eyes widen. “Ooooh, maybe he’s hunting. You know, like for pheasant!”
“Yeah,” she sighs. “Hunting.”
Snatching up the skins, Calisca crouches by the riverbank and begins filling them with water. She’s just finishing up the last one when a rustle comes from the bushes nearby. She stops, dropping the water skin from her hand and moving it to her sword hilt in one smooth and silent motion. She gestures for Jeet to stay quiet.
The lower branches of the trees ahead of them begin to shake, and are brushed aside by a Sparfel-shaped shadow. As he comes out into the moonlight, Calisca sees that he is alone and unarmed, and breathing heavily. She sighs and pushes up off her knees to stand.
“Enjoy yourself in there, asshole?” she snarks, just before noticing the very large arrow jutting from his back. “Sparfel!” she shouts, as he falls to the ground. Sensing danger, she draws her sword and moves close to Jeet. She whispers, “Ambush.”
In the next second, two large men in animal skins appear from the shadows. Calisca puts her back against Jeet’s. “I’ll take the one on the left, you ta– ”
Jeet is running full tilt toward the second man while screaming a blurred string of incomprehensible profanities before she can finish the sentence. She sighs and moves toward the other man. “Dammit, Jeet!”
Calisca dispatches her foe with a deft swiftness unrivaled by most anyone who wasn’t the swivel-eyed lunatic beside her. But whereas her strikes are precise, Jeet’s are…not so much.
And although the man he is currently disemboweling with his teeth was almost certainly dead before Calisca’s man was on the ground, Jeet is still shouting profanities through gritted jaw as he tears the man’s intestines from his corpse.
“You piece of mothershitfilthyass scrumblemumbaraburnfh!”
Calisca throws a rock at his head. Jeet looks up, eyes wild and teeth bared. He glares at Calisca for a moment, his gaze filled with a rage and hatred she can somehow feel though the air. But then, it fades. He spits out what’s left of the man’s gastrointestinal tract, before smiling and smacking his lips.
“Heh,” he chuckles. “I reckon he ate peanuts this afternoon,” he says, drawing his dagger and picking at his teeth. “I love peanuts!”
Nonplussed but aware of greater dangers, Calisca just ignores the obvious question and says, “We need to get back to camp.”
Jeet rises to his feet and spits out some chunky bit of you don’t want to know, then puts his foot against the man’s face and pulls his axe from the skull. It takes some effort. He turns to Calisca. “Let’s go.”
They take off running back to camp, although for Calisca it’s more of a light jog. Jeet’s legs, on the other hand, are a flurry of motion. Like a hummingbird’s wings, but with knees. As they run, Calisca explains that their attackers look like Glanfathan Hunters, and are exactly who Odema was warning them not to piss off earlier.
Rounding the corner from the riverbank, Calisca spots another one. She stops and crouches down, but still somehow manages to stay taller than Jeet. “Look there,” she points. “Another hunter. It’s a Glanfathan, no question. I wonder what set them off, though. Unless maybe damn Sparfel back there was desecrating one of their sacred whatevers.”
Jeet starts to ask, but Calisca cuts him off.
“You stay here. I’m going to go around by that tree and try to take him from behind. If there are others around – and there probably are – it’s best if we do this quietly. We don’t need to get their attention all at once.” She stops talking and almost waits for a response, when she remembers who she’s traveling with.
“You assmonsterpieceofmother — ”
Before Calisca can even make it to his side, the Hunter is already on the ground and Jeet is grinning like a madman.
“Wooooo! You see how his head just popped like that?! Let’s find some more!”
“Wait, no! We need to — ” But it’s too late. Jeet is already rushing toward the camp before she can finish her sentence. She chases after him, sword at the ready.
The bodies of their fellow travelers line the edge of camp, their blood soaking into the dirt of the forest floor. The Glanfathan Leader stands by the fire, holding a knife to the last survivor’s throat. “Stop!” he shouts. “Unless you wish this man dead.”
Calisca opens her mouth to try and reason with the Glanfanthan, but it’s already too late.
Again.
Because Jeet.
Slashing his blade across the victim’s chest and tossing him aside, the leader rushes at the oncoming Orlan.
Removing his axe from the crotch of one Glanfanthan while sliding his blade from the throat of another, Jeet turns to face the charge. Sword and axe clash in the night air as Calisca runs to the side of the young rogue on the ground.
“How bad is it, Heodan?”
“Not very,” he replies. “I’ll live.”
Calisca stands and turns toward the battle just as Jeet shatters the left side of the leader’s skull with the blunt end of his axe. He falls to the ground. As blood pools into his mouth and begins dribbling from the side of where his cheek used to be, he looks to the sky and gurgles, “Forgive us.”
As he gasps his last breath, a foul wind picks up around the edge of camp, its cold air penetrating and seeping into the skin of everyone still breathing. A voice cries out, “Get inside. RUN!”
The group scrambles up a small outcropping and rushes toward a nearby cave before the storm is fully upon them. Unnatural blue light swirls in the air while an unnerving wail pierces the night. The storm intensifies as the trio makes it into the cave just before a crescendo of howling wind and the clap of thunder dislodges stone from stone. The entrance collapses behind them.
Calisca lights a torch and looks at Heodan, an unfamiliar look of worry on her face. “Was that…”
Heodan finishes her thought. “A bîaŵac. Had to be.”
“Then we’re lucky to be alive,” she replies, dusting herself off and peering into the darkness ahead. “We can’t stay here,” she says. “We need to — ”
She’s cut off by a soul-piercing shriek and has her sword drawn in an instant. Heodan follows her lead, and pulls out his daggers. They stand shoulder to shoulder and begin to turn in a slow circle. Calisca raises her torch, trying to find what made the sound. For a moment, the air is quiet and still. But then, a whimper.
Calisca flashes her torch toward the sound, sword at ready.
“Nooooo!”
The torchlight bounces off the dim figure of Jeet, slumped against the cave wall. His hands are clutching at his side, blood oozing between his fingers. Calisca rushes to him.
“What happened?” She kneels down beside him, torch in one hand and exploring his body like a worried mother with the other. “Are you hurt? Show me where.”
Jeet slowly pulls his hands away from his side. His tunic is pierced and stained with blood.
Calisca rips a bit of fabric from her cloak and presses it into his rib cage. “We need to stop the bleeding. Heodan, look in my bag for a…”
“For a what?” asks Heodan, helpful but confused.
“Gods dammit, Jeet!”
“What’s happening?” asks Heodan, still helpful but even more confused.
Jeet is whimpering, shoving his bloodied hands over his eyes. He cries out, “I’m sorry!”
Calisca stands up and sheaths her sword. “Come on,” she says to Heodan. “We need to move.”
As she walks away, Heodan remains motionless, still confused. “I don’t understand what’s happening!”
Calisca calls back to him, “Berries. It’s his damn spring berries.”
Heodan looks down at Jeet, whose face is now covered in the same dark red of his hands. “Berries?” he asks.
Jeet nods, sniffing back a tear. “I squashed my sack.”
“Come on,” says Heodan, reaching out his hand. “It can’t be all that bad.”
As Heodan helps him to his feet, Jeet sniffs back his tears. “But Odema said I’ll be dead by morning if I don’t get the berry juice.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
Heodan smiles and shakes his head. “You’ve already had the convulsion, yes?”
“Yeah, back in the wagon. Before we pulled off the road.”
“And you passed out?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re not going to die.”
Jeet blinks and cocks his head to the side. “But Odema…”
“Odema,” says Heodan with a half laugh, “was messing with you.”
“So you’re saying I ain’t gonna die, then?”
“Nope. You could have, but you didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
Heodan smiles while he gathers up Jeet’s things and hands them over. “The Rumbling Rot hits the inside of your body like a thousand cuts, all at once. That’s enough to kill some people, but if you survive the initial shock, you’ll be fine.”
“So why have me go fetch berries, then?”
“Ah,” says Heodan, with a twinkle in his eye. “Well, while spring berries may not be very medicinal, they do have…other properties. Of a more narcotic nature.”
“Oh,” Jeet replies, holding his wet sack of ruined berries. “Double damn, then.”
Heodan grins. “Of course, I’ve heard there are some very interesting mushrooms to be found in cave ruins such as this.” He extends his hand. “I’m Heodan, by the way.”
Jeet smiles back. “We’ll have to keep an eye out, then,” he says, before shaking the rogue’s hand. “I’m Jeet.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured that out when Calisca was cursing your name. Speaking of,” he says, turning away from the collapsed tunnel, “we should probably catch up to her.”
The pair walk deeper into the cave, to a small staircase ascending through an ornate stone archway illuminated by the faint glow of two strange crystal sconces on either side. They find Calisca waiting for them in the light.
“About damn time,” she says.
Jeet walks up and glares at her thighs. “You might’ve told me,” he says.
“Told you what?”
“About the berries and how I ain’t dying.” He points over his shoulder. “Heodan here filled me in on your little joke.”
Calisca purses her lips and looks down to meet his gaze. “It wasn’t my joke, little Orlan. If you want to be pissed at somebody, take it up with Odema.”
Jeet climbs a couple of steps and glares at Calisca’s midriff. “Odema’s dead, like everyone else in the caravan.”
“Well, then you’re shit out of luck then, aren’tcha?” She turns around and starts walking away. “Now let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” shouts Jeet, before she gets very far. “What the hell happened back there? What’s a bee wick?”
Heodan interjects. “You mean the bîaŵac.”
“Yeah, that. Whatever. What the hell was it?”
“A windstorm,” replies Calisca. “Of a kind they only get here in Eir Glanfath. They’re deadly. Never met anyone who’s been through one in the open and survived.”
“Okay,” says Jeet. “But what is it?”
“The Glanfathan believe it’s a divine wind,” adds Heodan. “They believe it’s the gods’ way of reaping souls trapped in our realm that couldn’t find their way through the shroud of death.”
“Ah,” says Jeet. “Gods business, then. That explains it.”
“How do you mean?” asks Heodan.
“Well, I take it this little wind of theirs will reap a living soul as much as a dead one, right?”
Heodan nods.
“And it doesn’t really distinguish between the two?”
Another nod.
“Yep. That’s gods for you. Always turning screws with a hammer. Don’t much matter to a god what damage he does to the furniture, as long as it don’t fall apart when he sits on it.”
Calisca looks at Heodan. Heodan looks back at Calisca. They both shrug.
“Look,” says Jeet, rolling his eyes. “Alls I’m saying is, for all the worrying and killing each other we do over their tiniest commands, gods don’t much seem to care what happens to us along the way.”
“But surely,” starts Heodan. “You can’t be saying — ”
“I can and I am. A god has a problem with a city being sinful, right? So what’s he do? Earthquakes the whole damn place. Swallows everyone up, even though you know somebody in that city was a sweet little old grandma who never hurt nobody. Gods don’t give any shits. Too many people worshiping another god? Flood the world! Oh, those people over there eat cows? Here, have a plague!”
Heodan steps forward. “Ok,” he says. “I think we get it. And you have a point, but — ”
“But? BUT? But what about people born small, eh? Small and ugly, with crazy ears? Oh, them’s must be cursed, says the gods. Or more like says the priests who tell you what a god really meant when they say he said whatever some other priest said he said in some book a thousand years ago.”
Jeet’s hand moves to his belt, his fist clenching around the hilt of his sword. “But that don’t matter none, does it? Them’s is cursed and put on this world to serve their betters, ain’t they? Pay off the sins of their fathers, sort of thing. Never mind they ain’t never done nothing to nobody ‘cept plow their fields, tend their crops, sew their clothes, cook their meals, wipe their asses!”
He pulls his sword from its scabbard and thrusts it within an inch of Heodan’s throat. “Now think long and hard about whatever you was gonna say after that ‘but’. Because I’m paying real close attention.”
Calisca draws her own sword while sweeping over to Jeet and Heodan in one fluid motion. She brings her blade up between the two of them, knocking Jeet’s sword back. Then, she pivots herself in front of Heodan, bringing her sword down in a silver blur as she spins. Jeet yelps.
“Dammit, woman!” he shouts, lowering his sword and clutching his elongated Orlan ear with his other hand. “What’d you do that for? I weren’t really gonna hurt him.”
“Pull a sword on my friend again, little man, and I’ll take off more than the tip next time.”
Heodan puts a hand on Calisca’s shoulder. “Thank you, Calisca.” He looks over at Jeet. “I sincerely apologize if I offended you. That was not my intention. I only wished to — ” He falls forward into Calisca’s back. She spins around, catching him in her arms.
“Heodan?” she says, concerned. “Are you okay?”
He grabs hold of her arms and pulls himself up. “I’ll be all right,” he says. “It’s the cut from that Glanfathan. I’ll be fine. I just need to rest.”
Calisca looks around. “Well, we can’t rest here. We’re right in the middle of their precious ruins, and if there’s no more Glanfathan bastards in here, you can be damn sure it’s because something worse is. We have to keep moving.”
Heodan looks into her eyes. “I understand. But I can’t. Look, over there,” he says, pointing to a small recess in the cave wall. “If we can just stay here for the night, I’ll be able to move by morning.”
She shakes her head. “Too risky, Heodan. We need to leave this place, the sooner the better.”
Jeet steps up, putting his shoulder beneath Heodan’s arm. “The man’s hurt, ya heartless woman,” he says, before pausing and look up at Heodan. “And I reckon I didn’t just help matters none by going off on him like I do. I didn’t mean it, mate. I just…”
“I know,” interrupts Heodan. “I get it, really. More than you might think.”
“Right,” says Jeet. “Calisca? We’re making camp here tonight. If you want to leave, you go right ahead. If it’s as dangerous here as you say it is, then good luck going it alone.”
Calisca smacks her lips and sighs. “Fine. But I’m not dying for either of you.”
“Whatever,” says Jeet, putting his arm around Heodan’s thighs and leading him into the alcove. “We’re all tired.”
Calisca gets a small fire going while Jeet dresses Heodan’s wounds. No one speaks. When she’s done, she retreats into the farthest corner of the area and lies down. Jeet helps Heodan closer to the fire, then lies down himself. Eventually, the trio falls asleep just as the warm glow of the fire dims and the embers begin to cool.
To be continued…
I’m only doing this because I lost a bet by winning a raffle. It was one of the great coincidental tragedies of my life, and I don’t want to talk about it. All I’ll say is that I made a wager that something that had never happened before and that had the most statistically improbable chance of happening than it had ever had before right when I said it wasn’t going to happen…happened. And now I’m stuck doing another one of these playthroughs on the sequel to the game I said I’d never play. So yay me, I guess.
Anyway, I already wrote a lengthy introduction to my issues with the Baldur’s Gate series when I did this for the first game, so if you want to catch up on current events, go read that. But if you’re up to speed, let’s just jump right into my struggle.
Oh, and if you want to play this classic game, you can go pick up the original version (with all expansions) DRM-free for a cool $9.99 over at GOG.com, or the Enhanced Edition for $19.99, also at GOG.com and DRM-free. I’ll be playing the Enhanced Edition here, if you’re curious.
BONUS FEATURE: Baldur's Gate 2
The Complete Life Bytes Series
I loaded up the game and imported my character from the first Baldur’s Gate, or at least I would have if that feature had worked at all. But of course it didn’t, which means I had to hit the Googlebot up to reveal its secrets to me, and then I had to track down my save folder from the first game in the impossible file structure of OSX putting files wherever the hell it wants. Then, I had to copy my final save from the first game into the save folder of the second game, which didn’t exist yet because I hadn’t started playing, so the game hadn’t bothered to create a save folder for me. So, I loaded up Baldur’s Gate 2 again, then started a new game with a pre-generated character so that I could save it and let the game create the folder I needed. Then, I had to quit and copy my Baldur’s Gate 1 save over to the Baldur’s Gate 2 save folder so I could launch the game for a third time and finally import my character.
Already, we’re off to a great start.
The game begins with a lengthy introductory sequence wherein a disembodied narrator tells me about all the things that happened in the first Baldur’s Gate that I didn’t know had happened in the first Baldur’s Gate because I wasn’t paying attention. It tells me that Imoen was a kindred spirit of mine, for starters, which was news to me. Gorion was my foster father, and Sarevok was my brother. And our daddy was apparently the god of murder or something. I was taking notes on all this stuff, when the intro abruptly ended with me being thrown in jail for inexplicable reasons that probably would’ve ended up being explained in the Baldur’s Gate 3 intro, if they’d ever made a Baldur’s Gate 3.
The game itself starts with Sark from Tron throwing magic at my face while he rambles incoherent mumblings about experiments and crap. Then Clayface from Batman waddles into the room and tells the Master Control Program that somebody is attacking the castle. Or dungeon. Or wherever the hell I am.
Gul Madred stops shouting at me about how many lights there are long enough to mumble something about how the attack doesn’t matter, then he teleports himself away because I guess the attack does matter, after all. I have no idea what’s going on, but I’m stuck in some kind of cage inside what appears to be a mad scientist’s prison and I’m being tortured to death. Life can’t possibly get any lower though, so at least I’ve got that going for me.
Then Imoen happens. Right at the start of the game. AGAIN.
Pain. Lots of pain.
Never mind that I left her ass to die alone in the wilderness back in Baldur’s Gate 1 though, because she’s convinced we had a grand adventure together and are best friends 4 ever or something. She whines at me about being tortured for a minute, then she busts me out of my cage and we get moving. There are a couple of other cages in the room, though, so I run over to investigate.
Then Minsc happens. And Boo.
Despite having literally exploded into tiny meat chunks in the last game, he seems to be surprisingly well built. He yells a lot of dialog at me, then says the same crap about his space hamster that I’ve been hearing for years now, thanks to every nerd I know incessantly quoting him at any given opportunity. I end up pissing him off and he goes into a berserker rage, then Hulk smashes his cage and we’re suddenly friends again because Minsc is a mercurial lunatic.
In the next cage over sits Jaheria, who I haven’t seen since I sent her and Khalid packing back near the start of the first game. Of course, she’s operating under the same delusions as Imoen, because she’s also under the impression that we went on a grand quest together to vanquish evil. Fine. Whatever. Believe whatever you need to, missy. I don’t care.
Unfortunately, we can’t open up her cage to let her out since Imoen can’t pick the lock because she’s Imoen, so we have to go find a key. We head over to a room right next to all the birdcages and start rummaging through all its containers while Clayface looks on with disinterest. We find the key, but first I try to talk to the monster.
Turns out, he’s actually a golem, which is the Dungeons and Dragons version of a robot. He can’t think beyond his programming, and his programming doesn’t say anything about murdering us for escaping, so he doesn’t really give a shit. He’s also extremely unhelpful, so I stop talking to him and go rescue Jahiera. She joins the party, then tells me that Khalid was also kidnapped and is probably being tortured somewhere in the prison. I vow to search for him, and we’re off to the races.
Say “Go for the eyes Boo” one more time. Say it! I dare you!
Once I get everyone outfitted with armor and equipped with weapons, we rest so everyone can heal up. The next morning, Imoen tells me how courageous she thinks I am to dare fall asleep in this awful place, and I don’t have the heart to tell her what really happened was that I just accidentally clicked the Rest button when I was trying to save the game.
I save the game.
We start exploring the prison complex and stumble into the Crystal Caves where some kind of magical entity named Aataqah appears and asks me something about pushing buttons that I wasn’t paying attention to, so I answer his question and he summons another magical entity thing to attack me, so we kill it. He gives me a little, “Atta boy!” then tells me to seek out someone called Rielev and free him from his suffering. Ominous.
We set off to find this Rielev person, and the whole time we’re walking around killing goblins and flying things, Imoen just keeps whining about leaving this place. Which is SUPER helpful.
We eventually find Rielev, who turns out to be some kind of circus sideshow attraction in a jar. He gives me some crystals that kill him, but not before he tells me to go use them to wake up Lobster Boy and the Bearded Lady. We thank him for his time as he slips away into the great beyond, then set out to try and find these other people in jars that might be able to help us.
Along the way, we run into some goblins, and Jaheira’s stupid entangle spell entangles everyone like it always does, so we all just end up standing around and staring at each other like idiots. Eventually, it wears off and we kill the little gobbies and move on.
We find a library, and Imoen immediately stops everything to interrupt the entire party so she can whine at me about how much it reminds her of Candlekeep and how she was so very happy there, and can she please just go back home? Sure, kid. You won’t get any arguments from me.
She stays.
Google knows what’s up.
We kill a few more goblins, then I start tearing apart the stacks and looting all the books before I remember that this is Baldur’s Gate 2, and I probably don’t need to bring a special rare book no one has ever heard of to those hipster douchebags back in Candlekeep. So I throw them on the ground, and we move on.
Well, as much as we can, anyway. There are a lot of locked doors in this place, and – big surprise – Imoen the thief is able to unlock exactly none of them.
We wander into a room with some kind of magical Bubble Boy in the corner, so naturally we try to murder him. Unfortunately, no matter how hard we pound on him, he remains unharmed due to the protective power of his bubble. I notice some kind of ornate contraption in the middle of the room that looks like Ogra’s orrery from The Dark Crystal, so I set it to the Great Conjunction, which makes Bubble Boy lose his shield for some reason. We run over and kill him a lot, then jack all his shit. He was carrying something called the Sword of Chaos, which apparently belonged to my brother Sarevok. Sorry, Sarey, but finder’s keepers. It’s mine now and no takes backsies!
Ok, I guess technically it’s Minsc’s sword now, because I can’t wield two-handed weapons effectively and he can. But whatever. It’s cool.
We stumble into another random room and find another random golem. This one is blind because I guess even golems can get cataracts, and he works in the sewers. We lie and tell him that we’re his master so he’ll go and open up some door for us that I don’t know where it is. He moves pretty fast for a giant clay monster, but we manage to keep up and follow him through one of the previously locked doors that Imoen was unable to perform her one damn job on. We charge in, kill some sort of shambling squid monster, then realize Imoen has wandered off and is lost again. We backtrack through the Crystal Caves to grab her firmly by the hand and lead her to where the squid monster was because wizards in the Forgotten Realms haven’t invented leashes yet.
I find some kind of frost key on the squid beast’s body, which I thought I could use to open some kind of locked portal door that’s marked on my map, but that didn’t work. Then I remember that I was supposed to be talking to the other fish people with those crystals that guy in a jar gave to me, so I gather up the party and we find a room full of mostly dead jar people. The few who are still alive wake up with the crystals, but every last one of them just whines a lot about being stuck in a jar and didn’t help me at all, so I’m left wondering what the point of that whole bit was.
I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing right now, so we head back to talk to the one other golem who has spoken to me, which works out to be as useless as a wet Imoen in a thunderstorm. We decide to just attack it instead and maybe see if it’s got a key tucked away somewhere in one of its many impressive bodily crevices, but the damn thing just stands there like four people aren’t try to murder it with swords, because our weapons apparently have no effect on anthropomorphic clay monsters. We stop hitting it for a minute to try talking to it again. It acts like nothing at all just happened and remains useless.
I have no idea what to do now, so I save my game. It tells me that we’ve already been wandering these same half a dozen rooms for 12 days and 23 hours now. Time has lost all meaning.
Around 4pm on our 13th day in Hell, we finally find a door cleverly disguised as a door in a room we’d already walked through a hundred times, so we go through it and find a bedroom. We raid the nightstands looking for embarrassing battery-operated marital aids, but all we find is a necklace for Imoen because she’s like a swivel-eyed monkey and is attracted to shiny things.
Just outside the bedroom, we find a small patch of lush forest and three mostly naked ladies who tell me they want me to “take their acorns”.
Actually, they want us to take their magical acorns to whoever the Fairy Queen is in wherever the Windspeak Hills are. I tell them I will, then they thank me and tell us that David Warner’s real name is Irenicus, as if that means anything at all to me. Oh, and it seems they’re actually dryads. I know this because that’s what Jaheira calls them and I just take her word for it because what the hell do I know? The mostly naked ladies then tell us that this Irenicus person captured them so they could “instill emotion” in him, which I guess is what the kids are calling sex these days. But then they say that they couldn’t help him because he’s barren inside, which probably explains why he’s overcompensating so hard with this massive prison complex.
They also tell me that someone named Ilyich has the magical acorns of power or whatever, and to be careful because he’s really mean. However, it turns out I already murdered him well before I knew what his name was, and I happened to have already picked up the acorns because I’m a loot whore. (Which is probably a good thing, because we’ve killed a lot of crap in this place so far, so I’m pretty happy about not having to go on a scavenger hunt with all the corpses we’ve left in our wake. It’s the little things.)
They also tell me that Irenicus keeps a key to what I assume is the locked portal door that’s marked on my map somewhere in what I gather is some kind of disconcerting shrine to a woman he’s been creepstalking, probably on 4chan. I make a note to keep an eye out for it.
When the dryads are finally done expositioning all over me, Imoen starts going on about how beautiful the mostly naked ladies are, and about how she always used to dream about them, and suddenly Imoen just became a lot more interesting. One of the dryads tells her that she is welcome among them because of her youthful exuberance, which I think is just another word for boobs.
But Imoen says no thank you, because she still just wants to go home due to the fact that she’s a whiny little brat who doesn’t realize when three mostly naked forest nymphs are hitting on her. Stupid Imoen.
Leaving the unexpected woodlands, we make our way into another bedroom and some kind of security alarm goes off, then all the traps that Imoen didn’t detect start springing and the next thing I know, I’m poisoned and Minsc has been slimed by Nickelodeon. We finally manage to shake off the trap effects right as a couple of golems appear and start trying to kill us, so we murder them really hard, right in their silly putty. (Later, Minsc will use their lifeless bodies to lift whole comics pages from the newspaper.)
You can’t do that on television!
Oh, and before I forget, Imoen is apparently a magic thief now, because she suddenly knows all these spells she didn’t know before, but it doesn’t really matter because she refuses to cast any of them. I have no idea why she won’t, but I suspect it’s because she’s just pretending to know magic to try and impress me. It’s not working.
We eventually find the key that the dryads told us about by way of setting off every freaking trap in the entire room because Imoen can’t do a single gods damn thing. We grab it and run away.
Passing back through the forest and the first bedroom, we find a Teleport Portal, which I guess is what we needed the magic key to activate or something, because it’s all glowy and shit. There’s still that locked portal door somewhere back in the prison, but screw that noise. We’re getting out while the getting is good.
We all hold hands and jump into the teleporter. FOR FREEDOM!
…aaaaaaand, we just end up on another level of the prison, because of course this place probably goes on for miles deep beneath the earth’s surface like how Jesse Ventura describes the Denver airport. I bet Irenicus is even a Freemason.
Anyway, as soon as we materialize in a puff of magical wonder smoke, some dude named Yoshimo runs up, begging for our assistance. He’s trying to escape this madhouse just like us, so we welcome him to the team. Unfortunately, I guess I can have at least five characters in my party, because I didn’t have to get to kick Imoen out. Oh well, there’s always the possibility of permadeath, I suppose. Gods willing.
Yoshimo tells me that there are four portals in the next room that do something or blah other blah blah puzzle. I stop listening and just Leeroy Jenkins my way into the room to start smashing things. It’s super effective!
Having solved the portal puzzle like the Gordian Knot, I’m feeling pretty good about myself and we press on. Then, we find a dead body that apparently belonged to Khalid before he didn’t need it anymore on account of being dead. Jahiera goes bugfuck and starts telling everyone to stop talking to her because she’s obviously in pain at seeing the mangled, lifeless corpse of her husband lying before her, and we can all understand that.
Well, all of us but Imoen, of course. She pipes up to tell Jahiera that Khalid didn’t suffer, but Jahiera begs Imoen to be quiet, which just makes Imoen start whining like a child about how she’s not a child. Then, she tells us that she saw Irenicus cutting on Khalid’s body earlier, but I guess she just didn’t think that kind of news was relevant until right now, after his damn window nearly tripped over his mutilated corpse.
Classic Imoen.
Heya! You’re a dead fellow.
We leave Khalid to rot, and wander into another aquarium. This one has people fighting in it, only one of them turns out to be a clone that Irenicus made of whoever this woman is that he’s stalking. The other person is just an assassin who is trying to, well, assassinate her because that’s what assassins do. I try to talk to her, but she just accuses me of being The Master and tries to gouge out my spleen, so we murder her and the assassin both, just to be thorough. Then, we loot their corpses while Imoen continues to whine about some new thing I don’t care about.
We keep wandering around the place and eventually find some pedestals that start shooting death rays at us, but it turns out that I can disarm them with all these magic wands I’ve been holding onto like some kind of diseased hoarder. This also frees up a bunch of my pants pockets, which is nice. I manage to disarm all of them except the last one, because I guess I must have missed a wand someplace.
We continue exploring, and eventually come upon a room with a harmless old man named Frennedan trapped behind a locked door. We free him, and he immediately starts following us around like someone who we’re not at all worried will inevitably betray us at some point in the very near future.
Back over near the death pedestals, we find a room with some kind of empty looking shrine in it, where some more people we don’t know are fighting over we don’t know what, so we kill them all. This apparently terrifies poor Yoshimo who never signed up for this shit, so he takes off back into the pedestal room and starts running around in circles like a crack-addled madman, setting off traps and almost getting himself killed.
He finally calms the fuck down, and I gather my party before venturing back through the teleporter because there’s nothing left to explore here and I still need that last damn wand.
Fear is the mind killer.
It’s day 17 in the dungeon now, and we’re back at that locked door I naively ignored earlier, when I thought we were almost done with this place. We unlock it with whatever mystical key it was that I didn’t know I was carrying, then we walk through and are whisked away to the island of Myst. Or at least it kind of looks like Myst because of the long wooden walkways and silly CGI windmills whirring about the place that apparently due nothing but keep the air moving quickly. But it’s a windmill, which should mean that it only moves because the air is already moving rapidly enough to make it move, but I guess this windmill is just moving the air itself somehow, because it got tired of waiting.
Anyway, we decide to stop trying to find logic in this realm of madness, and press on. We pass more lunatic windmills, until we eventually stumble into the Cave of Wonders or something, because – and I shit you not – we find Aladdin’s frikkin’ lamp. We give it a little rub and a genie pops out who says he has something of mine that he can’t give me until I find his lamp’s twin, because apparently lamps have siblings in this world. Of course, he has no idea where it is, so I’m going to need to search for it because why the hell not. I’ve already been wandering around this place for a damn month at this point, so what’s another few seasons?
We set back out into the prison to wander around while trying to find the stupid twin lamp for the stupid genie. In time, I remember that he said something about the dryads possibly knowing where the other lamp is, which makes total sense because they didn’t bother saying anything about it before. We make the trek back, ask them about it, and yep. They have it, only it’s not so much a lamp as it is a flask because apparently little mister I Dream Of Genie has a bit of a drinking problem. But whatever; it’s not my place to judge.
We grab the flask and head back to the Myst door. We’re almost there, when I see Imoen’s portrait suddenly start turning red for some reason, so I click the map button to get an overhead view because I don’t know what’s going on and DAMMIT, IMOEN!
She’s wandered off again, probably daydreaming of talking to dryads about chocolate and boys or whatever, and she’s found herself stuck in a mess of goblins. And of course she’s just standing there doing nothing whilst they beat the living shit out of her because what the hell is she going to do, whine them to death?
So instead of going back to the genie and getting whatever item it is that I’ll probably end up needing in order to save the universe or whatever, I gather my party and venture forth to save Imoen’s sorry ass. AGAIN.
The green circle inside the green box is Imoen. The other circles are all the people I know who aren’t idiots.
After dealing with more of Imoen’s shit, we head back to Myst island and give the genie his booze. He’s super excited to get his hooch back, so he gives me whatever my item was, then disappears in a flash of Bacardi. I check my inventory, and I now have a sword called Varsona, which probably means it’s badass because it has a name. I equip it immediately.
It then occurs to me that we have a bunch of unidentified wands we’ve been carrying around, which I might be able to use on that last pedestal. Imoen knows the Identify spell, but she still refuses to cast it. Or any spell. Because she’s just that useless.
After spending far too long trying to figure out what her damn drama is this time, I eventually broke down and CONSULTED THE MANUAL. It turns out that she can’t cast any spells while she’s wearing the simple leather armor I gave her because I don’t know the fuck why, but it’s AD&D and who even cares. Armor just helps keep her alive anyway, so there’s really no benefit to having her wear it. I have her take it off and throw it on the ground. Then, I maker her start identifying all the things.
Several days later (literally, because lord knows little miss muffet over here can’t be bothered to remember more than four gods damn spells a day, so we keep having to go back to sleep so she can learn them again each night), and we’ve got all the wands identified.
Back to the pedestals!
Well, that was pointless. None of the wands did anything to the last pedestal, but I did notice a side hallway that we haven’t explored yet. We head down it, ready for a fight. And we get one.
More assassins jump out of the shadows to try and assassinate us, but we have like, a +10 saving throw against assassins by now, so we just kill them a lot and move on. We climb down some stairs into what looks like a sewer pipe, so that’s great news. I just love sewer levels. SO MUCH.
We pinch our noses and move forward into the darkness, when suddenly, cutscene!
We’ve finally made it out of the prison, which I guess means that business with the last pedestal was either totally useless or entirely optional, which is really just another way of saying totally useless, so I don’t even worry about it and just start celebrating our grand escape. But then, Irenicus has to show up and ruin everything.
He pops up out of nowhere and just starts throwing magic at people’s faces. Imoen throws some right back at him, but of course her magic doesn’t do anything at all because she’s horrible at everything. Then, the freaking Guild of Weavers shows up and starts wailing on him with magic songs from their distaffs or something, and the next thing I know, there are explosions and particle effects everywhere. Things are starting to look grim, when something amazing happens.
Bobbin Threadbare appears and tells Invictus or whatever his name is that he’s been performing unauthorized displays of magic, which I guess is a law or something, and they’re going to take him to wizard jail over it because that’s just how The Alliance of Magicians rolls. And while they’re demanding to be taken seriously, they accuse poor little Imoen of the same crime, then teleport her off to jail, too.
THEY. TOOK. HER. AWAY.
Just like that. Poof! She’s gone; teleported about by a magical Trivial Pursuit playing piece. Or maybe it was a pie chart of translocation. I don’t know or even care, really, because all that matters is that Imoen is out of my life. It’s probably not permanent, and I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s going to turn up in an (un)surprising Bioware plot twist at some point, but none of that matters right now. All that matters is that I’m rid of her, even if it’s just for a little while.
Sidetone: If you think I didn’t reload the Auto Save from just before we left the prison so I could strip her useless body of every single thing she was carrying before she got zapped away again, you’d be wrong. Because I totally did that shit.
The rest of my party is still reeling from the unexpected loss of one of our own when I suddenly realize that I have no idea what happened to that nice old man who was following us around the prison before we escaped. I almost start worrying about it for a second, but then I remember that Imoen is gone and it’s like mainlining heroin straight into my happy place.
Nothing can hurt me now.
After the excitement of Imoen going away wears off, we loot all the bodies of the dead mages Irenicus left scattered on the ground, then head off to explore this city I don’t know the name of in the land of I don’t know where. On a whim, I decide to pull out my map to try and get my bearings, even though I know the entire thing is going to covered in the stupid fog of war, but at least I’ll know where I started.
To my surprise, the map opens up to reveal the entire city of Amn. Not only is there no fog of war, but I even have little markers all over the map, telling me where things are. I have no idea how or when I mapped out this area I’ve never been to before, but I decide not to tempt Fate by asking too many questions, so I pick one of the map markers and we head on over to a circus tent because who doesn’t love the circus?
Oooh, I hope they have peanuts!
Of course, when I get to the tent, a guard stops us and tells me that the circus has been closed for my own safety because it’s not like I’m the son of a murder god and can take care of myself or anything. I ask him what’s up with that, and he tells me he has no idea because why would he? He’s just a guard stationed at the entrance with an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the city’s police force, but that doesn’t mean anyone actually tells him anything. I conclude that I’m talking to the Barney Fife of the Amnian PD, so I start talking very slowly, in staccato sentences.
He eventually opens up and tells me that something happened during the morning show and everyone is probably dead because of magic or something, and he’s just waiting for the Cowled Wizards (the guys from Loom I mentioned earlier) to arrive and make everything all better. I’ve heard enough and tell Barney to step aside. I got this.
We step into the tent, which is a lot bigger on the inside. And I mean, a LOT bigger. There’s a giant bridge and huge, phallic pillars and everything. I’m just standing there, taking it all in and wondering what the hell is going on, when I realize that we’ve probably been teleported to somewhere else that is very much not the charming circus tent filled with angry elephants and whimsical clowns I expected to find. Nothing makes sense in this world of insanity and despair.
We cross the bridge to find another damn genie, which I guess are super common here in Amn, so I start to wonder why there aren’t a lot more people walking around with sacks of gold and huge penises, but then I figure these aren’t the friendly, Robin Williams kind of wish-granting genies. They’re just jerks.
This one laughs and says something about us coming here to amuse someone named Kalah, then he asks me a riddle because riddles are what passes for security in fantasy worlds. He says, “A princess is as old as the prince will be when the princess is twice as old as the prince was when the princess’s age was half the sum of their present age.” Then he hands me a multiple choice test and a fucking Scantron, but nobody told me I’d need a Number Two pencil on this journey into darkness and what the hell’s up with making me do math in a video game, anyway? Is this one of those edutainment titles people used to talk about all the time in the ‘90s?
Numbers, numbers. Math, math, math.
I tell the mystical bastard that the prince is 30 and the princess is 40, because I’m a freaking mathemagician, baby. Then, he grabs my Scantron and runs off to the copy room to check my work on the scanner while he gossips about the other teachers down the hall. When he comes back, he tells me that I was right, then gives me 19,500 experience points for being Rain Man and lets us pass.
We cross the bridge to find a giant mosque or something, so we go inside and meet a panicked woman named Aerie, who looks a lot like a very large bald man. She tells us that we need to run away as fast as we can because whoever this Kalah person is happens to be an illusionist in the circus, and this is all happening as a result of some kind of mental breakdown the guy had, probably after he realized the ring leader was skimming his tips or something.
Aerie asks me to release her, but tells me I’ll need a key now that I don’t have Imoen around to fail at lockpicking anymore. Only it won’t look like a key because why the hell would it in this frenzied realm of senseless delirium? She says some commoners are hanging around the tent that isn’t a tent, but they’re really monsters who are holding a sword that’s not really a sword because it’s actually the key and you know what? Screw it. I’m just going to go kill things until something happens, because life is so much simpler that way.
My plans are cut short, however, when I bump into a mostly naked woman. She warns me not to be of impure heart, which I think is pretty rich coming from someone who self-identifies as a Pleasure Slave, but whatever. I ask her who Kalah is, and she goes on about how he’s the beginning and the end and some other wacky shit, and I realize I’ve probably stumbled into one of those Appalachian cults you hear about on the news sometimes. I decide to proceed with caution.
Keep it dapper, Bioware!
We turn around and go down another path, where we meet a giant spider who sighs when we approach and says, “I am a simple woman.”
She tells me that she’s not actually a giant death spider, or at least she wasn’t until the circus went apeshit, anyway. She says her name is Hannah, and that she came to enjoy the circus with her son, although he didn’t come into the tent with her because she’s a horrible mother who just lets her kid wander the grounds all unsupervised with carney folk around, but I guess that’s Amn for you. She says she was watching the circus while her kid was probably out back snorting cocaine off a pleasure slave’s midriff when a gnome came on stage and was really bad at magic tricks. The audience started laughing at him, which set him off and he went all Carrie on the place and turned the tent and everyone in it into his playthings.
We leave Spider-Woman to go explore deeper into this circus of horrors. We walk past the pleasure slave and enter a new room where we’re immediately attacked by werewolves, because there are werewolves here. We kill them all, and they disappear into little puffs of magic smoke because they were just illusions, after all. We head upstairs and are confronted by another damn genie who teleports us to wherever Kalah’s hiding. Or maybe we just walked through a door before he finished casting his teleport spell to send us somewhere else, and I’ve just stumbled upon a happy shortcut away from more fake werewolf slaying. I honestly couldn’t say, because I’m just clicking random shit at this point.
Anyway, we meet Kalah who congratulates us on a great job doing whatever it is we did, then he tells us that his hospitality will kill us and we’re attacked by more werewolf illusions. We kill them, then go wail on Kalah for awhile until the world eventually goes dark and the evil mosque or wherever the hell we just were disappears to reveal the circus tent we were in all along.
Kalah lays dying at my feet, whining that this wasn’t what was promised to him. I tell him life sucks and to get over it, then he gasps and coughs up some blood before closing his eyes forever. Aerie, the large bald man from earlier, has become a blonde she-elf now, and starts shouting something about Dan Quayle.
Come with me if you want to live.
Quayle, who is apparently her uncle, laughs at Kalah’s demise. Aerie is overjoyed to see him in kind of a creepy, Arkansas sort of incest way, then asks him what she would ever do without him, to which he replies, “I dunno, bitch. Let’s find out!” Then he kicks her out of the circus because damn, carney folk are cold.
He turns to me and says she’s my problem now, and I guess she’s joining my party because her portrait is already on the side of my screen, and I guess I don’t have any say in the matter.
I briefly consider choosing the dialog option that will tell Aerie that we’re on a quest to rescue a friend of mine named Imoen, but I don’t want to start lying to her so soon in our relationship, so I just tell her to pack her bags because we’re moving out.
But wait. IS that actually my quest in this game? To rescue the bane of my existence? Seriously?!
DAMMIT, IMOEN!
After saving whatever was left of the circus, I checked my journal to see if it had any clues about what I should do next. It told me I need to be looking for the Cowled Wizards, but didn’t tell me where because why should it finally start being helpful now, all of a sudden?
I talked things over with my useless twats, and we decided to head to the nearest inn to look for clues. According to my map, the closest one was the Mithrest Inn, so we strolled on over. Once inside, we struck up a conversation with Largo LeGrande, who had just recently come into a lot of money after shaking down someone named Guybrush Threepwood back on Scabb Island, I believe. After he was done bitching about the hardships that have befallen him as a member of the nouveau rich, I asked him if he knew anything about the Cowled Wizards. He didn’t, of course, but said that the Shadow Thieves might. So I asked him if he knew where I could find the Shadow Thieves. He didn’t, of course, but he did say I should talk to someone named Bloodscalp about them. So I asked him if he knew where I could find Bloodscalp, but he didn’t, of course. So I just gave up on the whole useless conversation and went and got drunk at the bar.
Wherever you go, on sea or on land, you can’t ever hide from Largo LaGrande.
We stumbled out of the inn some time later, and I checked my map again. There were a couple of houses on it with people’s names who I’d never met before, so I figured they were probably pretty important. We picked the closest one, and stumbled our way over to Cernd’s Home.
Of course, had we been a little more sober, we might’ve noticed that the map said it was Cernd’s FORMER Home, so whoever he is wasn’t there when we showed up. We went inside anyway though, because I guess it was an open house or something, what with the Amnian real estate market being what it is.
We looted the place for a few gold coins and books I didn’t want, then left and went to Fennecia’s place, the other house on my map. Of course, she, he, or it wasn’t home either, so we said screw it and just headed for the district exit.
Which turned out to be a mistake, because then an enormous world map opened up and I realized just how much more of this game there probably is, which made me die a little on the inside. Also, it turns out that my map which I thought had revealed a whole city, had only enough cartography budgeted for the one small section of a much larger whole.
Oh, well. There’s no way through it but to press forward. We leave Waukeen’s Landing and head into the Slums, where we are immediately greeted by Tingle. Or maybe Michael Jackson. Someone who starts conversations by making an Ooooooooo sound, at any rate. This one says his name is Gaelan Bayle.
We’ve taken our first small step into a larger world.
Sidenote: Why the hell do some people get last names in these games, while most NPCs are the Madonnas and Princes and Chers of the world? Is it a good thing to have a last name, I wonder? Maybe some kind of honorific sort of thing, bestowed up certain highly qualified people? Or are last names more like scarlet letters or something, and only the really obnoxious people get them? Further investigation is required.
Actually, I stand corrected. According to the text window, what I mistook for Gaelan’s “Oooooo!” was actually Gaelan’s “Coo!”. Because that makes a huge difference. Anyway, he says I’m the one he’s been looking for, so at first I think he’s just hitting on me or something. I tell him he’s mistaken because I like to let my fans down easy, but then he dangles the Cowled Wizards carrot in front of me. He knows things.
He also mentions something about us being in Athkatla, which just confuses me even more than I already was. I thought we were in Amn. Maybe Amn is the kingdom and Athkatla’s whatever city this is? I dunno, I’m sure it’s probably explained in THE MANUAL, but I don’t feel up to consulting that arcane tome just now. Or even much care, really.
I tell him he’s right, then he shouts another COOOO! at me and introduces himself. Yoshimo says he’s heard of whoever the hell this is, and that he’s connected to the underworld, although I really don’t see how. Any self-respecting gangster would’ve murdered him after the nineteenth cooing episode.
I ask him to tell me what he knows, so he coos again and then tells me he doesn’t actually know shit. But he does say he can hook me up with someone who does, which I’m guessing is just going to be those Shadow Thieves old Largo mentioned way back when we were getting drunk five minutes ago.
Gaelan says it’s not safe to talk here, though, so I agree to go somewhere more private with him. He coos again.
The screen goes dark, and when it comes back up again, wherever we are looks a lot like one of those vacant houses we were stealing things from a little while ago. But then, there isn’t much in this wretched place that doesn’t looks a lot like something else in another wretched part of the world, so we’re probably fine.
It kind of looks like an old lady’s living room, actually.
Gaelan starts talking about this mysterious group again, but he still hasn’t told me who they are. He also says they can probably help me rescue Imoen, if I want them to. Then, I finally get an honest dialog option and respond with, “I have little fondness for her, but I probably should get Imoen back.”
He tells me that it’ll mean his “friends” will have to cross the Cowled Wizards though, which is mighty dangerous…
And here comes the squeeze.
The little bastard wants to extort 20,000 gold pieces from me to help rescue Imoen. I’m not even familiar with the economic situation in the Kingdom of Wherever The Hell I Am, and 20,000 gold pieces still seems like way too much money to give up for just about anyone, let alone someone as useless as Imoen.
I tell him I don’t have that much money on me, and he says it’s no problem and that he can wait for me to earn it. He then directs me to his nephew, Brus, who he says can take me to someplace called the Copper Coronet, where I should be able to find work easily enough.
Yeah, this doesn’t feel like a scam at all. I’ll play along for now, but I’m out whenever the first Nigerian prince shows up.
We turn to leave, when suddenly Aerie, who I met like five seconds ago, nearly breaks down in tears to me about how her wings have been clipped and now she’s a filthy groundwalker or something. I tell her if she’s going to whine, she can do it somewhere else. She apologizes, then tells me she’ll whine to somebody else, instead. (I hope it’s Minsc, because he’ll probably murder her with kindness. Literally, because he’s just not a stable individual.)
Having derailed that particular whine train before it left the station, we turn to leave again. And then, a cutscene happens.
Cooooo! Progress!
We’re in Chapter Two now, and my worst fears have been confirmed. It seems that saving Imoen has been hardcoded into the plot, and there’s no escaping it. I’m just hoping the patented Bioware plot twist has her turn evil before she shows back up though, because I’d be ok with a heartfelt reunion as long as it involved murdering her right in the Heya.
Anyway, once the little chapter crawl has finished, we turn to leave again and GODS DAMMIT, ANOTHER CUTSCENE! Will we never be allowed to leave this accursed room of everlasting torment?
This one takes us to wherever the Cowled Wizards are holding Imoen and Irenicus, although it turns out that his full name is John Irenicus, so at least now I know that having a last name is a bad thing here, after all. So I’ve got that much figured out, at least. The scene ends with one of the dudes saying they’ll rot in someplace called Spellhold, because I guess these guys aren’t exactly into subtle naming when it comes to labeling their magical prison complexes.
Once the however many cutscenes we’re up to by now is over, we turn to leave, and…finally make it out the damn door. Brus runs up to us, who appears to be maybe eight years old because I guess there’s no such thing as child labor laws in the criminal underworld, and tells me I need to meet a girl named Nalia, who needs my help. Then, he leads us to the Copper Coronet and scampers away, probably to go play marbles or make a stool pigeon squeal or something. Whatever mafia kids do in their free time.
We’ve literally just arrived at the next place we should be, when Jaheria pipes up, asking “Where to now, fearless leader?” like some kind of condescending jerk. I ask her how the hell should I know because fuck her, that’s why.
I fear I might have a new Imoen on my hands. I make a note to ditch Jaheria as soon as possible, because you can never be too careful with things like these.
Having seen to it that Jaheria checked herself before she wrecked herself, we open the door and strut into the Copper Coronet like we own the place. Or at least like we’re the protagonists of this little adventure story. Whichever.
Some fratboy townie named Amalas comes at us, all angry that we look like adventurers or something, and threatens to, I dunno, punch me, I think. I accept his challenge and then murder him in some kind of bar room Thunderdome.
Two men enter, one son of a murder god leaves. YOLO!
After the fight, the Nalia person Brus mentioned earlier starts shouting to the whole tavern about how no one is willing to hear her plea, and wailey, wailey, woe is her, etc.. She then comes up to us and asks me if I’m for hire, like I’m some kind of sword-weilding prostitute. Which I guess I kind of am, so I don’t get too upset about the implication. Instead, I tell her that I’ll help her out, and we exchange pleasantries by way of me clicking through a wall of dialog options for what feels like an eternity until she joins my party and we’re off to go do whatever it is I just promised her we’d go do.
I start looking for the exit from this place, when fucking Aerie stops everyone to start whining about her damned clipped wings again, like anyone cares. I guess when she said she was going to talk to someone else, she didn’t realize that meant she needed to talk to someone else. Or maybe she’s trying to talk to the new girl in our party by putting me in the middle. Either way, I tell her the same thing I told her last time, then she whines back the same whine she whined last time, and good lord, but I’m saving the world with some needy ass people.
After shutting her down a second time, we continue trying to find the exit to this impossibly large tavern. I finally spot a door, but before we can leave, another asshole pops up out of nowhere to stop us and start talking at me.
The guy’s name is Anomen, and it looks like he’s a potential party member. He starts chatting me up about things like courage and valor and such, then asks me if I intend to be a force for good in the world. I almost respond in the affirmative, but then I remember that I chose True Neutral for my alignment on the character creation screen because I was somehow paying attention at the time.
Instead, I tell him that there is no good or evil, only balance in the universe, or some other equally vague, pseudoscience philosophy bullshit, and it occurs to me that I probably should’ve named by character Deepak Yoda or something. Anyway, this response pisses him off, and he tells me to get bent and go away. At first, I’m kind of angry about his reaction, but I’m pretty sure this guy would just end up right up there with Aerie or Jaheria regarding their predilection toward stopping everything to say something annoying every five minutes. I consider his rejection a win and move on.
Which is exactly what I used to tell myself when I’d be in real bars in the real world, getting rejected by real women.
Woah. I think I just made a roleplaying connection between myself and my character in the game, which I’m pretty sure is exactly what Tom Hanks and Jack Chick tried to warn me about during the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s. If I’m not careful, I’m going to end up having a psychotic break and start sacrificing children to the Black Goat of the Wood with a Thousand Young or something.
I think I need to take a break.
HAW HAW HAW!
I decided that we could all use a good night’s sleep in a real bed for a change, so before we continue searching for a way out of this unholy tavern, I rent a room from the innkeeper and we get a little shuteye. A brief cinematic plays showing a rat scamper across the floor of our room – which is pretty true to life if you’ve ever stayed at a Best Western – and we wake up refreshed and ready to get back to doing whatever it was that I forgot we’re supposed to be doing.
We resume our interminable search for any possible avenue of egress from this bar of endless torment, when we’re stopped by yet another whining NPC. This one is named Hexxat because no one has a normal name in this foreign land, and she’s speaking in ellipses. I suspect she’s probably from Japan.
“…”
I hope someone out there got that joke, but if you didn’t, you can go type “JRPG ellipsis” into Google while I talk to this woman about whatever her problem is. I’m pretty sure you won’t miss much.
…
We’re heading over toward the corner of the bar she’s crying in, when we’re stopped by some guy named Bernard, because of course I find an NPC with a normal name the second I say they don’t exist, and he tells us that Hexxat is a weirdo. Like anyone isn’t in this place.
She says she needs, “to get to… Dragomir’s Tomb. In the… the district… with… the graves.” I start to break the news to her about Sephiroth murdering Aerith, but then decide that now is probably not the best time to bring up tragedies from her homeland. Instead, I tell her that I can help her out, because I totally know exactly where this tomb of Dragomir isn’t, but nobody else knows that, and I want to maintain my position of authority within the group.
I invite her to join the party so we can go visit this tomb of hers, to which she emphatically replies that’s it’s not HER tomb, but Dragomir’s. Normally, I’d probably be annoyed by this aggressive use of semantics, but then she lets it slip that the tomb is in the Graveyard District, so I can pretend like I knew that all along. Because I probably would’ve never deduced that a tomb would be in a graveyard or anything.
I lie and tell her we’ll go right now, if she wants, and she joins up immediately. But now I have to leave someone behind, because my party is full. I’m torn between Jaheria and Aerie, because I’m not sure which is worse, Passive Aggressive Annoying or Big Whiney Baby Annoying. I think about it for far too long, then go ahead and kick Jaheria out. She probably annoys me slightly less than Aerie at this point, but I can’t have anyone challenging my authority in front of the other useless twats.
Cry some more.
Jaheira bitches at me after I kick her out, in her usual passive aggressive way. She’s all like, “This is unexpected. I thought things would be the same between us, but I guess not…” Um, yeah sweetheart. I kicked you to the curb shortly after the start of the last game, and I’m kicking you out at the same time in this one. Life’s full of little disappointments, innit?
She protests some more, but eventually relents and sulks off to wait in Athkatla, near wherever Harper Hold is. I jot it down on a bar napkin, just in case somebody in my party gets exploded and I need another meat shield somewhere down the line. Then I give her a pat on the back, tell her it’s not her, it’s me, and send her on her way.
But then I reload a savegame and strip Jaheria of all the cool loot and equipment she was holding so she’ll be naked and penniless when I kick her out, for I can be a cruel taskmaster. But really, I have to outfit two new party members while trying to save up 20 grand here. Every little bit helps.
Once Jaheria is finally gone, I spend the next half hour fiddling with inventory and spell management, because that’s apparently half the fun in this game since you spend half your time doing it. Then, we go back to the innkeeper and rent another room when maybe two or three minutes of in-game time have elapsed. I know he sees the new girl in my party and he raises an eyebrow at my sudden need to rent another room within the hour, but I don’t have time for his petty judgments. I just need my mages to memorize all the new spells I just gave them. Shut up.
After we’ve rested again, we finally find the exit to this accursed place, and we head out to do either that one quest the new character we picked up wants done, or that other quest the other new character we picked up wants done. I decide we’ll settle this conflict with geography and just go to whichever one is closest.
We’re heading toward the district exit when we get stopped by some asshat named Cohrvale, who demands we get out of his way when none of us are anywhere near him. I decide to murder him for the effrontery, if the opportunity comes up.
The opportunity comes up.
Open the sky, Bobbin. OPEN THE SKY!
Those of us with swords or other pointy things start wailing on the guy, while my mages start throwing lightning bolts at his friend because they just learned how to do that, and they’re excited. However, the second they unleash the power of Zeus upon mine enemies, one of those Cowled Assclowns shows up and tells us we’re not allowed to use magic in the city, or we’ll get in trouble. What even are these jerks, the Hall Monitors of Amn?
I try to murder him, but the game won’t let me. Which just doesn’t seem fair.
Anyway, we finish killing the guys we were killing before Bobbin Threadbare popped up to write us a ticket and ask about his mother, and we do it the old fashioned way: by chopping them into tiny bits without the aid of magical lightning bolts.
We’re halfway to the district exit when it dawns on me that we’re hauling around a crap ton of loot we’re never going to use, and we’re just going to pick up more if we go do whatever quests these women want done, so we turn around and head to the nearest shop to sell some junk.
I check my map, and see something called the Silver Stockade, which sounds like a promising place to get rid of some of this loot, so we head that way. When we get there, the building is actually an old ship, which seems like sort of a whimsical thing to make a landlocked building out of, but whatever. Maybe we’re in the theme park section of the city.
I try to go inside, but we’re stopped by a guard. He asks me what my business is, and then I get a strange dialog option about having heard rumors I haven’t heard concerning people being led into the shop by chains. I pick that one, then he tries to murder us.
We murder him right back and go inside.
Or try to, at least, but the door is locked. I just shrug my shoulders and start to turn around because I’m so used to Imoen The Shitty Thief not being able to do anything, but then I remember that Yoshimo can pick locks. And I mean, he can actually pick them, which he successfully does to the lock on this door. We head inside and are immediately attacked by more guards. I just want to sell some shit, dudes. What is wrong with these people?
We kill them, then kill some more. I’m not sure what I’ve stumbled into, but I really wish I could use magic without those cowled bastards showing up. My melee fighters are getting a little beat up.
We loot the corpses of the fallen, and now we’re even more loaded down with useless junk I need to sell. I spend a few minutes doing the inventory hip hop until I have everything in order, then we press on.
It is at this point that I realize I can’t read good. We’re attacked by more guards and then someone called Slaver Wizard starts shouting at us and throwing magic in our faces. I make a mental note that I’m apparently allowed to do magic indoors, but then I realize what I just read. This guy is a SLAVER wizard. And these guards we’ve been killing are SLAVER guards. And this place I thought was called the SILVER Stockade is actually the SLAVER Stockade, and now I am become Abraham Lincoln. I didn’t realize what I was getting into when I walked in here, but now it’s time do some emancipating on their asses.
Slaver, silver. What’s the difference?
Me and the fellas start murdering everyone with a red circle around their feet, while the ladies start raining magical death upon the enemy spellcaster.
Or that was the plan, anyway. What actually happened was a lot of death and reloading. Nalia eventually pulls out a wand of monster summoning and conjures up a few beasties to help us out, who serve as great cannon fodder for the two (yes, there was another one hiding behind the first one) wizards to take their aggressions out upon.
It was a heated battle, but we persevered. We loot what we can without doing the inventory dance again, then move a bit further into the slaver’s den of inequity. And then we find more guards and a snake man, and bravely run away.
We make our way back to the Copper Coronet so we can rest and heal up before going back to work on the underground railroad. I rented the Merchant room for us this time, which comes with approximately 15% less rat. Then, I tuck the useless twats into bed because everyone I’m traveling with is a big baby, then lay down to get some shut up myself.
Then Imoen happened.
I was having a perfectly good dream about anyone other than Imoen, when she suddenly popped into my head for a cinematic dream sequence. Except I guess I was doing that lucid dreaming thing Queensrÿche was singing about in the ‘90s, because instead of just watching this one, I got to control it.
Of course, all I could do was click Continue between Imoen’s droning monologue and select the one dialog option available to me when Irenicus showed up, but I’m still getting a handle on this. I’m not quite a Dream Warrior yet, but I’ll watch Nightmare On Elm Street 3 again this weekend, just to brush up.
SHUT UP, IMOEN!
We awake the next morning, and head to a shop in Waukegan’s Promenade to sell some crap before heading back to deliver a little Django-inspired justice to those slavers at the stockade boat thing.
We rush back inside and kill the snake men, then we come across some holding cells. Yoshimo picks the locks and we free some kids, because it’s not bad enough that these bastards are slave traders, but they’re trading kids. I decide to murder them extra hard, right in their Harriet Tubmans.
We storm the next room, where there’s another mage and some douchebag named Haegan calling himself Captain of a landlocked boat with kiddie slaves on it. We murder everyone else in the room first, then beat him up for a little while before I have Nalia polymorph his kiddie-peddling ass into a squirrel. Then, Minsc steps on him until all that’s left is a mushy red stain and some rodent fur on the floor.
We use his key to unlock another door, when we’re attacked by a couple of trolls that refuse to die, for some reason. Beat on them long enough, and they’ll eventually make a swooshy sound and go down, but I guess they have Wolverine’s mutant healing factor or something, because they just get back up again a minute later.
Who needs Child Protective Services when you’ve got a heavily armed party of righteous madmen at your disposal?
We knock the trolls down for the time being, then I run to the back of the room to talk to another child slave. She thanks me for freeing everyone, then I give her 100 gold pieces to split with the other kids so they don’t starve on the streets, because just because I’m an asshole in these games doesn’t mean I’ll tolerate anyone being shitty to kids.
I mean, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Right?
Anyway, after we’re done eradicating the Amnian slave trade in this part of town, we head back to the Copper Coronet to rest and heal up to get ready to finally go do whatever it was I’d planned to do when we woke up this morning. Oh, yeah. We were heading to the Graveyard District to take care of whatever Hexxat’s problem is.
I rent another room and crawl into bed. As I begin drifting off sleep, it dawns on me, and I break out in a cold sweat:
I’ve just done…a sidequest. ON PURPOSE.
I think I’m starting to enjoy this game.
We wake up the next morning to Hexxet’s bitching that we haven’t done her quest yet, so I reluctantly agree to do it first thing. Then, on the way out the door, some pretentious nob named Lord Jeridan offers me 10,000 gold pieces to go kill some trolls in wherever the Windspear Hills are, and I forget all about Dracogen’s tomb or whatever. Dengler will just have to wait.
We start to head out to go take care of this Lord Wossname’s problem, but we end up walking past a slave who keeps chanting “I’m so tired” like some kind of damn mantra, so I guess word’s got out that I’m the Great Emancipator or something, so I’ll have to deal with this first.
The slave cries out to a city guard for help, but the slaver just pays him to look the other way, because I guess things are just the same all over, aren’t they? Minsc sees what’s going down and loses his shit, since it’s been five minutes since the last time he had a violent mood swing, so we rush in to free the slave by way of exploding the slavers.
Are there no honest cops in this city?
They go down pretty easily, and the slave thanks us for our time. We loot the gold off the slaver corpses but leave the rest of their junk and head on toward the district exit, because I’m about to bank 10 grand here and don’t have time for this penny-ante shit.
We’ve almost made it out of the Slums when we’re stopped yet again by another person needing our help, and I can’t help but wonder what’s next in the parade of constant interruption.
This guy’s name is Habib Khalid Achmed Allafif, so I’m already suspicious. In a world where anyone with just one last name is a jerk, then someone with as many as this guy has is bound to be an asshole.
He screams something about how he’d sooner throw a scimitar at someone’s head than suffer the indignity of prison, and I start to realize that D&D is kinda racist. I walk up to Habib to ask him what’s going on and to see if he needs any help, and he responds by throwing a rock at Aerie’s head and running away. Which, I’m not gonna lie, was pretty funny, so I’m not even mad.
There’s some other shit going down here, though. Somebody named Hareishan is murdering Shadow Thieves like they were going out of style, which seems odd. After she’s done killing them, she tells me that I wasn’t supposed to see any of this yet because I haven’t chosen a side. Then, it’s something about obey the will of the mistress and when I’m ready they’ll find me and, honestly, I’m not even paying attention anymore.
I click the dialog option that I hope will let me kill her, but she teleports away. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I loot the bodies of all the thieves she killed and we finally make it to the district exit.
Yoshimo has a katana. Habib gets a scimitar. If there were any actual black people in this game, I wonder what sort of weapon they’d get?
We’re halfway to the rich guy’s house when we get waylaid by enemies, so I guess that’s still a thing in this game because random encounters are SO MUCH FUN. Fortunately, it was nothing we couldn’t handle, so we have them murdered and looted and we’re back on the road faster than Chitika Fastpaws, whatever the hell that means. But it’s something Aerie says every 5 damn seconds, so it’s stuck in my head and you will share my pain.
We finally make it to Windspear Wherever, and we’re not even five damn steps into the place when Nalia isn’t suddenly chiming in again about how I promised to go save her farm or some crap. I pacify her for the time being by lying and telling her we’ll go there right now, but unless she can come up with 10,001 gold pieces to top Lord Fancypants’ offer, she’s just going to have shut up, take a damn ticket and wait her turn like everybody else.
I notice a group of people gathered around a shimmery blue thingamabob, so I figure they’re the ones to talk to about whatever it was I told Little Lord Fauntleroy we’d do here. I go up to one of them to get the 411 or whatever it is the kids say these days, and she tells me I need to speak to the most holy Reverend Brother Odren, hallelujah and praise his name. I go up to another person who looks a little most holy-like, but he tells me I need to speak to their wizened leader, Brother Odren, so I go up to another person who tells me the same fucking thing because every little pixel bastard in this game looks like every other little pixel bastard in this game, and can I please just get some floating nametags or something over here to help a player out, gods dammit anyway.
I just keep clicking on all the little dudes until one of them is finally Brother O-Ren Ishii or whatever the hell his name was because I can’t remember any of this bullshit anymore.
Anyway, he’s very happy to see me, and then he praises Helm’s name and then the whole damn group goes into a religious circlejerk with the praising and the glory be’s and hallelujahs, and I feel like I just walked into a Southern Baptist church, amen.
Finally, this Odren character gets to the point and tells me that he’s glad I’ve come because Watcher’s Keep is a long journey from – hey, wait just a damn minute. We’ve traveled to somewhere called Watcher’s Keep? I thought we were going to Windspear Creek or wherever it was Lord Sassafras told us about. How did we get here?
“God, guns, and Jesus. AMEN!” -Baldur’s Gate, Texas Edition
I curse the ineptitude of my own navigational acumen, then decide to just click through whatever this Odren guy is about to tell me, because I might as well just go do Nalia’s stupid quest now so she’ll shut up about it since ain’t nobody paying me to deal with any holy hellfire bullshit at no Watcher’s Keep, I can tell you that right the Helm’s Damn now.
He tells me he’s the leader of something called the Knights of the Vigil, who were given a solemn charge by whoever the fuck this Helm god is, like that’s supposed to impress me or something. He says that Watcher’s Keep was once a great prison for terrible foes of the gods, so I’m guessing word of all the emancipating I’ve been doing lately has gotten around, and they want me to bust the old prison up and let loose the enemies of the gods. Which is fine by me, because most gods are assholes anyway.
Except that’s not what Odren wants, because that might actually be interesting. No, instead he says that The Great Evil stuggles within and is trying to escape, so he wants me to go murder it or something righteous like that. In Helm’s name and such.
Screw that noise.
I tell him I don’t have time for his bullshit right now, then he gets all middle management passive aggressive on me and is like, “Well, that’s good because you don’t have enough experience to do this yet, anyway. So there!”
Yeah, whatever dude. If I come back, it’ll be because somebody’s paying me, preferably to murder you and all your little cultist concubines and then free Lord Voldemort or whoever the hell it is you’ve got locked up in there. But for now, piss off and see ya.
I check my journal to find out where it is that I told Nalia we’d go, then we head to the area exit and I click de’Arnise Hold on my map, even though my stupid journal said it was de’Arnise Keep, because this is only the Enhanced Edition of a game that came out in the year 2000 and was just re-released a couple of years ago, so naturally nobody could be bothered to do any proofreading over the last 15 damn years.
Anyway, we get to where we’re going and Nalia immediately starts whining that the keep has fallen and will be hard to save now. I tell her to fess up and come clean about what, exactly, it is that she expects me to do here, and she tells me it’s all about the trolls. And, according to the crap Lord Dribblepants was telling me earlier, trolls can only be killed with fire. Which might’ve been useful to know sooner, since I have a couple of mages who could’ve spent last night memorizing a gods damn fire spell or two.
I put a checkmark next to Nalia’s name on The Next To Be Kicked Out list I’ve started keeping.
SHUT UP, IMO– I mean, HEXXAT!
She says some moron named Daleson might know how many trolls and snakemen – yeah, she left that part out, too – there are, and how strong the opposition is, so we should go talk to him so we can plan a complex tactical assault and minimize our risk, which sounds like it’d be a terrific plan if I gave a shit.
I tell her we’re just going to rush in and start smashing things, because that’s what I do. She insists that her way is the better idea, but I stopped listening about ten minutes ago. We’re going in, and she can just cry about it.
Except that before we even take one damn step, here comes Hexxat again, bitching that we still haven’t done whatever HER bullshit quest is yet, and I swear to Helm that I can’t take much more of this.
I ask her if she’s sure she wants to leave, and being that she’s kind of a simple person, she just responds by telling me she needs an item from the Tomb Of Bavmorda or whatever, so I just recycle the dialog options until I get a chance to lie to her again and say we’re headed there right now. She buys it, because simple person.
With that obnoxious bit of recurrent drama dealt with, I gather my party and we get ready to venture forth to murder us some trolls.
Only we don’t get very far, on account of how every useless twat in my party – which is everyone – starts bitching about how tired they are, so fuck it. We’ll just sleep on the damn ground and you mages can spend the night memorizing some fire spells, then I swear by all that is unholy, we’re waking up in the morning and killing all these mother fucking trolls in this mother fucking Keep, so help me Helm.
But of course, that doesn’t happen because as soon as I close my eyes, I get another freaking dream sequence. WHY WON’T YOU JUST LET ME PLAY THE GAME, GAME?!
Every night is like an infomercial in my brain.
This one has me sitting in some kind of church pew while Irenicus is preaching nonsense about the futility of life and power or something, but the only thing I care about is how I’m getting better at this lucid dreaming business, because now I have TWO dialog options to choose from. Geoff Tate can suck my silent lucidity.
I tell him to get bent, but then he tries to convince me that I will eventually bow to his will and accept the “gifts” offered to me, or others will suffer. He then teleports Imoen into the scene and starts torturing her with magic waterboarding and fire spells, and I don’t think it’s having the effect he thinks it’s having.
After dreaming of Imoen’s misfortune and suffering, I awake the next morning relaxed and refreshed from the first good night’s sleep I’ve had since I woke up in that cage 214 days and 19 hours ago, according to my latest savegame. Killing these trolls should be a cakewalk now. You know, endorphins and all.
We try to storm the castle with a frontal assault, but the game designers have put the drawbridge up so that I’ll be forced to follow Nalia’s annoying plan of subterfuge and interminable talking, because they paid somebody to write that shit and they’re not just going to let me skip it. So, fine then. I guess we’ll go find this stupid Daleson person.
We wander all around the area, and I can’t find wherever Daleson is hiding. I do find a little fort, though, with somebody named Captain Arat standing inside. I go up to ask him if we can please go kill things now, then he calls me and my friends vagabonds and I want to murder him. But I can’t because that would be Wrong or whatever, so instead I ask him how to get into the castle.
He tells me that the secret entrance Nalia mentioned but didn’t bother telling me where it was because she’s a manipulative, withholding snob, is hidden in some bushes north of the fort. He also says that he and his guards will help us out, if we lower the drawbridge as quickly as we can once we’re inside. Nalia then helpfully suggests that we should lower the drawbridge as quickly as we can once we’re inside because she’s determined to show me how useless she is.
Thanks for the tip, Useless Twat #7.
We find the secret entrance without any trouble, because it apparently makes a dingly ding sound and glows pink when you get near it, which is pretty damn ostentatious for a secret door, but the whole thing just reeks of Nalia’s absurdity anyway, so I’m not really surprised.
We go inside, and Nalia immediately starts in with the bullshit about finding Daelson again, then reminds me that opening the drawbridge as quickly as we can would really probably be just a swell idea.
I put another checkmark next to her name, then move out.
We open a door to find a servant begging a troll to not punish her anymore, just before it punishes her again with an exploding fist punch. She explodes. We rush in and wail on the troll until he goes down, then Nalia finishes it off with a flame arrow, because despite EVERYTHING ELSE about her, she’s actually a pretty good mage.
After defeating the troll, we notice another secret door that starts glowing pink and aggressively chiming at us, so we check it out and find Daleson. And then The Great Talking Times happen, so I just start clicking my mouse on the Continue button until carpal tunnel sets in and he eventually shuts up.
After he’s gone, yet another secret door lights up and we go though it, only for several more to light up along the way like this whole damn castle is made of those glowy tiles Vanna White spins around whenever someone guesses the right letter on Wheel of Fortune.
R, S, T, L, N and an E.
We go through all the secret doors and fight a bunch of snakemen and trolls, but I won’t bore you with the details. We manage to get outside and lower the drawbride, so Captain Whoever was able to come in and not really do anything. After a while, we needed to rest so Nalia could memorize all her fire spells again, and I had another damn dream sequence, but Imoen barely got tortured in it at all, so it’s hardly worth mentioning.
Oh, and Hexxat has chimed in twice more about how she’s leaving because of that thing I haven’t done, but I just keep telling her the same shit lie and she keeps buying it, because I’m surprised she can even remember her own name, never mind something I’ve only told her 500 times now.
We slowly work our way through the castle, cleaning out the trolls and snakemen where we find them. Nalia says we should go to her aunt’s bedroom because there’s a secret passage in there, which surprises no one in the group. She says it leads to the cellars, which are really just a polite way for rich entitled people to say dungeons without sounding cruel. I suspect the leader of the bad guys is down there, because Nalia suspects the leader of the bad guys is down there. And we both know she’s not bright enough to have come up with that on her own unless a game designer wrote it into her head, so she’s probably right.
Of course, she doesn’t bother to tell me where the hell her aunt’s bedroom is, because she’s only lived in this stupid castle her entire miserable life and hasn’t told me one gods damn useful piece of information yet, so why start now and break her perfect record of not being the least bit helpful?
Well, I guess she’s pretty good at throwing fire magic at the trolls, which is kind of helpful. But still.
I pick a random direction and decide that the bedroom might be that way because how the fuck should I know, so I point and everyone follows me. And then Hexxat chimes in for THE THIRD TIME IN FIVE MINUTES about her stupid quest. And I lie to her about it AGAIN.
I add a new name to The List and put a checkmark next to it.
We’ve been searching this castle for an hour now, and I can find neither this mythical bedroom nor any other entrance to these so-called cellars. Oh, and Hexxat bitches half a dozen more times throughout our search, and I lie a half a dozen more times. I’m stating to think I should just let her go and be done with it, but I’m kind of hoping whatever her quest is will unlock her feeble mind once it’s done, and she’ll become a powerful character. But right now, she’s basically worthless in a fight, and the disinterested moan she makes every single time she gets hit – which is all the time – makes me think this is how MTV’s Daria would sound if she ever played D&D.
THAC0? Whatever.
I’m about to give up and call it a night when I do the unthinkable and consult the Oracle At Googlephi, because sometimes you just want to finish a damn quest and go to sleep. It tells me that some bad guys I’ve already killed but didn’t loot have the key I need that unlocks all the damn un-pickable doors in this accursed place, so now I get to go play Where’s Waldo with a bunch of corpses. Yay.
I spend the next ten minutes picking through the remains of the few things I’ve killed that actually left remains, and another fifteen minutes looking for the ones I haven’t found because they aren’t there. I go back to the Oracle, and she tells me that the guys I’m looking for were in the southernmost room on the second floor of the Keep, so I head there and loot all of the nothing on the floor. Thanks, Google!
Resorting to desperation, I just start feverishly clicking anything I can, until I finally find a tiny bookshelf above a desk that I can open. And there’s the key. On a bookshelf, not a body. It turns out that the bad guys I fought in this room were only guarding the key, not holding it, which is fine. I mean, everyone loves pixel hunting, right?
Found it!
We grab the key, then head to the first unlockable door that looks like it might lead to an rich noblewoman’s bedroom, find the secret door inside, go through it, then listen to Nalia crywhine about how this is all wrong for a minute before we walk down a passageway and through yet another secret door until we finally make it into a room where some dude named Glaicus starts waving a sword at us.
He says something about serving his new master, then Nalia tries to tell me he’s been charmed and we shouldn’t kill him because he’s probably a really nice guy when you get to know him or something, but I’m on the clock here, so we just murder him and keep going.
But of course, what I thought was the aunt’s bedroom with the secret door was a different bedroom with a secret door because this place is just lousy with secret doors. However, while I was searching for the cellar entrance in the wrong room, I noticed another secret door go pink and dingly dingy in another room, so we head over there.
We open the door and find Nalia’s aunt and a guard in the room, which is apparently her bedroom after all, which is a little surprising because it’s kind of a dump.
The Lady Delcia Caan comes out from her hidey hole to insult us for a little bit, then she wanders off.
We’re on our way down to the cellar dungeons, when I spy a room to our left. It’s filled with golems, and a row of lootable statues or sarcophaguses or something, and all three of them have a magical item inside, so I loot them all.
And then the golems wake up and murder me.
I reload and grab the one non-magical item from the room, since that doesn’t provoke the golems. Also, I’ll need it to forge what sounds like a really good weapon later, so that works, too. After I have the item in hand, we take the express staircase to the cellar.
We walk through a few doors, then get bum rushed by some kid of engorged beetles with a severe case of gigantism. We die a few times, but I eventually manage to save and reload our way to victory, because I’m a Time Lord.
We start working our way through the largest cellar ever built by human hand, and come across the place where the Umber Hulks – which is what the stupid beetles are actually called – tunneled into the place. A little section of the floor glows blue when I hover over it, indicating that there’s a container there I can loot. So I loot it.
I pick up a couple of odd looking items that I don’t know what they are because the game doesn’t let you right-click things to look at them before you pick them up, so I end up stuffing the decaying carcasses of a couple of dogs into my pockets without even realizing it. I bet they’re probably useful for some weird reason known only to our game designer overlords, but I don’t feel like having dog bones rattling around in my pants for the next ever, so I drop them and we get back to exploring.
Mmmmm, dog bones!
We search every room of this supposed “cellar” and find lots of prison cells with iron bars on them, further indicating that this is, in fact, a dungeon and Nalia is either lying or is a delusional little shit, or both. Probably both. I start to confront her on it, but then decide that would probably seem too much like giving a shit, so we just get back down to business.
We open up another door to an impossibly huge room for any cellar or dungeon, and come across the troll leader, TorGal. I get several dialog options, which probably means I can talk my way out of this fight if I want to, so I ignore all that and just start beating on the guy. He’s a lot stronger than he looks though, and he has two friends with him, so he murders me and everyone I’ve ever not loved.
I do the save and reload dance a few times, then get the bright idea to open the door, piss him off, then run away so he’ll follow us into the next room. And, since trolls are apparently too stupid to use doors (which begs the question of how they even got inside The Castle of 10,000 Secret Doors in the first place), I close the door behind him and then me and the useless twats take turns murdering him in the kidneys.
Once he finally goes down, Nalia goes all ragecrazy or something and vows revenge on the dude we just got revenge on, but whatever. She never makes much sense anyway, so I don’t see why I should expect anything different to happen.
We can probably leave this place now and complete the quest, but there are still two more trolls in that room we ran away from, so we rush inside and kill them now that we don’t have to contend with TorGal at the same time. They go down pretty easily, then I notice a body lying on the floor in front of a statue that turns out to be Nalia’s dead father, who she apparently doesn’t give a shit about because she doesn’t say a single damn word when we find him, even though at any other point in the game she’ll stop everything to talk about the needy every five minutes. I just keep clicking the corpse for a while, trying to goad her into at least saying, “Bye, daddy” or something, but I’m pretty sure she’s a heartless sociopath.
She is dead inside.
We’re about to leave, when I notice I can loot the statue Nalia’s dad kicked the bucket next to, so I check it out and find over 2 grand in gold, plus more in jewels crammed inside the thing, which I stuff into my pockets because somebody’s paying me for this damn quest, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Nalia.
We leave the statue room and make our way out of the castle. Once outside, Nalia finally shows some sign of emotion and pretends to be upset that her daddy just died. I tell her I want to be paid for this nonsense, and she says she’ll see what she can do, but isn’t making any promises. Then, she reveals what’s probably the real reason we’ve been dragged along on this stupid vengeance quest of hers, and it has nothing to do with killing trolls and everything to do with poor little Nalia not wanting to get married. Apparently, she’s been betrothed to a jerk or something.
She has an idea how to get out of it, which isn’t something I’d normally care about, but then she offers to give me her castle and I start paying attention. She says I don’t even have to marry her or anything; she just doesn’t want to give the Keep up to the Toenails or whatever family she said she’s marrying into. I accept because free castle, then I get a brief scene where I’m introduced to my majordomo and other servants, which is pretty swet. I’ve always wanted my very own majordomo.
Also, I get to collect taxes. My dreams of becoming an oppressive tyrant and squeezing the lifeblood from my pathetic vassals are finally coming true. I can feel it. It’s all happening!
Majordomo dude says the taxes should generate about 500 gold pieces a week for me to come stuff into my pockets, so I’m starting to think about just hanging around the Copper Coronet for the next several months, getting drunk and hitting on wenches until I’ve saved up 20,000 gold by not doing anything. But that probably wouldn’t end up being as much fun as hitting things with sticks, so I dismiss the idea.
Before we leave, I head back through the endless series of secret doors like some kind of medieval Maxwell Smart, and reconstruct something called the Flail of Ages at a hidden forge. It’s a pretty badass little weapon that deals acid, cold, fire and crushing damage all at the same time. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of my useless twats know how to use a flail, so I’ll just keep it in my pocket for now, until I can kick one of them out for someone better.
With the Keep secure and its ownership transferred to Yours Truly, I feel that our work here is finally finished. We should probably get around to taking care of Hexxat’s drama now that we have a minute, because I’m probably going to cut out her tongue if she pipes up about it one more time, which she’s likely to do at any moment since it’s been approximately 30 seconds since her last outburst, so we leave the area and head to the Graveyard District back in Athkatla.
My first castle, by Fischer Price.
Early the next morning, we set out for the Graveyard District, which we’re able to make it to without being waylaid by a single enemy, which was nice. However, as soon as we get here, a messenger pops up out of nowhere, whistling a jaunty tune and asking Aerie if she was Dan Quayle’s apprentice in the circus. She says yes, and then in a shocking turn of events that shocks no one, it seems old Uncle Quayle is in a bit of a pickle and would like us to return to the circus and help him out as fast as we can, because heaven forbid I go one single day without some new asshat demanding I do something immediately and without delay.
When will it all be over?
Honestly, even though I’m actually kind of enjoying Baldur’s Gate 2 (or at least not hating it as much as Baldur’s Gate 1), all of these incessant demands are starting to make playing the game feel a lot like work. And I don’t even mean that figuratively. I mean in the quite literal sense of how every little problem anyone has is always of the utmost urgency, and all your immediate supervisors can tell you is to give this project 100% priority while also giving these other 18 projects 100% priority because they don’t teach middle managers how math works in whatever correspondence course it is that generates these useless drains on society. But yeah, everyone in the game constantly harping on me to do this one thing right now while nine other people are also harping on me to do these other things right now feels a lot like work, and it needs to stop.
But I digress. I click through the messenger’s dialog and Aerie’s subsequent crywhining at me to drop everything we’re doing to go help Uncle Quail’s Egg right this instant, and then just try to pretend it never happened. We’ve finally made it to this stinking graveyard so we can find this Tomb of the Gravitron thing Hexxat’s been bitching about the entire game, and we’re damn well going to do it. Everybody clear on that? Good. Now shut up, and let’s go.
The useless twats seem to have gotten the message, because they all pipe down and allow me to finally click somewhere on the screen to get us moving again. And gods dammit, but here’s goes Hexxat with her bitching again. EVEN THOUGH WE ARE EXACTLY WHERE SHE WANTS TO GO, TO DO WHAT SHE WANTS DONE.
“We need to go to where we are right now, or I’ll leave you and go to where we are right now!”
But I don’t really think I can get too upset with her. The poor lunatic clearly jumped off the Sane Train about a dozen stops back, so she’s not exactly all here. She probably doesn’t even realize we’re in the graveyard, so I just click through the same dialog options again, and reassure her that’ll we’ll head to where we already are as soon as she stops talking. She just nods and stares off into the distance like normal, so I guess everything’s fine.
AND OH MY GOD, ANOTHER INTERRUPTION. We’ve taken literally NO STEPS into this graveyard, and I’ve already had a messenger interrupt me, then had to stop and listen to Aerie’s whining, which was followed up by Hexxat’s crazy ass being crazy again, and now I’ve got some kid named Delon – who apparently spends his nights hanging out in cemeteries, which can’t be at all healthy – running up to me, begging for help that he needs, of course, RIGHT THIS VERY INSTANT.
Saints preserve us.
The kid says he comes from someplace called Imnesvale in somewhere called the Umar Hills, where people have been disappearing and coming back crazy. Hmmm. Sounds a lot like Hexxat’s people, if you ask me. I go ahead and tell the kid we’ll help him (if I feel like getting around to it, at some point), mainly so that Minsc won’t lose his damn mind about it and try to kill me again like he did in the last game.
Delon wanders off back amongst the gravestones, and we FINALLY get to start looking for this stupid tomb. However, this being a graveyard, there are a lot of tombs, so I decide to walk around the whole place first, to see if any important ones highlight on my map before I just start busting down doors and defiling the sacred resting places of the dead.
Look at the past three screenshots and notice how much we haven’t moved.
So I’m doing that, and – now get ready for this one, because it’s going to be a HUGE surprise – I get another random asshat named Nevin running up to me needing my help with a problem that requires IMMEDIATE ATTENTION.
Helm, give me strength.
I ask him what his problem is when when all I really want to do is punch him in the throat, and he says that his Uncle Lester has risen from his grave, which I guess is as uncommon an occurrence in this mad world as it is in the real one, so I can sort of see his cause for alarm. I decide to hear him out, and maybe pencil his quest in, if I can find the time.
Not that the game gives me any choice in the matter, of course. Because as soon as we stop talking, here comes old Uncle Lester rising up out of the damn ground in front of us, like some sort of pixelated Lazarus come from Hell. He starts yelling at Nevin about what a cheap bastard he is, which I’ve really no reason to doubt, and then starts trying to murder him. I briefly consider just watching how all this plays out, but I haven’t killed anything since I got here and I’m feeling a little antsy.
My first impulse is just to have Aerie cast her Turn Undead spell on him, in the hope that he’ll slink away back into his grave, but of course everyone is still loaded down with fire and acid spells from all the troll fighting we’ve been doing, so there’s nothing for it but to beat the grumpy old bastard into submission.
Unfortunately, we’re not able to bring the old guy down before he’s managed to kill poor Nevin, not that any of us are likely to lose any sleep over that great loss or anything. Still, I feel like his life shouldn’t have been lost in vain, so I loot his corpse to preserve his memory or whatever. It turns out Uncle Lester was totally right about the guy, though. All he had on him was one lousy gold piece. Meanwhile, sketchy Uncle Zomboid has shambled off to try and find his favorite prostitute again, which is bound to come as a bit of a shock to the poor girl, but that’s not my problem.
I think this was supposed to be funny.
We get back to the business at hand, and resume our exploration of the cemetery. We don’t manage to find anything called the Tomb of Whoever or anything, but we do come across a couple of entrances to the Lower Tombs, so it’s probably down there. We hop in one of them and descend.
Instead of tombs, we find ourselves in some sort of enormous spiderweb, because I guess groundskeeping at this cemetery just doesn’t give a damn. We run around and map the place out while killing a few spiders here and there, but then we find what seems to be the heart of the problem: a giant spiderweb cave thing. I really don’t think this is where we need to be for Hexxat’s quest, but it’s a giant spiderweb cave thing. We have to take a peek inside, right? We just gotta!
As soon as we walk in, some clown named Pai’Na shouts something about death to the interlopers, then sicks a bunch of spiders on us, like no one saw that coming. Fortunately, the spiders are of the tiny variety, so we squish them pretty easily. Whoever this Pai’Na character was goes down without much of a fight, too. Once all that’s done, we loot the room and find some kind of magical rock Yoshimo puts on his head to make himself strong. Yeah, I know. It’s D&D logic. Just roll with it.
After we’re done playing exterminators for whatever criminally negligent company manages this cemetery, we take the nearest exit from the spiderweb cave thing into the southern dungeons, where we’re immediately transported to ancient freaking Egypt. I shit you not.
Anck-Su-Namun! Imhotep!
Of course, as soon as one of us steps on Cleopatra’s face, a bunch of skeletons and wraiths pop out of the walls and try to kill us in the name of their people or whatever. We’re in the middle of fighting for our lives, when I realize that Turn Undead isn’t a spell Aerie hasn’t memorized, but a skill I forgot all about the button for. I switch over to her and press it, and she starts turning these undead as hard as she can.
Which doesn’t do a damn thing and we all die.
I reload the savegame from just before we entered the Temple of Ra or wherever we are, and this time I remember to tell all my thieves (of which there are no less than three in my party now, which just seems kind of ridiculous) to start Detecting Traps, which I should’ve done in the first place. Once we’re back inside and everyone is doing what they’re supposed to, someone notices that both of Cleopatra’s eyes are trapped, so I have Yoshimo run over and disable them.
Which doesn’t do a damn thing and we’re all attacked anyway, because the crypts are apparently triggered to open regardless of the traps we can see. It’s the traps we can’t see that are the real danger, like invisible trigger zones added in by game designers to activate scripted events. THE HORROR!
We manage to kill all the baddies, but not without taking a beating. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place I need to be for Hexxat’s quest either, and as much as I’m digging this Egyptian motif and pretending to be Indiana Jones, I decide we should pull out for now and come back later. I’m tired of her droning.
We leave the southern dungeons and lower tombs, because I’m starting to think this is just getting way too complicated for what should’ve been a starter quest, had I gotten around to bothering with it sooner. I decide to check my map of the graveyard to make sure I didn’t miss the area I missed because I should never be trusted with a map. I find a tiny bit of fog of war that we didn’t dispel earlier, so we take a stroll down that way and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s the damn tomb right there. Because of course it is.
Great! Now maybe she’ll shut up.
I ask Hexxat if she knows how to open the tomb, and she babbles something about having done it before. Then, the door flies open and something inside lets out some sort of devil yell and a couple of undead ghost thieves come flying out. We kill them, then Hexxat just stands there like nothing weird just happened, so I just shrug my shoulders and we go inside.
Hexxat mumbles something about having to go inside the tomb we’re already inside of, but then she runs over and just starts staring at a wall really hard until it goes pink and I see it’s a secret door. We open it up and go inside, then get a fancy pre-rendered cutscene so you just know shit’s about to get real.
We run into a bunch more undead ghost thieves who all chant, “YOU MUST ENTER THE TOMB” while we’re killing them to death, which is kind of weird because I thought we were already inside a tomb. But I guess that’s the whole joke, since my journal suddenly updates itself, telling me that there’s a tomb within a tomb and that whoever designs these things must mad, drunk, or possibly both – but also urbane, witty, handsome and charming because gods dammit, who let the game designers break the fourth wall?
Sigh.
Hexxat says I must enter the tomb alone, which isn’t at all ominous, but whatever. She then shouts something about how the Sleeper must awaken, and I guess this is Dune now and maybe my name is a killing word, but I just don’t care anymore, so I hop into Dragomir’s smelly sarcophagus and damn the torpedoes.
On the other side, I run into a ghosty ghost named Burich who wants very much to kill me, but I somehow manage to talk my way out of a fight and he gives me his special rod that I need to use to penetrate an innocent wall hole elsewhere in the dungeon. I take it, but he still wants to murder me for some reason, so I hop back in the sarcophagus and come out the other side clean as a whistle.
I dust myself off and head back near the entrance to the tomb, where I whip out my rod and jam it deep inside the wall vagina to open up another pathway further into the tomb. Of course, this also seals us in because I wasn’t feeling trapped enough by these stupid companion quests already. They had to go and make the metaphor real.
Anyway, we push on further into the tomb until we finally find old Dragomir. I start talking to him, and he asks me why I’m here. I get a dialog option to say, “The sleeper must awaken,” so I figure what the hell. Let’s go with that, House Harkonnen style. He then figures out that I’ve come for Hexxat, whom he then curses and asks how she continues to draw people in.
I wish I knew, ugly demon dude. I wish I knew.
Spoiler Alert: He’s a vampire.
I tell him that Hexxat is already here with me, so maybe he’s as confused as she is because I guess all the crazy in this place is contagious. He just shouts something about how now is the hour of my doom or whatever, and we get down to the fisticuffs. Dragomir is a strong opponent, and it takes a few tries before we’re able to bring him down, but we eventually kill him to death.
Hexxat pipes up and says that we’re very close now, whatever that means. Oh, and apparently we’re dealing with vampires here, because I just looted Dragomir’s corpse and he was wearing a cloak only wearable by vampires. So, using my amazing powers of deduction…vampires.
We push deeper into the tomb, until we eventually come across some glowy barrier thingie that only Hexxat can pass through. When she does, we get a cutscene and suddenly Hexxat is talking to Hexxat, only Hexxat is actually some poor girl named Clara, and the real Hexxat is some kind of Haitian/New Orleans vampire queen because she’s the first black character I’ve seen in this game, so of course she is. D&D is racist as fuck.
Anyway, she kills the useless twat formerly known as Hexxat, then tells me she’ll meet me in the Copper Coronet in a couple of hours. Remembering that we’re sealed in here, I decide to follow her to find the way out. When she gets back to the room where I killed Dragomir, she demands I give her his cloak, but first I tell her that I want some answers, which wasn’t at all true so I don’t know why I clicked it.
She then goes into Full On Exposition Mode and starts telling me all about how Clara was actually a farm girl who came to the city to be an actress, but she ended up becoming a prostitute instead and I’m already bored. I just start hammering the End Dialog button like a coked up lab rat until she finally shuts up.
Kale mi noo, fir yer free readin’!
She joins my party and hands me her gris-gris bag that somehow has Dragomir’s entire casket in it, which I then somehow stuff inside my back pocket. Apparently, this and the cloak will let her leave the tomb and walk around during the day and…oh, whatever. I don’t even question anything anymore, for logic is lost to me now.
I decide we’ve all earned a good night’s rest, so we leave the tomb and head back to the Copper Coronet. Or that was the plan, anyway, until another damn messenger appears with another damn URGENT QUEST for us the second we emerge from the tomb. This one’s for Nalia, and it says we must go to the Graveyard District where we already are AT ONCE. Nalia insists on this, because she’s a stupid person who understands even less of geography than I do.
I figure we’ll swing by whatever it is she needs to do since we’re already here, then we’ll go back to the Coronet. And Minsc can just shut the hell up about that kid’s quest in Imnesvale, I’m not even kidding.
Apparently, Nalia’s urgent quest was to attend her father’s funeral, which is suddenly a super important thing even though she didn’t really seem to care very much when he died. Oh, well. No big deal. We swing by, pay our respects, Lord Toenail or whoever gets pissed that Nalia doesn’t want to marry him, the drunk dwarven uncle gets drunk and wanders off…you know, typical family shit. We finish up and leave, then finally make our way out of the damn cemetery.
But before we get anywhere, I suddenly notice that four of my characters – including myself – have fewer hit points now than they did before we started this little graveyard smash, so I wonder what’s up with that. Finding no help at all in the game itself, I end up having to resort to the horror of horrors and CONSULT THE MANUAL. According to the accursed book, we’re all experiencing some kind of status effect that drains our energy, and we’ll need to be healed at a temple.
Et tu, Minsc?
I remember spying a temple way back in Wakizashi Promenade or whatever it was called, so we head there. We’re stopped along the way by someone whose name I don’t remember, who told me I need to GO BACK TO THE DAMN GRAVEYARD to meet her mistress, so screw that. I’ve just spent days inside that madhouse, and I’ve got the status effects to prove it. I ain’t too eager to go back anytime soon, thankyouverymuch.
After she leave, Brus suddenly comes running up, telling me that I need to go see Gaelan again before I make any “rash decisions,” whatever that means. I have no idea what’s going on though, so I just ignore it all and go to the temple.
I buy a Greater Restoration prayer for all four of us afflicted with whatever unholy malady plagues us, which sets me back 750 gold pieces each. We then head over to rent a room at the nearby inn and that’s when it hits me.
The only reason Brus and whoever that other person was are suddenly coming up to me now is because I must’ve triggered a scripted event by having met my goal of saving up 20,000 gold pieces. Of course, that was before I spent several grand on freaking restoration spells at what I guess was a privatized corporate church because damn, the profit margin on healing spells has got to be pretty freaking great.
I guess I’ll have to just go see about Lord Whatever His Name Was’ quest tomorrow, since it pays that 10,000 gold I’ll need so I don’t end up accidentally breaking the game by trying to talk to Gaelan again or this new person without having the gold I had when I set some flag in whatever database it is inside the game that is pushing me along the plot.
But for now, we’re just going to go to sleep and not worry about having to do another damn optionally mandatory side quest until tomorrow. I’ve had a day of nothing but trolls, ghosts, spiders, mummies, funerals, vampires and endless twat drama.
I need a bubble bath and some me time.
Dammit.
I awake the next morning at the Mithrest Inn to the relaxing sound of nobody giving me shit for a change, which is nice. I check my coin purse like I do every morning because I don’t trust any of these bastards I’m sleeping with, and sigh when I remember that we’re still a few thousand gold coins short of our goal. I roll over and try to get back to sleep, but there’s nothing for it. We’re going to have to go sidequesting. AGAIN.
I wake everyone else up by way of kicking them in the ribs until they stop snoring, then we splash some water on our faces and we’re out the door. Time to go see Lord Whoever He Was. Yay.
Once everyone’s awake, I notice that Aerie has leveled up, so I pat her on the back and tell her she’s a good girl, then I give her a skill point in the proper use of flails, because I want to get some use out of this Flail of Ages thing I forged back in Nalia’s – I mean, my – castle. So I do that, then switch over to the inventory screen to have her equip it. Which I absolutely cannot do, because I guess her character class can’t use flails for some bullshit D&D reason no one understands, so I just wasted a skill point and I don’t even care. I could reload a savegame and reassign the point, I guess, but Aerie is a cleric/mage, and the only points I can assign are in weapon use. But the only weapon she uses is her incessantly flapping mouth and maybe a few finger wiggles to cast her spells, so giving her a actual weapon is kind of pointless. Like my life.
I don’t know what I expected.
We leave the inn and are making our way toward the district exit when it dawns on me that I haven’t visited a shop to sell off any loot recently, so I should probably do that to free up some pocket space before we go off on another damn adventure. Of course, it doesn’t dawn on me that we might actually turn enough of a profit to avoid having to go off on another damn adventure, but that’s what happens.
I briefly consider selling the Flail of Ages because it’s worth a pretty penny, but I hold on to it in the hope that I’ll eventually come across a useless twat who can actually flail it around without killing himself or seriously injuring the rest of us. Instead, I just start clicking through everyone’s inventory and selling everything we don’t need, which includes a bunch of gems and crap. I sell a few “lol gems” and I don’t even know what to make of that, because I’m not sure LOL was even in the public vernacular back in 2000, so I’m sure it’s not actually a joke. But even if it was, it wouldn’t be a very funny one, so I’m not too worried about it.
We manage to unload just enough crap to put us over the 20,000 mark, which means Lord Byron can just go walk in beauty with the night for all I care. His mandatory sidequest just became optional again, so I’m opting out of it and heading back to the main campaign because I’m never going to finish this damn game if I don’t stop dicking around with party drama and start making some actual progress in the storyline.
I’m rich and you’re not.
It looks like I’m at a fork in the road, and I’m not sure which way to go. That whole bit with the mysterious mistress in the graveyard sounds like it has a lot more potential to be interesting than whatever crap aligning myself with Gaelan is going to lead to, plus she might not charge me 20,000 gold for the pleasure of being her errand boy. Still, it’s not like I’ve actually spent any money at all in this game apart from the insane tithing I just had to do at the Temple of Holy Exploitation last night, so I’m not too concerned with having a lot of gold on hand, and I really don’t feel like going back to the stupid graveyard.
I decide to stick with the devil I know, so we head back to the Slums to pay Gaelan a visit. As soon as we walk inside, he starts that cooing business again, then tells me not to worry about the 20,000 gold I was just worrying about, because he decided that 15,000 would be enough but didn’t bother to tell me until just now. I consider murdering him for almost making me go do more sidequests for no reason, but decide against it. The game probably wouldn’t let me, anyway.
Gaelan tells me that I need to go see the Shadowmaster, Aran Linvail, in some orange building down by the docks, then gives us 45,000 experience points that mean nothing to me because they’re apparently the RPG equivalent of pesos and it takes 8,000,000 of them to buy a taco or something. I thank him for all the nothing he’s done, and we head over to see whoever this Shadowmaster is.
As soon as we step out the door, I get a surprise cutscene! It’s another one of those little chapter crawl thingies, which means we’re finally making progress again and I’m one step closer to saving the world, I mean saving Imoen, I mean finally finishing this damn game.
The chapter crawl. It’s kind of like Star Wars, but without any of the fun.
After the chapter crawl, I get an actual cutscene where Irenicus breaks out of his prison on Loom island or wherever, explodes a few Cowled Wizards, then grabs Imoen and leaves. I really hope he’s going somewhere to turn her against me or something, because an evil Imoen is an Imoen the game will probably let me kill. Of course, it’ll probably give me a choice to save her for the Good Bioware Ending, but I don’t really care about that. I just want vengeance for my suffering.
We get to the Docks, and Yoshimo tells me something I don’t care about involving either a price on his head or kidney failure, but I tell him whatever it is will just have to wait because I’m done with stupid companion sidequests for now. If someone want to come murder Yoshimo while he’s with me, we’ll just murder them right back until they stop trying.
We make it to the Shadow Thieves HQ, when some crazy trashcan preacher demands I repent and come to know the one true god, which just happens to be whichever one it is this nutcase believes in. I tell him no thank you, then he tries to kill us all for our sins. I guess people take religion a lot more seriously in this city, because this is not something Kirk Cameron would ever do, even if you made fun of his banana.
After we get done teaching crazy cleric dude the error of his ways, we head into the building and start looking for this Aran Linvail fellow. We find a secret door Gaelan told us about, which takes us to a massive lower level where we spend a lot of time not finding where we need to go. We eventually stumble upon some kind of training session wherein a new recruit learns how to use a bow by way of murdering three other new recruits with arrows, then some woman whose name I can’t remember tells us we need to go look for a secret door all the way back at the start of this area, because of course it’s another damn secret door. Can’t have a building in this damn game that isn’t chock full of freaking secret doors.
We go through the motions and finally make it to Aran, who then whines that he doesn’t work with vampires and that Hexxat will have to go. I tell him to get stuffed, because I just went through a lot of trouble to get this vampire and I’m not about to just give her up. He says it’s cool, no big deal. I just need to give him 2,500 more gold pieces to ease his bigotry, and everything works out.
Don’t be racist against vampires, dude.
With all that out of the way, he tells me he’s going to give me some magical items and that I’ll be able to go rescue Imoen just as soon as I do some shit for him, because of course I have to do some shit for him. I’ve already spent this whole damn game doing shit for him, and it was all just so that I could afford to pay him for the privilege of doing more shit for him. Typical.
He wants me to go guard his shipments with someone named Mook, which is a stupid name and I already hate this person, but whatever. Let’s just go play watchmen and get this over with.
We step outside, then lie down and go to sleep because I’m supposed to do this quest at night, and we have time to kill. When we wake up, Lord Toenail appears and arrests Nalia for not marrying him. I try to murder him, but the game won’t let me because all the choice and freedom people say this game has is bullshit. He takes her away, and now I’m down a party member and short a mage, leaving me with precious little but fairly useless thieves and Minsc.
After they leave, one of Toenail’s guardsmen comes up and tells me what a sumbitch his boss is, and that if I go find a guy named Barg, I should be able to get enough dirt on the bastard to make him give Nalia back. So, hooray! Another voluntarily compulsory sidequest. SO EXCITED.
I want my mage back before we go any deeper into this Shadow Thieves foolishness, so I go try to find whoever this Barg guy is. My journal says he should be “at the docks in the Docks District” which is super helpful, but I guess it means where the actual shipyard docks are, so we head there. Except it’s not Brag we find, but Mook and I’m just like, screw it. I guess we’ll do this Shadow Thieves crap now and get it over with.
Mook tells me she’s seen a suspicious character casing the place and that we should sit tight and click through dialog options until something happens. Eventually, a guy magically teleports in and murders Mook, then tries to kill us. We defend ourselves, and I have Aerie cast a Silence spell on him, just in case he tries to get up to any magical funny business. Things are going well, too, until those Cowled Assclowns show up out of nowhere.
Begone, son of Cygna!
Apparently, it’s still not okay to use magic in the city (unless you’re the Scripted Event Bad Guy who just used magic in the city), and they’ve already given us a warning, so now they go bugfuck and start slinging murder spells at us and fine. Screw it. I’ll just reload a savegame and kill the guy without magic. Like some kind of caveman.
After we’re done beating the guy to death, we resume our search for this Barg dude. What this involves is a lot of wandering around and either clicking on people and risking getting another sidequest of +10 urgency, or hovering my mouse pointer over them and waiting the twenty minutes it takes for the tiny tooltip with the person’s name on it to appear. I opt for the latter.
And who do I find while I’m doing this? Jaheira, of course! I’m down a party member right now, so I welcome her back into the fold and she’s super happy to be part of the team again. I smile and then don’t tell her that I’ll be dropping her again like a bad habit as soon as we get Nalia back.
We eventually find Barg standing outside the Sea Bounty’s Tavern and stumbling around like a drunken fool. We talk to him, and he lets it slip that he does a bit of pirating for Lord Toenail now and again, and then tell me that he also goes in for a little slavery, as well. Some guy named Dirth will have more info inside the bar, so we go inside to check it out.
As soon as we walk in the door, some guy named Baron Plover starts talking to Jaheria because of course the second I pick her ass back up, I’m being interrupted by sidequest drama bullshit again. But it’s not all that bad. Apparently, Jaheria ruined the good Baron’s life by accusing him of slavery – and can we just take a minute to appreciate just how much illegal slave trading is going on here? – so he’s pissed and wants revenge. Some mages teleport in and don’t get in trouble with the Cowled Wizards because they’re wearing amulets of +10 Plot Scripting, and they curse Jaheria. Of course, it’s no ordinary curse that can be cured by paying the outlandish healing rates at a temple, but one that involves doing a whole bunch of crap I ain’t gonna do.
She shall die as she has lived: by passive aggression.
Sadly, the curse will eventually kill her, but I’ll have kicked her ass back to the curb long before that happens. I just need her to be a meat shield until I get Nalia back anyway, so I really don’t care. She asks me if I’ll help her track down the cure posthaste and toot-sweet, and I lie and tell her we will. I don’t know why she still believes anything I say, though. Not that bright, I guess.
We find Officer Dirth hanging out in a corner of the bar, then walk up to him and ask him if he’s an evil slave trader in league with Lord Toenail. He responds by trying to kill us, so we respond by killing him until he’s dead. Then I loot his corpse and find a register of recently traded slaves bearing the seal of Lord Toenail himself. I decide that’s probably enough evidence to secure Nalia’s release, so we head off to the Government District to present it to whoever the guy was that other guy told me I should take the evidence to.
I check my journal. It says we’ll need to take the document to Corgeig in the government building. But then it also says that I apparently don’t think this slave register will be enough evidence to do anything, so I might as well break into Toenail’s home and look for some more crap, since it’s right next to where I’m going anyway.
We break in by opening the Toenail estate’s unlocked door, then walk inside where nobody is, and search the one container I can loot. I find a ledger which might indicate foul deeds or something, so I snatch it and we walk right out because Lord Toenail is kind of a shitty criminal mastermind. We then take the evidence next door, to the government building.
Just before we go inside, some dude named Madeen tells me those Cowled Bastards need my help with something I don’t even care about, but it might be important later so I make a note and then shove him aside.
We go into the building, which is absolutely filled with pixel people who all look the same to me because I’m racist against graphics. I just pick one at random who I hope is the Corgi guy I’m supposed to give this evidence to, but nope. Instead, it’s some assclown wizard named Tolgerias, who I guess is the person Madeen told me I needed to talk to, because the universe just hates me, so I keep accidentally locking myself into all these stupid sidequests because of, I dunno, karma or something.
I start talking to the guy and I’m getting all these dialog options where I can demand he tell me where they’re holding Imoen, when it dawns on me that they’re not holding Imoen. Not anymore, anyway, since Irenicus busted out and took her whiny ass with him. Once I figure this out, I just start clicking shit until he shuts up.
I eventually find Corgi and present my evidence, which turns out to be sufficient to call an official inquiry into Lord Toenail’s activities and yadda, yadda, yadda, Nalia is free to go. She joins back up, and I kick Jaheria back out onto the streets. She’ll probably just go back to pitifully standing next to that building I found her pitifully standing next to earlier until she slowly withers and dies from whatever evil curse Baron von Braun put on her. Tough break, kid.
With Nalia back in the party, we leave the Government District and head back to the Shadow Thieves to tell Aran Whoever what happened to Mook The Recently Murdered, except that Yoshimo refuses to move for some reason, so I get to the district exit and send the disembodied narrator voice into a looping fit of shouting at me to gather my party before venturing forth over and over until I just reload the auto save from when we left the building and try again. Hooray, bugs!
“You must gather your party before venturing forth.”
We eventually make it back to Aran, who tells us all this nonsense is over some inter-guild drama and I don’t care. I have to go see some potential defectors at someplace called the Five Flagons in the Bridge District, so we go to the Five Flagons in the Bridge District because I’m smart like that.
When we get to the Bridge District, some asshole cop wanders up and warns us about, I dunno, I guess Jack The Ripper or somebody because there’s a serial killer on the loose and unless any of this is at all related to the main plot, I don’t care. I click through his dialog and head straight to the Five Flagons.
We go upstairs and meet the defectors. I try lying so they’ll think we’re here to be recruited to the rival guild too, but they see through my clever ruse and attack me. One of them shouts the name of the contact before he dies though, so at least now I know the password. We kill the two guys and loot their bodies, then Gracen – that’s the contact – comes wandering in. I get a whole list of dialog options with various names to address him with, so I pick the right one.
And he attacks me anyway.
We kill him, then find a note on his body that talks about the Graveyard District and mentions that crazy Pai’Nai guy we killed back in the spiderweb cave thing. Oh, goodie! I hope this means I can just go straight there and get whatever it is I need from the room, because I already killed that bastard and all of his little spider friends. With any luck, I won’t have to do it again.
And with a little more luck, I won’t have horribly broken the game by killing him early.
We’re on our way out of the Bridge District, when we’re stopped yet again by another scripted sequence. I’m immediately annoyed, but then – holy crap! A wild Neera appears from Baldur’s Gate 1! She saves some kid a witch was trying to abduct or something, then teleports away before I get to say hi. Dammit, too. I could really use her in my party, since I’m overloaded with freaking thieves at the moment.
My favorite Imoen replacement.
We’re on our way to the cemetery when we’re waylaid by a wild Neera again. I’m hoping this means I can recruit her now, but she says she has to get back to wherever the Wild Forest is, but I should totally meet her there when I can. I think we’ll take finish up with this Shadow Thieves business first, then pay her a visit. Hexxat is starting to become kind of a problem with everyone else in my party, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m traveling the countryside with a bunch of white supremacists. But I can’t save the world with just one lousy vampire by my side, so I’m going to have to suck it up and deal with them.
Also, Hexxat is proving just as useless as she was back when she was Clara pretending to be Hexxat or whatever the hell was going on back then, except now she suffers various vampire penalties to her occult math equations that run this game that I don’t understand, so I think it’ll be easier for everyone if we just go our separate ways.
Plus, I kind of miss Neera.
We make it to the graveyard, then descend into the lower tombs and head for the spiderweb cave thing. We go inside…
Aaaaaaaand, I think I broke the game.
The room is empty, and the one lootable area has already been looted, on account of how I looted it earlier, before some event trigger set a flag on a file in some database somewhere that populated it with whatever it was that’s supposed to be here now, assuming Pai’Nai and his spider minions were still alive.
Dammit.
Hoping against hope that I haven’t done something horribly wrong (because I really don’t feel like loading a savegame and redoing a full day’s worth of crap), I head back to Aran to at least try and tell him about the defectors and maybe the name of the contact, along with how they meet in the graveyard in the cave where I killed this guy that I didn’t know who he was at the time before I murder him and ruined everything.
We get back to Aran, and I tell him about the defectors and Royce Gracie or whoever the rival guild contact was. I let him know that they meet in the graveyard district, but none of that seems to matter at all because the leader of the rival guild, a guy named Bodhi, tried to assassinate him last night.
Rendering all my previous work moot, whether by design or as a surprising workaround for when some jerk breaks the game, Aran concludes that Bodhi is a vampire, and that the rival gang must also be vampires. And he knows exactly where they hang out, which is back in the lower tombs of the cemetery, to the north of the spiderweb cave thing. He tells me he’ll send a mage to meet us who can open their Special Vampire Doors or whatever, then shoves a fistful of wooden stakes in my hand and I guess we’re off to play Buffy now.
Work it, girl.
We prowl the vampire halls, killing vampires. I’m not staking them though, because the game never told me how to use the stakes, and it’s not letting me use the stakes, so I’m not using the stakes. Any time we dust a vamp, he just goes all wisp of smokey and flies away, so I don’t consider it much of a problem.
We’re chasing some vampire from WKRP named Les Nessman across the area, until we finally corner him after a pretty intense ambush. Of course, we can’t actually attack him because he retreats to some spike and blood room or something, so we have to go back and find wherever that is and then kill him. Hooray, more walking!
We find the room, and it’s covered in a bunch of little spikes that all of my useless twats can’t help but step on because they’re useless twats. We eventually make our way across the room amidst their ouchies and boo-boo cries, then confront Lester and give him final death. Except I don’t really think that’s what we’re doing, because the game still won’t let me use the damn stakes.
We go back to the main area and find some side tunnels, dust some more vamps and kill a few ghouls, etc… Eventually, we come upon some kind of mummy wrap things that I don’t know what they are, but when I click them it tells me that a vampire I killed retreated here, so I guess this means I can use the stakes now. I click it again and yep, vampire dusted. I do the same for the other ones in the room, then Bodhi appears and reveals herself to not be a dude. She then starts talking a whole bunch of unskippable shit at me until we finally get down to the punching and the biting.
And then she kills us.
Then she kills us again.
And again.
She’s a tough little cookie, but much reloading and cursing later, we finally manage to not kill her because she’s apparently scripted to teleport away at the last second so we can run into her again later, probably in some sort of Surprise Bioware Plot Twist or something. We lost poor Yoshimo in the battle, though. May he rest in peace for the next few minutes, or as long as it takes us to get to the nearest temple and resurrect him. So maybe it’s more like a nap, then. May he nap in peace.
Six people, several dogs and other summoned minions fighting ONE vampire. The Scooby Gang, we are not.
Only, I don’t get a chance to do any of that because I get murdered by spiders on the way out of the lower tombs, and I forgot to save the game after we didn’t kill Bodhi, so we have to go not kill her all over again.
And then she kills us.
Then she kills us again.
And again.
Each and every time, I have to run and stake all of the vampires again, then click through her giant walls of expository text before we even get to throw the first punch or sling the first spell. EVERY. TIME. I mean, this game is only 15 years old, but I guess no one at Bioware of Beamdog or wherever has ever figured out how to auto-save at the start of a boss fight like every other game developer on the planet has managed to do.
Oh well, we fight her again and eventually win again, and Yoshimo eventually dies again.
May he nap in peace.
We find a shortcut out of the tombs this time, so there’s no danger of spiders getting me, but I still save anyway so as to avoid being stupid again. Then we hop up to the service, catch a cab to Wookie’s Promenade, and run up to the temple where I’m forced to optionally donate the required 1200 gold pieces to resurrect poor old Yoshimo. Once he’s better, we run over to the Adventure Mart – which is a lot like Walmart, but with less sweaty people and more open check-out lanes – and sell our excess loot, then it’s back up the Mithrest Inn, where I rent the most expensive Royal suite the guy has because dammit, we’ve earned it.
You get a higher quality of rat in the Millionaire’s Club.
We wake up on the morning of our 347th day in this place, which means I’ve spent nearly a year doing sidequests for needy companions who take and take and take, but do they ever give? Of course, it might not be nearly a year yet, because I don’t know a year actually lasts or even how time works in D&D terms. There’s probably an equation for it, though. Probably something along the lines of rolling a 3d20 + {[4d6 * (7d3 + 2d8) – (3d20 / 1d12)] – π * r²}. Seems legit.
Anyway, we wake up and I make an executive decision to go try and grab Neera before we turn in the Shadow Thieves quest, because as eager as this game tends to be when it comes to wresting control from the player and funneling us into some pre-scripted event, I don’t want to get caught having to do anything else with Hexxat. She’s even more useless than Imoen ever was, which is not something I say lightly. Or ever thought I’d say about anyone. Ever. In the history of whatever planet it is that we’re on.
Of course, I don’t let that on to Hexxat, for obvious reasons. You know, just in case I have to do some kind of quest before I get Neera instead of after – although, who am I kidding, I’m sure there’ll be both – I want her along for the ride in the event that I need her to, I dunno, stand around and get punched or something. She’s pretty good at that.
MOAR SIDEQUEST!
I tell the group that we’re going to swing by and just say hi to an old friend of mine, and they go along with it because they’re stupid and I’m their god now. However, the second we leave the inn, here comes someone named Cabrina who demands we do another urgent quest right away because that hasn’t happened in, like, five damn seconds. This particular annoyance is from some mysterious figure known only as L, who wants Hexxat to go do something Hexxat’s not gonna do, because Hexxat’s going to be gone as soon as we get to wherever the Wild Forest is. I hope.
I click through all of Cabrina’s crap, then we head to the district exit and I double-check my map to make sure I’m actually going where I think I’m going, lest I end up in the middle of another meeting of the Forgotten Realms chapter of the Branch Davidians or something.
We make it to the Wild Forest without any problems, and Neera just happens to be arriving at the exact same moment we are. Wow! What a random, crazy happenstance! Also, hey…isn’t the Wild Forest where those mostly naked dryads way back at the start of the game wanted me to take their magic acorns or something? I’m pretty sure it was, so I’m not even going to bother checking my journal because I’m just that bad ass.
Neera joins up immediately, although she wants me to do her quest right this instant, which I’d normally refuse, but I kind of want to see what happens with these funky nuts I’ve had rattling around in my pants for the past 347 days. I think we’ll give it a whirl.
My funky nuts. I keep them inside a sack in my pants.
After giving Hexxat the brush off, we start walking into the forest and come across a little fat dude standing next to a broken down cart, probably a Faerûn Pinto. I try to help him out, but he just keeps telling me to turn around, then starts yammering something about a fortnight over and over again until he explodes. No, really. He exploded. I think he might’ve been a robot. No, really.
We meet a talking snake next, which freaks Neera out because I guess she has crippling ophidiophobia or something, but it doesn’t even offer us an apple or anything. It does say a lot of stuff about death, though. The death this and the death that, but then it shuts up and doesn’t do anything, so we walk right past it and murder a bunch of kobolds. Then, we cross a broken bridge that isn’t really broken, but is just an illusion spell Neera plucked a bunch of eyelashes to cast. Yeah, she actually said that.
We continue working our way deeper into the forest, killing a few panthers and some more kobolds along the way, and eventually make it to the Hidden Refuge where we’re given a metric crap-ton of new sidequests to not do. Seriously, they want me to fetch materials for one of their craftsmen, then go fight some kind of bad guys, then do a whole bunch of other crap I’m not about to do because screw this, we’re leaving. And I’m taking my magic nuts with me!
We go back to the city and make our way to the Shadow Thieves building to turn in our quest for Aran, so we can hopefully move the plot along a little bit and make some damn progress already.
Aran doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that I didn’t kill Bodhi, since it’s enough that I staked plenty of vampires along the way, so her guild should be effectively shut down for the time being. He then gives us 50,000 meaningless experience points, and I start wondering how many of these damn things I need before I get to level up again. But then I stop caring about any of it, and Aran goes on to tell me that he’s booked us passage on a ship headed for Spellhold, which Irenicus has already taken Imoen away from, but I guess my character doesn’t know that yet, so we have to go through the motions of trying to bust her out of a prison she isn’t in, anyway.
Except that my character should totally know that, because I keep getting these dream sequences every few nights showing me that she’s not there anymore. You’d think I’d been given a dialog option to say something about them to Aran, but again, Bioware spent good money to pay someone to write this crap, so they’re damn well going to make sure I play through it, whether I like it or not.
Speaking of dream sequences, I get another just before we board the ship for Spellhold. Irenicus has Imoen locked up in a jar or something, where’s he’s torturing her and killing a whole bunch of other people he’s also locked up in jars. Then he says, “She’s almost ready for you” to someone off screen, and I’m starting to think maybe Imoen is going to be sacrificed to some dark eldritch god or something, which I’m totally okay with. But I’m also hoping she just becomes a vessel for some dark eldritch god to possess, so I can exorcize the demon by way of murdering little Imoen right in her queer fellow.
Heya! You gon die.
We board the whatever this ship’s name is, and I get a new chapter crawl when we depart. We’ve made it to Chapter Four now, and I just can’t resist casting the Google Bones to see how many chapters are left, and it’s good news. There are seven total chapters, not counting the Throne of Bhaal expansion pack I’m not counting because I’m not going to play it.
We’ve officially made it past the halfway point, kids! And, if my previous experience with most RPGs is any indication, the rest of the chapters will start picking up speed and getting shorter from here on out, unless the ending is a long and tedious, drawn out affair. But just because Baldur’s Gate 1 did that doesn’t mean that Bioware didn’t learn from their mistakes and streamline the sequel’s ending, right?
I grow cynical of my optimism.
Oh, and I was totally right about how turning in the Shadow Thieves quest would lock me into a pre-scripted sequence, so I’m glad I went ahead and picked up Neera before we did that, otherwise Hexxat would’ve been dead in ten seconds after the ship’s captain betrayed us as soon as we stepped onshore at Spellhold.
Of course, to be fair, we all pretty much die within ten seconds of the captain betraying us, because damn, it’s an unreasonably difficult battle. We eventually manage to make it through without losing anyone, which is especially important now that I’m stuck doing this quest without being able to travel anywhere else until we’re done here. If anyone dies, it’ll be a while before we’re able to get back to a temple to perform any miracle resurrections.
Speaking of temples, I just noticed that Minsc has been afflicted with whatever damn malady it is that causes that stupid status drain effect most of us came down with earlier, but since I can’t travel back to a temple, he’s just shit out of luck for now. Oh well, we’ve made it this far. Might as well press on.
We make our way from the docks and into the little village around Spellhold, if that’s even where we are. We turn a corner and watch some nonsense play out that I don’t pay any attention to other than simply giving it as much focus as is required to click the Continue and End Dialog buttons. Then, we take a few more steps and are attacked by slavers who want to, surprise, enslave us. We respond by killing them real hard.
I’m a lot like Moses, but with more fireballs.
After escaping the indignities and general inhumanity of the slave trade, we press on in the direction I hope Spellhold is in, because I’m already tired of this place. I’ve only been here five minutes, and I’ve already been betrayed by a sea captain, assaulted by his magical something or other minions, then molested by slave traders. I think it’s safe to say I’ll be giving this island zero stars in my Yelp! review.
Then again, I’m actually starting to think this isn’t actually Spellhold, because it’s filled with pirates who just wander around yelling Argh! all the time and attacking us for no good reason at all. I don’t have any idea where we really are, so I’m just going to call it Buccaneer’s Den, because maybe if I pretend this game is an Ultima hard enough, it’ll become a little more bearable.
After a little more exploring, I do manage to find a temple in this village of debauchery, but I guess the Temple of Umberlee, Bitch Queen of the Deeps (no, I’m not making this up) doesn’t do Greater Restoration blessings, so Minsc is still out of luck. And so am I, apparently, because I just noticed I have the same energy drain thing going on with me. So yay.
We continue wandering around aimlessly for a while, then finally find the hard to find path leading from wherever we are to Spellhold, so we take the exit and hit the road. Of course, when we get to there, I get a warning message that the bridge is enchanted or something, and that it wouldn’t be wise to try crossing without the Magical McGuffins I didn’t know I needed, so we turn around and head back to Brynnlaw, which is what the pirate village is actually called, according my journal I checked just now.
I’m still calling it Buccaneer’s Den, though. And somewhere in the distance to the east, Lord British is sitting in Britannia Manor, waiting for me to come say hello. I miss that old bastard.
Anyway, we’re supposed to find someone named Sanik inside some building somewhere in the town my journal doesn’t think I need to know the name of, so it looks like a lot of random breaking and entering is on tonight’s agenda.
Except not, because the first place I go to is the Pirate Lord’s house. I have to bribe a guard to let me in since I don’t have a name to drop, but he only wants 300 gold, so I throw it on the ground and let him scrounge for it while I walk on inside like I own the place.
I tell the pirate lord that I need to bust someone out of Spellhold, then he tells me he can’t allow that, then Yoshimo tells him that he can, then the pirate lord tells me that he’ll sneak us in as madmen, because apparently Yoshimo has some past relationship with the guy that I don’t care enough to ask about. The next thing I know, we’re being whisked away to the magical prison by way of a fly-by cutscene.
Seems inviting.
We’re dropped off in some sort of common area, where we’re left to fend for ourselves amidst the crazy folk, which is not entirely unlike the rest of this lunatic game. Whoever brought us here told us that Imoen is in a cell down the hall, so we go looking for her, and slap my butt and lick my biscuits if it isn’t Imoen I see when we open the door. Only it can’t really be Imoen, on account of how I know she’s not actually here, so I already feel let down by this plot twist.
Of course, this entire meaningless section of the game is just going through the motions anyway, so I’ll play along. Maybe it’ll make it end faster.
We wander around for a little while, talking to people who don’t make any sense at all, so nothing’s really feeling any different than any other part of the game so far, but I eventually run out of people to click on, and Yoshimo can’t pick any of the locks on the doors in this place because they’re protected by Magical Wards of +10 Game Design and won’t open until the moment comes when they’re scripted to open.
Without anything much else to do, I just lie down and take a nap. I like to think it’s what Randall McMurphy would do if he were in my situation. Tomorrow, I’ll look for Chief and we’ll bust out of this joint before Nurse Ratched comes along with her lobotomy needle. But for now, rest…
When I wake up, the magical pie chart of teleportation appears, and bust my buffers, if it isn’t ol’ Jon Irenicus standing before me. He tells me that he’s taken over the joint since last we saw him, thanks to some help from Bodhi or something or other. I still think it’s a trick, but maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe that was Imoen in that cell after all, and I missed my chance to murder her because the universe is a cruel mistress.
I think this is what demoralization feels like.
We can only hope, sweet Imoen. We can only hope.
After Irenicus gets done taunting me, he reveals that the only character that hasn’t gotten on my nerves throughout the entire game – and who I actually kind of like – was working for him the whole time. OMG! BIOWARE PLOT TWIST #1! Or maybe it’s #2, if we count Irenicus’ sudden takeover of the asylum I clearly saw him bust out of in my dream visions.
Which, now that I think about it, probably weren’t dream visions so much as they were Irenicus broadcasting what he wanted me to think directly into my cerebral cortex. Holy shit! BIOWARE PLOT TWIST #3!
He knocks us all out with magical sandman dust or something, and I wake up back inside one of his torture porn laboratories, locked inside a fucking jar. Isn’t that just dandy.
Oh, and he tells me that Imoen is apparently a child of Bhaal as well, which I guess makes her my sister or something, but I don’t really care. I’m not counting this as a plot twist either, because George Lucas already pulled this joke on me when I was a kid, and I swore to myself…never again. Never again.
As soon as he gets done monologuing me to death, he does some evil finger waggling along with uttering the same incomprehensible chanting that accompanies every other spell anyone ever casts in this crazy little world, and all the people in jars around the room start dying, just like what happened when he did this to Imoen. Once they’re all dead, I get zippy-zapped and wake up in some sort of dreamscape reality where it looks I’m back in Candlekeep.
So I’m having to relive Baldur’s Gate 1 then, Jon? Damn, Irenicus. I knew you were an evil bastard, but that’s just cold. You’re kind of a dick. And a monster. You’re a monster dick.
Look on the bright side. At least we never made out in front of a wookie.
On the plus side, I’ve totally mastered the whole Dream Warrior thing, because I have full control in this little nightmare Irenicus has conjured up for me. It starts off with Imoen whining, because no hell dimension would be complete without Imoen’s incessant whining. Next, I run into a demon guarding a door, who won’t let me pass until I give up a character stat. I choose to abandon all reason because logic is useless in this place anyway, so I give it my Wisdom. It’s not like I’m not using it or anything.
Deeper into what I thought was Candlekeep but isn’t, Imoen comes back up to me and tells me to lead the “Bhaal Creature” back to her, so we can fight it together. Which makes sense, because she’s always been SO HELPFUL in a fight. But seeing as how the outcome of this particular fight has probably been predetermined by the game developers, there’s not much I can do about it.
I roam around the castle for far too long, because there’s nothing at all to do in here, so I go back outside and start wandering around. I eventually find Big Daddy Bhaal and lead him back inside, where I run up to Imoen for protection. Like some kind of hopeless eunuch.
At which point, she does absofuckinglutely nothing. Not a single gods damn thing. She just stands there while I get my ass beat. And, since I couldn’t save the game once Bhaal spotted me because I was in combat and the game failed to do an auto-save either when I entered, left, or re-entered the castle like it’s done for every other area transition in the entire damn game, I’m screwed. Back to the beginning of the dream. Hooray!
I repeat everything I did earlier, only I save it before I run up to Bhaal this time. Then, I run inside and talk to Imoen again, then she continues to not lift a finger while I’m being murdered. I guess I’ll have to fight the guy on my own, which is kind of hard when I’m still suffering from energy drain and he nearly kills me with each hit, but I eventually manage to dispatch him.
I wake up back in the real world, and Irenicus says he’s done with me and hands us over to Bodhi to dispose of. Only she doesn’t kill us just yet, since she wants us to run through – and I’m not even joking here – a freaking maze. I’m not sure what electric Kool Aid acid trip game developers were on back in the ’90s, but whatever it was made them absolutely adore Full Motion Video and fucking mazes. Stupid ’90s.
Once Bodhi cackles over our fate and goes away, Imoen is ready to join back up with me. I politely decline, then she starts crywhining about how I’m ABANDONING her after EVERYTHING WE’VE BEEN THROUGH together. No, sweet Imoen. I’m not abandoning you despite everything we’ve done together. I’m abandoning you because of everything we’ve done together. Or, more specifically, everything you’ve not done while we were together. Like being at all useful.
Muahahahahahahahahaha!
After she gets done bitching, she says she’ll try her best to make it out of here on her own and meet us back at the Copper Coronet, which I just know is going to happen because this freaking girl is a damn immortal menace and cannot be stopped, so I’m sure we’ll see each other again.
Because dammit.
I’d like to start this entry off by describing something cool and interesting that happened during Bodhi’s maze run. I’d like to say that it was a surprisingly refreshing take on an outmoded method of game design intended to artificially lengthen playtime by infuriating the player with tasks that aren’t remotely fun, but that Bioware somehow managed to pull it off this time because they filled the maze with a plethora of novel and engaging mechanics that stimulated my intellect while rewarding my sense of exploration and discovery. I’d like to say all of these things, but I won’t. Instead, let me just summarize my experience and then we’ll try to pretend this never happened.
There was a maze. We went through it.
…
I could say more, but I really don’t want to. I just don’t see how I could make the incalculable nature of my boredom and frustration while trudging through the thing even remotely interesting. There were riddles and statues and traps and crap and shit and suck. Oh, and I somehow got turned into The Slayer, but not in the cool way like Buffy did. I’m not suddenly blonde and athletic or anything, but I do turn into a hideous ragemonster whenever we go to sleep now, which kind of sucks.
But it’s also a little funny, because then there’s this whole bit where I lose control of my character, who then tries to murder my companions, but I still have control over them. So it all becomes this whole Benny Hill / Yakkity Sax comedy routine of me making them run around in circles while my Slayer beast flails his arms and shambles around after them like some sort of enraged Quasimodo. I think I even giggled once.
But it’s over now, and we’ve made our way back up into the prison or asylum, or Kellogg’s Sanitarium. Whatever this place is. And, in keeping with the Randle McMurphy theme I had going on earlier, I decide to open all the cells and release the inmates. It’s revolution time, Irenicus. Feel the swift hand of crazy justice!
Which one of you nuts has got any guts?
After a fair bit of dialog clicking to rally the troops, we storm Irenicus’ laboratory armed with our guts and insanity. He babbles a bit about how it’s all futile, then we unload on him with everything we’ve got. He goes down surprisingly easily, but somehow I die, anyway.
We reload and sit through all the dialog again with the rallying of the troops and then more with Irenicus, because Bioware still doesn’t think things like pre-boss auto-saves or skippable dialog are important. So we wail on him again, and he teleports away again. Hooray, we won!
But then here comes Yoshimo, ready to murder me because Irenicus cursed him or something. I try to reason with the guy, but he’s having none of it, so I stab him right in his shiny wakizashi and he goes down. But then more assassins start coming out of the woodwork, and we must’ve ended up murdering a least half of dozen of the little bastards before we were through. Unfortunately, none of them have any decent loot except for Yoshimo. I rip his heart out of his chest and stuff it in my pocket, right next to my magical nuts.
Suck on that, jerk.
All I need now is a pint of pig’s blood and a full moon, and I can get up to some serious mystical shit.
We make our way out of the asylum, and are stopped by someone else who apparently betrayed me, but honestly, I can’t keep up anymore. This one is a pirate, I guess. Maybe he was on the ship with us? Who knows. Or cares. We pump him for information, and he tells us that Irenicus is going to some elven city in the Forest of Tethir called Suldanessellar, which is a ridiculous name for a city, but I guess elves don’t know how to spell for shit.
So I guess we’re headed to wherever the hell that is.
Captain Barbossa here says we can either leave with him on his ship, or by entering a magical portal Irenicus left behind that will probably take us to somewhere called the Underdark, which freaks Aerie right the fuck out and doesn’t sound too pleasant to me, either. Probably just more monsters and mazes, and I’m not even having it.
He’s probably just going to betray us again, but I don’t care. I just want to leave this place I’ve spent the past eight hours of my life, because that’s what it takes to get this crap done for you people. So you could at least scroll up and click that Like button, you know. It’s not like I’m making you run through an endless maze of crippling despair or anything.
Captain Threepwood escorts out of the asylum via a fade to black transition, and suddenly we’re back on the surface. He tells us to do whatever we need to in town, then we can climb aboard his starship and head for the skies. Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Ok, enough Styx. We have business to take care of back in Buccaneer’s Den. I pull out my map and find the exit, then point everyone in the right direction and we’re off. Of course, we can’t just walk there because floaty undead ghost things start attacking us, and Minsc keeps getting murdered in one hit. None of us are anywhere close to full health, of course, and everyone’s fatigued because I haven’t felt like re-enacting the Chasing The Wenches scene from Pirates of the Caribbean with The Slayer and his Merry Band of Useless Twats, but I really don’t see any other choice.
We lie down to rest.
And I get another dream sequence, where an Imoen who isn’t Imoen starts telling me something about unleashing my inner asshole and embracing the Dark Side or whatever, so I watch as I become The Slayer again and murder all my friends. Then, the scene ends and I find out I’ve learned to control my Slayerishness now, so I strum a few air guitar chords from War Ensemble and pat myself on the back.
“The final swing is not a drill; it’s how many people I can kill!” Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth.
We wake up the next morning all healed up and refreshed, so we make quick work of the ghosties on the way back to town. Once we arrive, I decide to hit up the Bitch Queen again, and see if she’s reconsidered her stance on Restoration spells. She hasn’t, of course, but I start clicking around and find out that she does sell some Restoration scrolls, even if she’s too unholy to restore people herself. I buy a couple and use them on myself and Minsc.
And good lord, were we ever energy drained. I start to see why that damn maze was a lot harder and took a lot longer than it probably should have. I was running on 17 hit points the whole time, while Minsc was doing a little better with 21. After I use the scrolls, we both gain a level and I go back to having 119 hit points, with Minsc getting 96. I guess the first one now will later be last, eh Minscy?
Hrmmm. I’ve had three musical references in this entry. I wonder if my subconscious is trying to tell me something…
We leave the temple and head over to The Vulgar Monkey to rent a room a get some shut eye. The next morning, we head back downstairs to talk to Captain Jack Sparrow and set sail. Only we can’t, because his ship’s been scuttled by the game designers, so we’re going to have to end up doing more shit before we can leave this place, even though the whole point of taking the ship rather than the portal was to avoid going to wherever the Underdark is and having to do more shit before we can leave this place.
I can’t find joy in the little things anymore…
Captain I’m Running Out Of Names wants us to steal the Pirate Lord’s ship under cover of darkness, which isn’t too bad. We can do that. Except we can’t, because first we have to open the “sea gates” which are so common around every port that has never had such a thing because they don’t actually exist, but whatever. We can do that too, I guess.
To open the gates, we have to get the horn that signals the gateman so he’ll open the gate so we can steal the ship so we can leave the port and get to wherever it is we’re going. Also, I know an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. I guess she’ll die.
Four references now. Everything is slipping away…
It’s like Mousetrap, but with sidequests.
I agree to his stupid plan, then he tells me I need to sneak into the Pirate Lord’s lady friend’s house at night to steal the horn, which is probably not going to look good on my resume. But whatever. If I’m lucky, she won’t even know I’m there. If she’s lucky, she won’t have to get murdered tonight.
I briefly consider quaffing an invisibility potion or something, but then I figure the game will probably force-detect me anyway, because I’m sure that’s what has been scripted to happen by the Powers That Be. So we just rush in, instead. Cayia, the Pirate Lord’s significant other, is busy lying on the bed and getting some strange from some random pirate when we bust open the door and don’t startle them at all.
They finish the conversation like we’re not even there, and only then do they notice the six heavily armed madmen standing in front of them. Cayia cries out for the guards who just materialize right out of nowhere, so we kill them all without hesitation because all this sidequesting has ruined us and we’re all psychopaths now. Once everyone is dead, I loot the room and grab the horn, which is actually a conch shell. I resist the urge to make a Lord of the Flies joke, and we head back outside.
Ok, I lied.
We head on over to the Pirate Lord’s ship and I almost try to reason with the pirate guard stationed there, but then we just kill him really hard because that’s easier and we’ve all gone insane. Once he’s dead, we go over to Captain My Captain and we all board the ship.
We’re about to shove off when the Pirate Lord appears and yells some crap at us that I don’t care about, then murders his wife for adultery because pirate lords don’t play. He then pulls a whole mess of pirate henchmen right out of his swashbuckling ass, because they just appear on the deck and start trying to kill us. We slaughter them without remorse though, since we’re all just murderers and madmen now.
Once we’re done swabbing the blood and entrails off the poop deck, Captain Planet gives me a sword as thanks, then we head out to see…and are promptly boarded by bunch of whatever the hell the Githyanki are, who demand we surrender the “relic of holies” they say we have, and I don’t really know what’s going on anymore. I just want to give them whatever the hell it is they want, then go somewhere and lie down.
And of course, the relic of holies turns out to be the damn sword Captain Jerkoff handed me before we left, so now I have an entire race of lizard people pissed at me.
I just unleash on them, because what’s the point of anything anymore? I’ll go full genocide, if that’s what it takes. I have Neera load up on her magical fireballs of doom, then direct my other spellcasters to unleash hell while I start carving through the beasts like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner and I don’t even give a shit. Eventually, the ship breaks apart and Captain Hook hops on a lifeboat to save himself while we’re dragged down to the deep where angry blue fish people start yelling random syllables at me.
That’s five now. I give up. Surrender to the Darkness. Respite. Succor. Sanctuary…
When we last saw each other, I was being held in an underwater cavern populated by fish people because I’ve apparently reached the Let’s Just Throw Any Old Shit Idea Some Unpaid Intern Came Up With After Pulling An All-Nighter Writing His H.P. Lovecraft Thesis portion of the plot. Honestly, I have no idea what’s even going on right now, and I don’t care. There’s something to do with ancient, prophetic doom written into the history of these Smurfishens (yeah, that’s what I’m calling them) that somehow involves me and my companions.
Also, there’s something else going on having to do with traitors or tyranny or tyrannical traitors or something, but I really couldn’t tell you. I started mindlessly clicking the Continue dialog button after about five straight minutes of actually paying attention before my eyes glazed over and my index finger just started acting on autonomic impulse. At some point, I was thrown into an arena where I had to fight a giant, two-headed caveman or something because that makes sense.
To recap: I avoided going to the Underdark because I didn’t want to get caught up with having to do more useless shit to progress the plot, so I got on a boat that was boarded by lizard people who wanted a sword I didn’t even know existed until the ship’s captain made me his drug mule, then when the fighting broke out, I guess we were hitting our swords together so hard that we broke the ship and it started sinking, so then these blue fish dudes showed up and dragged me and my friends down to an underwater grotto where I became part of their religious iconography and fought a giant two-headed caveman.
Seriously, Bioware. Drugs are bad, m’kay?
That time I killed Captain Caveman.
We kill the giant conjoined caveman twins with fire and steel, then we’re whisked back to some kind of Smurfishen board room, where a big fish with the impossible name of King Ixilthetocal says a whole bunch of authoritative shit at another mucky muck fishy dude, then some other fish guys say some other crap. I could probably reload a savegame so that I could go back and pay attention in order to give you an accurate sense of what’s actually going on here, but I’m already having serious doubts regarding the fractured state of my mental health and I fear what terrors might result from putting too much strain on it.
I guess I agree to go do something for King Unpronounceable, because everyone finally shuts up and the game reluctantly surrenders control of my characters. I should probably check my journal to see a concise description of what it is I should be doing, but I opt for an even less wordy approach and just start wandering around until something attacks me. I figure that will be the bad guy.
We head outside the city and one of the Smurfishens warns me that it’s dangerous to go alone, but we go anyway because he’s a fish and what the hell does he know?
We set off some traps because the only thief I had that was actually any good at thieving was Yoshimo, but all that’s left of him now is this pocketful of his still-beating heart, so he isn’t much help with detecting traps. And neither is Nalia. But they’re pretty crappy traps and don’t hurt much, and now that I can rest again without Hulking out, it’s no big deal to get zapped and then go nighty-night until I’m all better.
Which is what we do, until we reach an area where some Imps are talking like Gollum and start asking us if we wantses to plays their gameses, precious. I tell them to shut up, but of course they don’t and I have to end up playing their stupid game because some programmer back in 1999 wanted me to. The jerk.
La la, lalalala, la la la. la laaaaaa!
The game involves talking to several people that I have no idea who they are, who each give me an item to give to one of the other people I still don’t know who they are. Not that it’d matter if I did know what was going on, because the whole place is lousy with traps anyway, so just walking to and from one guy to the next means I have to make a saving throw vs death every couple of seconds. Which is SUPER fun.
After lot of time and reloading later, I solve their stupid puzzle and get a cloak and some boots for my trouble, but they’re magical and do +something or other, so I put them on and go my merry way.
Just beyond the imps little playground, we meet a Beholder guarding a chest. And yes, I know what a Beholder is. It’s a giant monster with a gaping mouth and one big eye, with bunch of little tentacle eyes around it. I told you I’ve read all about D&D. I just never got to play it because I had a deprived childhood.
Anyway, the Beholder is supposed to be comic relief, and I guess it’s a little funny. But when you’re just trying to finish a quest and you get dragged to the bottom of the ocean where goofy talking fish people are splat-splat-splatting around the place on their fin-feet, well…humor becomes a pretty relative thing.
I manage to talk the Beholder into letting me loot the chest without killing us, then he wanders off to go do whatever it is evil dungeon creatures do when they’re off the evil dungeon clock.
Inside the chest was something called Sekolah’s Tooth, which is apparently something I need to have in order to get into the rebel prince’s base. So I guess it’s a civil war thing the Smurfishens have going on, and I gotta go kill Robert E. Lee or something, which I don’t really have a problem with. Damn rebs!
It’s a tooth. What else do you want me to say about it?
We head back to the city and start wandering around again, when we start coming across little combat zones of civil war madness. It’s fish man against fish man. Smurfishen against Smurfishen. Brother against brother for the profit of another; game point. NOBODY WINS!
So yeah, we just murder everyone on both sides because they’re all wearing neither blue nor grey, so it’s just a bunch of floppy blue fishflesh flapping in the breeze when the spears come out. Better to just kill them all, so each side knows I’m not messing around.
We keep at this for a while, always heading in the direction of more fighting. More carnage. More senseless bloodshed of innocent aquatic life, all in the name of…wait. What exactly is this civil war about again? Are the Rebs running slaves or something, or it is just more like Prince Big Britches wants the throne, so we have a War of the Roses type of thing going on?
Not that any of it really matters much to me, mind you. My plan is to just keep rushing in and killing every single one of the scaly bastards because as far as I’m concerned, they’re both to blame for putting me in the middle of their stupid little war, so all are punished.
Preach it, Mercutio.
We finally find Prince Whoever hiding in some room that looks exactly like every other room in this underwater nightmare, then we kill him and take all his shit. It turns out, slimy blue fish people don’t really react well to fire, so Neera’s little Minute Meteors spell is making her a Smurfishen killing badass today. Let’s all hear it for Neera, group.
Hooray, Neera!
After I get done looting his body, I rip the prince’s heart out because that’s apparently I thing I do now, and we take everything back to King Crazyletters in the fishy throne room. He snatches the prince’s heart from me and then eats because he’s fucking crazeballs, then he tells us he knows a way to get us back to the surface.
FINALLY! Progress!
He leads us away via another fade to black, then when the screen comes back up, we’re all standing over a big ass hole leading down to…the mother fucking Underdark. SON OF A—-
You mean to tell me that I took that damn ship for the sole purpose of avoiding having to do whatever tedious bullshit I would’ve had to do in the Underdark, but now that I’ve done a whole bunch more tedious shit for Captain Jackass and the conga line of fish head gumbo people, I still have to go to the gods damn Underdark anyway? So everything I just spent the past couple of hours doing was pointless?!
THANKS, BIOWARE. You’re a bunch of dick holes.
For the first time in my life, I truly feel the urge to murder someone.
We grab a magical rope and hop down the damn hole because I guess we’re going to the freaking Underdark now. We get a little cutscene where Irenicus and Bodhi are talking to a new character the writers just now pulled out of their cavernous asses that they’re calling the Matron Mother or some other horseshit, and I can’t even pay attention because I’m so pissed off about this whole Underdark business that I almost want to spend the rest of my life inventing a time machine just so I can go back and murder whichever designer at Bioware thought any of this useless crap was a good idea.
But hey, at least I made it to Chapter 5. So that’s something. I guess.
As soon as the little flyby intro revealing the terrors of the Underdark finishes and we take our first steps into the inky blackness, Aerie loses her shit. I tell her to be strong, but I’m pretty sure Minsc ended up having to slap her. Tough love and all that.
We head into the black, and come across a shimmering pink portal that spits out Air Elementals like an overactive gumball machine. We waste a lot of time killing them, but they just keep on coming like some kind of Sisyphusian horror, so this is probably a puzzle or something and dammit. I just want to kill my way out of here, with no puzzling. No talking. No sidequesting. Just pure, unadulterated carnage from asshole to eyeball. And then we’re out.
That’s my plan, anyway. But I have a feeling it will all go horribly wrong.
I reload a savegame and make a note to ignore the devil portal. This time, we go south at the crossroads, but this path leads us to some dwarves who don’t attack me, which means they probably want to talk, which means dialog and sidequests and I don’t have time for any of that nonsense.
They’re like Pringles. Once you pop, you can’t stop. EVER.
I turn around before they come at me with their aggressively Scottish accents, and we just keep wandering through the Underdark, trying to find a way out. There’s nothing too eventful about it, other than a whole bunch of fighting whatever Drows are and a crap ton of those little dancing mushroom dudes from Fantasia.
Eventually, we make it to the northeast corner of the map, where we spot some more dwarves, but we’re not able to turn around before they spy us. Then it’s all, “Ach! I need a swing of some strong dwarven ale!” and some mercifully brief dialog about going to see their King I’ve no intention of seeing, so we turn around and go away.
I’m just dragging my mouse around at this point, when it suddenly turns into a wheel at the edge of the screen, which indicates a transition point. Hooray, progress!
We head that way and are dumped out…in another cave. It’s unclear whether we’re on the same level, of if we’ve ascended or descended, so this could still be the Underdark, or possibly the Overdark or maybe even the Belowdark, or whatever the Underdark under the Underdark would be called. But who cares, really?
ONWARD!
This place is kinda funky, with little swirly things on the ground and the vague sense that there’s lava moving around nearby, so I’m not sure we’re actually in the Underdark anymore. Or maybe we’re in some subsection of it. I honestly have no idea. We walk around for a good bit before we run into and trouble, and when we do, it’s with some of David Icke’s reptilians or something and they’re called Kua-Toans, which sounds a lot like Croatoan to me, which if you remember your high school History classes, was the word left carved into a tree of the lost Roanoke Colony. So probably what happened was Icke’s transdimensional overlords used their vibrational matrix powers during a celestial event back on Earth during the late 1500s and transported all the colonists to this plane of existence, where they’ve been steadily interbreeding a new royal bloodline for the UK inside the Hollow Earth ever since. OMG, and the Hollow Earth is Faerûn.
IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
Or maybe you just saw the Croatoan episode of Supernatural.
Or you just don’t give a shit.
Whatever. It’s cool.
How did conspiracy theorist ever theorize anything before The Matrix came out?
We keeping push on through this dungeon, killing the reptilian overlords whenever we find them, until joy of joys – I see an EXIT marked on my map. We run toward it like two lovers through an open field. Then, we run into some more Drow who try to kill us, so we kill them and leave the Underdark!
Except we don’t, because the giant ass door won’t open and its lock can’t be picked BECAUSE OF STORY REASONS, so crap. I don’t have a clue what to do now. We wander around a little while longer, but since I’m clearly not supposed to be here without having first done some stupid bullshit sidequest beforehand, we turn around and head back into the main part of the Underdark to start doing the unthinkable: talking to NPCs.
Ugh.
I guess we’ll start with those dwarves who saw us earlier. It sounded like they might even have a city of sorts in here, so maybe we can find a shop and sell the ridiculous amount of loot we’ve been hauling around for ages.
But of course, they don’t. It’s just a pathetic little collection of mining tunnels – and surprise, they mined too deep into the ground and awoke and ancient evil. I reckon it’s probably the ghost of J. R. R. Tolkien or something because damn, they’re totally ripping off Durin’s Bane, the Balrog of Moria. (Yeah, I know the Balrog’s name. I’m a nerd. Deal with it.)
Some dwarf named Goldander Blackenrock wants me to go kill this ancient copyrighted beastie, then bring the tunnel down on its head after I’m done, probably because the poor little guy’s had to go through life with a name like Goldander Blackenrock, which is bound to do things to a person. I wonder if all dwarves really have such stereotypically stupid names, or if this is just D&D being racist again. Oh well, best not to worry too much about it. We’ve got business to attend to.
So we’re off to kill the Balrog, I guess. The wonderful Balrog of Oz!
But before we can do that, Goldfinger tells us that we need to head to the northwest passage of out his little shitbox of a city and find a creature named Alan Alda or something. Probably in a green tent. Big red cross on it. Dude running around in dresses and a guy with a teddy bear. Can’t miss it.
We start to climb down the hole leading to the 4077, and wouldn’t you know it? Some kind of winged fire demon thing materializes called a Balor, which is totally not a Balrog in the same sense that Ice, Ice Baby totally isn’t Under Pressure, amirite? I guess I misheard Goldeneye when he was dishing out this quest, because I thought I had to go see the Adonis person or whoever before I killed the Balrog. But I was wrong. Again.
No. See, their’s goes “Ding ding ding ding DINGA ding ding” and ours goes “Ding ding ding ding TINKA ding ding.” SO IT’S DIFFERENT!
He’s a total badass too, and no matter how many times I reload or what spells my mages cast against him, I lose at least one party member each time we fight him, which is kind of a big deal when there are no temples around and this supposedly open-ended game full of freedom has had me locked into forced linear progression for hours upon hours now, so it’s not like I can hop back to a previously visited area and hit up a temple or anything.
So I end up Hulking out and go ragecrazy on his ass via my Slayer powers. I have to agree to let the evil have a bit of my soul to do it, but I’m not really using it anyway, so I figure why not. I just want out of the damn Underdark, so whatever the price is, I’ll pay it. Once the Balorog is dead, I use the scroll Goldschläger gave me to collapse the tunnel. We then run back to him and he gives us some shit and tells us to go find Abaddon or whoever using this Light Gem doohickey he just gave me.
Finding Alabaster is no easy task, since I have no idea where I am, much less where he/she/it is, so there’s a lot of wandering around the Underdark and murdering Croatians, like they haven’t had to endure enough already. Eventually, we make it to some stairs that I don’t know where they go, but fuck it. We’re taking them.
We either descend or ascend again, because the game never makes it clear. But wherever we are looks a lot fancier than the hewn walls of the Underdark. Masonry is afoot here, so I suspect the reptilian shapshifting overlords will be near. Best to keep a watchful eye.
Fortunately, we’re in luck for a change. The stairs lead us straight to Adalon, who is a female, by the way. And also a dragon, because why the hell not. She, of course, has some shit she needs me to do before she’ll show me a safe way out of the Underdark, which I’m almost certain will end up being the exit I already found and made safe by murdering everyone around it before the game wouldn’t let me go through the door, but fine. We’ll go do your thing, dragon lady.
Dragon Age: The Early Years
She casts some kind of illusion spell on us that lets us pass as Drow and then some major boring shit happens over the next TOO MANY HOURS involving fetch quests within fetch quests within fetch quests. It’s kind of like Inception, but with a whole lot of tedious walking instead of all the cool zero-gravity hall fighting. I could go into detail and tell you all about the Drow and their internal politics, but the truth is nobody would care. I know I sure as hell don’t. And I’m definitely not talking about the time I got raped by an evil she-elf or anything, so don’t even ask about it. I won’t know what you’re talking about, because it never happened.
Are we clear?
All that counts is that I met the Matron Mother, then murdered her through treachery and deceit. So basically, it was normal Tuesday. She calls – or called, rather – herself Ardulace, was undeniably evil and really, seriously hated it whenever anyone used wire hangers on her clothes. I switched out some real dragon eggs with some fake ones I got from a traitor, then gave other fake ones to the person who gave me the first fake ones, and then everybody died. Or, at least the Matron Mother and the duplicitous tart who was set to be her successor died, but that’s all that really matters. If you’re having trouble following along with any of this, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything, because the writers only introduced this Matron Mother character to frame the whole Underdark nonsense they force feed down your gullet because Bioware doesn’t even have a cutting room, let alone a cutting room floor. They make it, you have to play end. End of story.
And that’s about the only thing of note that actually happened during hours of repetitive, disconnected gameplay, but in the end, we finally got all the shit done that Adalon Smaug wanted us to do, by way of doing a whole bunch more shit for other people, who each had other people we had to do even more shit for before we could do the shit for the people who sent us to the other people in the first place, and now all I want to do is cry.
Anyway, silver dragon chick makes good on her word after I give her egg babies back, then takes us to exactly the place I thought she’d take us, which is the place I was earlier with the door that wouldn’t unlock until the game told it to. Which is now.
Please let it be over. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…
As we head out through the doorway, I cross my fingers, close my eyes and pray to Helm and Bhaal and the Bitch Queen of the Deeps to please – for the sake of all the people I haven’t murdered yet because this game hasn’t quite yet pushed me over the tipping point, but it’s getting dangerously close – please let this be over now.
I keep my eyes closed tight, then hold my breath as I click my mouse button to take us through the doorway.
And then…more tedious Underdark bullshit. But at least this bit is short and just involves a lot of killing things for a few minutes as we make our way up to the surface, which is actually kind of relaxing in a weird sort of psychopathic way. But then again, I’ve always found senseless murder to be an excellent palate cleanser, so that might just be me.
We pop out of the Underdark to a chilly welcome from the elves, because they’re elves, and being shitty to people who aren’t elves is kind of their thing. (Have I mentioned how racist D&D is?)
They don’t trust me at all, so we’re dragged before their leader whose name I’m not even going to bother trying to type because I’ve about had it with fighting both my spellcheck and autocorrect, and I just can’t take it anymore. These names are absolute nonsense, anyway. It’s as if a bunch of random consonants and a few vowels were simply tossed into one great big Scrabble Bag of Holding, then shaken up and whatever order they were drawn out in became someone’s name in this accursed game.
For real, though. I’m pretty sure that’s how the Bioware do.
Chapter 6 out of 7. We’re almost there, Porkins. Stay on target.
Anyway, once the leader decides I might be a threat, he has one of his lackeys – let’s just call him Mister Unpronounceable for now – interrogate me while onlooking sages play the role of lie detectors. They want to know if I’m in league with the Drow or Irenicus and Bodhi, so they ask me a thousand and one questions until I just want to start punching everyone I’ve ever met.
Once I prove I’m not a threat by way of repeatedly telling them I’m not a threat, Mr. U tells me that Irenicus has gone all David Copperfield on Sunnydale (or whatever the hell the name of their stupid elven city is), and has made it disappear by cloaking it in magics. You know, like with the Statue of Liberty.
He goes on to say that I’ll need to RECLAIM A POWERFUL MAGICAL ARTIFACT that was STOLEN by PLOT CHECKLIST BOX NUMBER 37 before the elves will be able to retake the city. Or at least find it, at any rate. I guess they don’t have maps or something, probably because they’d need paper to write them on, which obviously comes from trees. And everyone knows elves are pretty gay for trees, so I guess I kind of see their problem. At any rate, they’ll need me to go reclaim something called the Rhynn Lanthorn (which even my autocorrect knows is a stupid way to say lantern) from the MYSTERIOUS STRANGER who stole it.
Once they have the great and powerful Lanthorn, the elves will supposedly be able to use it to walk right into Sunnydale, since I guess it’ll light it up in the presence of the ancient city or who the hell knows. Or cares. All I’m getting from this LENGTHY dialog exchange with these pointy eared bastards is that everything hinges on getting this lantern. All of my questing up to this point has led me here, from my very first moments waking up to being tortured in Irenicus’ funhouse, to Imoen’s eventual capture and my slow progression into madness – it’s all come down to this. And only this.
>GET LAMP.
You know what? Fuck you, Bioware. Now you’re just trolling. What’s next, a white house and a small mailbox? Am I likely to be eaten by a grue? Maybe have Ford Prefect show up with a towel? Or how about sending me on a quest to find the fabled Wishbringer stone? Have you no sense of decency?! For shame, Bioware. For shame.
“We have talked long.” Baby, you ain’t kidding.
Once I finally wrest control of my characters from this dread machine of unyielding dialog robots, we head straight back to Athkatla. Mister Unpronounceable suggested we gather some allies before storming Bodhi’s lair in the Graveyard District (because she totally has the Lamp Thingie, since the game has apparently run out of patience and has begun just flat out telling me shit), so I figure I’ll go talk to the only allies I’ve actually made during this little adventure that didn’t turn out to be traitors, vampires, or are just plain dead. To the Docks, my friends! We must make haste for the Shadow Thieves!
Except making haste is impossible in the unrelenting tide of constant interruption that is this game, so as soon as we hit the road, we’re waylaid by Fan Service. Specifically, Drizzt Do’Urden and his merry band of people I don’t give a fuck about because, for as much of a nerd as I am, I’ve never stooped to reading D&D novels.
Because some lines you just don’t cross.
Still, I know enough about the universe to know he’s a fan favorite, even if I don’t recognize any of his buddies who are having a bit of WITTY BANTER when they waylay us.
Once they notice us, Drizzt tells me that I look familiar, but my only dialog options are variations on a them about how I killed him in the last game, even though I have no memory of having done that. Then again, I did click through as assload of dialog and never paid much attention to who or what I was swinging my sword at most of the time, so I guess it’s possible. I try to pick the least offensive response, so I just play dumb and tell him we’ve never met.
He says that’s weird, then shrugs and scampers off into the bushes with his little friends. Probably to go LARPing down by the river or something.
With that unnecessary bit of nonsense out of the way, we continue on to Athkatla and the Shadow Thieves. We’re making our way through the docks, when the game suddenly starts flashing messages about Jaheria taking damage. Seeing as how this is something that normally happens when I’m twiddling my thumbs while waiting for everyone to SLOWLY saunter over to wherever it is I’ve clicked, my first instinct is to hit Pause, then jump over to my party to see who’s attacking them. But Jaheria isn’t even in my party, which confuses me for a second. But then I realize she’s probably still hanging out by the tavern in this area, waiting for me to come save her. The damage messages are coming from the fact that, while she’s standing there waiting on a train that ain’t ever gonna come, her insides are slowly rotten away due to whatever it was that guy cursed her with a little while back.
I laugh way too long at this. Then we move on.
I passively aggressively ignore her suffering.
After enjoying the schadenfreude of Jaheria’s predicament, we continue on toward the Shadow Thieves HQ and are stopped by some of those githankey lizard people or whatever they were called, who are still pissed about that sword the Captain gave me back in the last chapter, just before our ship sank and the Smurfishens happened. It’s their holy wossname, and they want it back. I’m not even using the damn thing, so I’m like sure thing, crazy inter-dimensional religious wackadoos. Take it.
They thank me, then attack us anyway. We murder them all pretty easily, but after the fight, I notice that Neera has run out of her magical wizard balls, so I have her re-cast the spell she uses to replenish them. Which is when I remembered about the Cowled Wizards and their stupid magic ban.
They show up, cast Silence on everyone, then start flinging spells and exploding everyone I know. When most everyone is dead, I go to reload and then realize that I haven’t saved my progress since right after Mister Unpronounceable finally got done talking way back in the wherever we were. And neither has the game, because I guess it’s just given up on auto-saving entirely now.
I reload and we’re all the way back in the elven wonderland, so we have to walk all the way back to Athkatla again. And, lucky us, we’re waylaid by Drizzle T and his uptown posse a second time. This time, I just lie my ass off (or maybe I’m telling the truth, because I honestly don’t remember) and tell him that I helped him kill some gnolls or something back in Baldur’s Gate.
Which he’s totally cool with, so maybe I did actually help him. Or maybe memory is as shitty as mine, and now we’re both just standing here, awkwardly pretending to remember things that never happened. Either way, I’m somehow able to sweet talk him into helping out with my fight against Bodhi, so I’ve got that going for me.
Hey, you’re that guy from that place where we did that thing that one time, right?
After Drizzy scampers back off into the bushes again, we make our way back to the docks again. Then we laugh at Jaheria again. Then we’re attacked by the GetHappys again. Then we kill them again, only this time I don’t have Neera do anything with her balls, so the Cowled Wizards never show up and history is righted, once more.
It suddenly occurs to me that, with each save and reload, I’m just leaping from life to life, as if I’m striving to put right what once went wrong. And hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home…
OH BOY
We finally make it to Aran, who whines at me for a little while before reluctantly agreeing to help me fight Bodhi. I feel like that was a bit too easy though, so he’s probably just going to betray me like everyone else I’ve ever loved. This game is starting to feel a lot like real life, only somehow even more monotonous.
He tells me he’ll send his best assassins to the cemetery when I’m ready to begin my assault, which I take to mean as the game’s way of telling me to finish up any sidequests or other business I need to take care of now, because it’s about to take control away from me again. However, since I don’t care about my unfinished business or the people who are depending on me to save them, it doesn’t really affect me. All I care about is getting to Imoen, so I can (hopefully) finally murder her and bring this whole nightmare circus full circle. If I get to take Irenicus down along the way, so much the better; but I’m really just looking for some closure, at this point.
The only thing I need to do now is swing by a temple and pick up a Greater Restoration blessing for Nalia, who has become the latest victim of whatever virus it is we picked up along the Oregon Trail that keeps infecting everyone in my party with Energy Drain. I bet it’s Mono.
After she’s all better, we swing by the ol’ Mithrest Inn and rent a room for old time’s sake. We say hi to the rats who’ve probably been missing us, then everyone dogpiles into the big featherbed for a long group cuddle. And don’t give me that look, either. Our song is not your song. Deal with it.
Once that’s done, we head to the graveyard to fight Bodhi…who taunts us for a minute, then promptly runs away as fast as she can. We spend the next few minutes slaughtering the minions she leaves behind, then we just leave and come back the next morning, because what are they going to do then? They’re vampires. ¡El sol no es bueno para los vampiros!
Aaaaaaand now I’m suddenly thinking about that part in From Dusk Till Dawn where Selma Hayek is dancing half naked on the stage…
Don’t judge me.
And now I’m trying not to think about that part where she turns into a half-snake/half-vampire murder python, so I head into the Lower Tombs to distract myself by killing Bodhi.
Once down there, we start fighting our way though hordes of the undead, which just keep coming out of the woodwork, like so many roaches under a blanket of moldy old cardboard. We put them down with a little help from Aran’s assassins and Drizzy’s merry band of marauders. Now it’s time to take down Bodhi.
We storm her sanctum sanctorum and just start slinging all the spells we have at her, none of which are doing any good, since she’s immune to magic because of course she is. After dying several times in a row, I try a new strategy of breaching her doorway, then letting everyone who isn’t in my party rush in. While this is happening, I position my fighters to protect my spell casters as Neera casts a Break spell on Bodhi to hopefully remove that pesky magic resistance, then my other two mages release both a Cloud Kill and Massive Fart into the room (both are wide area-of-effect spells).
And then I close the door and listen to the screams of the dying.
Including Drizzt and his buddies.
Because I’m cold like that.
Sorry, Drizzy. War is hell.
Once everything goes quiet, I position everyone around the corner in the little hallway leading to Bodhi’s lair, then I run up, kick open the door, and sprint back around the corner where Nalia is waiting to jump out and cast a Web entanglement spell. Bodhi and her minions then get trapped as they rush toward me, and they’re easy pickings from there. After all the bodies stop twitching, we run back in, stake Bodhi in her coffin, then snatch the Lanthorn.
Holy shit! I think I might’ve actually started figuring out how to play this game.
We take the lamp back to Mister Unpronounceable, then he whisks away to the magical elven city of Crazyvowels. When I given control back, I’m in a dark forest with the fog of war covering everything again, so I bet this is another freaking maze. I’ll probably need to use the magical flashlight to guide me through false walls or something, which is going to be SUPER fun, I just know it.
I kind of want to know where I am though, and since the only thing my map screen shows is Area Map, I decide to turn around and go back to wherever we came from, so I can get to the travel screen right quick and see exactly what area my Area Map is for. Except that doesn’t happen, because suddenly cutscene!
We’ve made it to the final chapter. It’s all happening!
I watch a flyby of the city, then I get THE FINAL CHAPTER CRAWL, and I think I just somehow skipped a very large and annoying part of the game. Maybe not. I don’t care enough to go look it up to see, because I’m not actually missing whatever it is I’m missing because I don’t care.
We pop up on some platform in Crazyvowels, where Mister Unpronounceable is telling me yadda, yadda, yadda, go kill Irenicus. Before we run off to start the murder spree, he says that I first need to go see someone with an elvish name I’m not going to bother remembering. I just turn around and wave at him, since I’m already halfway gone.
Crazyvowels is basically just a fancier version of the Ewok Village Playset from my Return of the Jedi toy collection, with lots of little suspended pathways between tree houses. Irenicus and his goons are attacking the place, so at least I get to kill things while walking very slowly and admiring the scenery, which is always nice. Also, I’m apparently a badass at Fake Balrog slaying now, because I’m killing them left and right without breaking a sweat.
I am become death, destroyer of Tolkien ripoffs.
I suspect Irenicus is in the palace, so we make a beeline for the doors…which are locked, of course, and Nalia can’t use any of her Thieving Skills anymore, probably for nebulous D&D I’ll never understand. That means I can’t pick the lock (not that I think the game would let me anyway, seeing as how it wants me to go meet whoever it was Mr. U mentioned), so I’m going to have to find another way in. I sigh and accept the likely outcome of this resulting in another irritating series of fetch quests for some annoying ass NPC, but whatever. We’re so close. I can’t give up now!
Oops. Sorry. I grabbed this out of the Science Fiction part of the Fantasy and Science Fiction section. But the sentiment still applies.
I pull out my map and give it a glance. I can’t remember the random vowel vomit that passes for the name of whoever it was Unpronounceable told me about, but I do see someone’s house marked on my map, so that’s probably him. Or her. It’s impossible to tell with elves.
When we get close to the house, another Balrog attacks and goes down pretty easily, but then some spellcasting bastard named Rammalammadingdong or something freaking STOPS TIME and murders us. I try again and again, but if I do manage to get close enough to hit him, he just slaps me with a Death spell and I explode. If I somehow manage to not explode, he summons some kind of demon thing that eats me. We try to kill him for at least half an hour before I give up, Hulk out and go Slayer-crazy on his ass.
He’s as dead in two seconds as my reputation is with my party. I am now DESPISED by everyone I know, because I guess I’ve been giving into the Dark Side and using my Slayer powers too much. Also, I’m kind of a dick. It’s probably a combination of factors, really.
After bastard dude is dead, we head inside where Priestess I Don’t Care is fighting more tiger people. Oh yeah, I just remembered that I forgot to tell you that there are apparently tiger people now. They’re sneaky little bitches, but their tails are kind of cute, so fighting them fills me with conflicting emotions I can’t resolve in a healthy way, so I just punch them until they die.
Once we save the Priestess, she starts talking to me and I accidentally click the TELL ME MORE dialog option, which is basically the same thing my wife does whenever some parking lot perfume salesman spies her, then she ends up talking to him for ten minutes while being spritzed by the finest carcinogens China has to offer because she’s too nice to tell him to piss off.
Anyway, Priestess lady tells me all about how Irenicus was a good guy once but he FELL FROM GRACE for some endless multitude of reasons I clicked through, and Bodhi is his sister or something. I honestly don’t know, because all I hear is the clickity-click of Continue dialog button at this point.
Please just shut up.
When she finally gets done talking, she tells me all we need to do to defeat Irenicus is FIND THREE MAGICAL ITEMS, because god knows you can’t just go do things in a freaking RPG. You always need to find three things, usually involving multiple steps to acquire each one. This time, I have to fetchquest my way to victory by way of finding a Talisman, Moonblade, and the Goblet of Fire. Well, technically it’s the Golden Goblet of Life, but even one of the worst Harry Potter movies was a better couple of hours than any time I’ve spent with this game, so I’m going with Fire. And I’m pretending Dumbledore is somewhere back in Candlekeep, which has become Hogwart’s Castle in my mind and yes, I know I’m 40 years old but shut up you can’t tell me how to live my life go away.
I’m going to spare you the details of the stupid fetch quests, because they are exactly as much fun to write about as doing them wasn’t. You’re welcome.
Now that we’ve FETCHED ALL THE THINGS, we head to the Temple of Cellophane or something to summon the Leaflord, Lord of all the Leaves. I assume he’s going to help me stop Irenicus by way of devising a cunning horticultural campaign involving aggressive landscaping or some equally absurd nonsense. We kill a few tiger dudes standing guard at the temple doors, then rush in and come face to face with…some dude I’ve never seen before.
He says I continue to surprise him though, so maybe we met before and I just didn’t care. Or maybe this is just another BIOWARE LAST MINUTE CHARACTER DROP IN, as was so prevalent in the last game. Either way, he just wants to kill me, which is worrisome because he’s got a couple of giant golems and a tiger guy fighting alongside him, which all prove too much for us to handle all at once.
Fortunately, everyone in his little clique are deeply stupid, so we just rush in and kill the tiger guy, then rush out and sleep to heal up. Then, we go back in and do the same thing to one of the golems, then the other one. By the time it’s down to just the one badass mage, he isn’t such a badass anymore and Minsc explodes him with that cool flail we forged back in Nalia’s castle that he can finally use now.
After everyone is good and murdered, I put all the stupid doohickeys on the altar and ta-da! Leaflord!
Mmmmm. Mossy!
Old Leafypants spends a few minutes YELLING AT ME IN ALL CAPS, then busts open the doors of the palace, where Irenicus is holed up, waiting for me to come murder him really, really hard. And Imoen too, if I’m lucky enough to get the chance to not be able to save her or something.
We storm the castle with our dukes up, ready for a fight…and then nothing much happens. We just wander in and look around at the pretty architecture for a minute, then I start clicking things. I gently molest a tree for a few minutes, then it spreads its limbs and offers me its nuts. (See? I told you elves were pretty gay for trees. And you probably thought I was just being insensitive.) I guess I also picked up some kind of stone musical instruments along the way or something, because I click a couple of statues a few times and then give them the things I didn’t know I had, and a staircase opens up.
Yay, me!
I start to shove everyone down the stairs, but then my character has a sudden crisis of conscience or something because he starts talking to each party member about how they’ve come far enough, and none of them have to follow me to Irenicus if they don’t want to. It’s probably meant to be a moving tribute to the loyalty of my companions, but when I already know they despise me, it falls kind of flat. But they all stand by my side anyway, and we descend.
The spirit of the Tree of Life appears and tells us that Irenicus has put some parasites on the tree that are killing it and gods dammit, this IS a clever horticultural plan of aggressive landscaping. I WAS ONLY JOKING, GAME!
Tree parasites. I’m exterminating tree parasites now.
We spend the next few minutes playing gardeners and killing the parasite thingies, of which no part of the process is even remotely interesting, so I’m not going to talk about it. After the last parasite falls, we’re transported to another cutscene, followed by reams of unskippable dialog before yet another boss fight we cannot win without trying a hundred times and watching the cutscene a hundred more times and clicking through the unskippable dialog a hundred more times.
This fight is with Irenicus, and it’s damn near impossible. The instant we see him, he stops time and starts casting Instant Death spells on my mages, leaving just me and Minsc to swat at him with our melee weapons, all of which proves useless. The only way I was able to beat him was by going Slayer again, which caused whoever was left alive in my party to abandon me, which is not something I would normally care about if this final battle was actually the final battle, but of course it’s not.
After killing Irenicus, I’m dragged down to Hell to face him again, but unless I reload and manage to keep my people alive, I’m facing him alone. And it looks like this whole Hell section is going to be another tiresome bunch of Doing Pointless Shit Quests just to get to him again.
I thought this would be the final entry, because I thought I would finally finish the game today. I was even kind of happy that this whole nightmare would end with the thirteenth entry, because that’s a terrible number and nobody like it. I truly, honestly thought it would be over today.
Somebody hold me.
You know what? Screw this noise. If my friends can’t accept me for who I am, then they were never really my friends in the first place. Nancy Reagan and about two dozen Afterschool Specials taught me that back in the ’80s, and it’s not something I plan to start ignoring now. If the gang only liked me when I wasn’t being the Slayer, then they only liked me when I wasn’t being myself. And I can’t wear the mask any more.
So I descend into the depths of Hell, alone and loud and proud. I’m here. I’m evil. HEAR ME ROAR!
It feels good to finally let go, so I put my game face on and Slayer up. Except then I decide not to do that, because being in Slayer mode hurts me over time, so I guess even the game wants me to hide who I am. From it, from society. From myself.
*sniff*
Fine. I transform back into my human form, then start exploring what I hope aren’t nine circles to this Hell, because I just don’t think I could take that much more game.
I walk into a room and come face to face with the demon of Pride, which is actually kind of fitting if you know me at all. He tells me that I need to go kill some creature to reclaim the Tears of the Thingie and claim my birthright, and you know what? I’m all for it. I’ll be Bhaal, if that’s what it takes to end this. Damn my soul AND the torpedos. I’m going in!
I scream a battlecry that I’m sure probably sounded a lot better in my head than it did coming out of my mouth, then Slayer up and charge in to face down whatever beast lies in wait, for it shall surely fall beneath the might of my SLAYER RAGE!
Except that it doesn’t. What it does do is barely get injured while I explode into tiny Slayer chunks. So much for going it alone, I guess.
Dammit.
I reload back at the Irenicus battle. I trigger the cutscene, then spend the next ten minutes running far enough away from the battle to allow the game to let me save again, then we run all the way back and quick save just before we get close enough to trigger combat mode again. Now I don’t have to endure the cutscene and unskippable dialog anymore. Ain’t I smart?
Not that it matters. I’m just no match for the jerk, and this isn’t even his final form. I try every trick I can think of, but I can’t think of all that many on account of how I have no idea what I’m doing. I try loading up my mages with buffs and debuffs, which does nothing when Irenicus stops time and Insta-Kills them to death before they get so much as a finger waggle off.
I try summoning some creatures, but he kills them just as easily as he murder my mages, if not more so. I try brute force and just wail on him, but that only lasts about half a second longer than every other battle, which probably has more to do with a lucky roll of the dice than anything else.
I repeat this process more times than I can count, and it’s just not fun anymore. I know it’s probably my fault for not doing even MOAR SIDEQUESTS and gaining more levels before getting to the final area, but come on. I’ve put hours upon hours of my life into this game – much of which was surprisingly fun and a huge improvement over the first game – but a whole lot of it has just been extremely tedious, unimaginative filler. And now I face an impossible boss battle just because I didn’t feel like throwing even more hours into the sidequesting time sink.
I’m about to just give up and call it quits. I made it this far, and I’ve written thousands of words about my journey. It should be enough.
It should be.
But it isn’t.
I decide that, if the game’s not going to play fair, then neither am I. If it’s going to let Jon Irenicus tap into transdimensional forces to pull instant death kills out of his ass like tacos on a low fiber diet, then I’m going to play dirty, too. And with darker magics than even Irenicus could dream up. But the best part is that he won’t ever see it coming.
Before going back into battle with him for the umpteenth time, I summon the antediluvian god of Baldur.ini. I then chant the unholy mantra to invoke its power: ‘Program Options’, ‘Debug Mode’, ‘1’. And then, I reload my game…
I walk slowly up to Irenicus, oozing confidence and testosterone. He starts to waggle his fingers, and I just say, “Hush now. Daddy’s home.”
Then, I cast Control-Spacebar and CLUAConsole:EnableCheatKeys().
A look of horror flashes over Johnny Boy’s face, and I almost think he knows what’s about to happen. He doesn’t, of course. How could he? He’s just a collection of mathematical algorithms and pixels. He’s not a god.
But I am.
I put my cursor over his body, then press Control-Y…
SPOILER ALERT: He dies.
Yes, I cheated. So what? Just pretend that I went back and did whatever stupid crap you think I should’ve done, then make believe I came here and beat him fair and square if it makes you feel any better. Just don’t actually expect me to do that, because I’m done. Flat done.
I watch the cutscene, then descend into Hell with my dignity still intact and ready for a little payback. It’s clobberin’ time!
We arrive in Hell, and I run straight to the Pride demon. He says his thing, then I rush into face the dragon again.
CONTROL-Y!
He goes down, and I take the first Tear of Bhaal.
I run back out to the central area, then down into another room, where I come across the Fear demon. It offers me a cloak that will never let fear or panic touch me again, but it’s made from the skin of nymphs – which reminds me of those mostly naked dryads back at the start of the game – so I decline the offer. I want nothing to do with anything so evil simply because it might be a great help in my upcoming ordeals. I don’t have to compromise my integrity anymore, just to stay alive. I have REAL power now, so I can afford to be good again.
We push the demon aside and run forward into a room of high level Beholders. Normally, I’d probably be in for a difficult battle, but that was then. This is now.
CONTROL-Y! CONTROL-Y! CONTROL-Y!
They lie dead, motionless and rotting in pools of their own viscera at my feet. I snag another Tear, then we walk over and loot the chest they were guarding, and I grab some potions I don’t need because Death can’t touch me anymore.
CONTROL-Y AND YOU DIE!
I find the Selfishness demon next. He presents me with a choice: Go through the Evil Door, and someone in my party will be sacrificed, or go through the Good Door, and everyone will live, but I’ll lose some of my abilities. The choice is a simple one, now that I have become immune to the petty necessities of pragmatic reality. I choose the Good Door because I don’t need abilities anymore.
I lose some hit points and a little dexterity, both of which are meaningless to me now. Statistics are something that happens to other people. Let the proletariat fret over min/maxing their die rolls. Their petty worries are of no concern to the aristocracy.
I get another Tear, the loot the room because old habits die hard.
Next up is Greed. He gives me an evil sword that will make killing this Tear’s guarding much easier, but I don’t use it, for I no longer heed the siren’s call of Evil’s allure. Instead, I give the sword to the genie enslaved to guard the Tear, thus sacrificing my power to release him from his eternal servitude.
I have transcended morality.
I get another Tear, then head to the last room. Waiting inside is Sarevok, the Big Bad from the last game. He tries to goad me into a fight, clearly representing Wrath, if only in deed rather than name. I refuse to be lured into his trap and do not succumb to my inner rage. This infuriates him, so he attacks me anyway.
I dispense the wisdom of the Way of Control-Y, and help him find inner peace at last.
Requiescat in pace, Sarevok.
With all the Tears now in my possession, we return to the main room and unseal the gate. My alignment changes from True Neutral to Neutral Evil, and I am judged.
Irenicus emerges from the black abyss that lies beyond the dark portal and summons forth a small army of minions to aid him, but it is all for naught. I dispatch each of them in turn, almost without thinking. Certainly without remorse or concern. Their fate was decided the moment they were conjured into existence. I am a function of the universe now, and the universe is but a manifestation of my will.
To oppose me is to oppose existence itself. All who try shall suffer.
Irenicus now lies dead at my feet while all of Faerûn celebrates the victory of my benevolent grace, for I have delivered them from evil and shown them the one true way to victory lies not through magical items or skill with a sword, but through Me.
I am the beginning.
I am the end.
I am…getting in trouble with my wife, because it’s my night to do laundry and I’ve been playing this damn game way too much.
No, I won’t be playing Throne of Bhaal. So don’t bother asking.
THE END
After no one read my Baldur’s Gate feature, I thought I’d continue my lack of success by adding another bonus feature to the Life Bytes series thousands of people also aren’t reading. This time, I’m bringing you a historical retrospective on the First Person Shooter genre. Why? Because sometimes, you just want to shoot things, preferably in a consequence-free environment, unshackled from the chains of mundane concerns like petty morality or the long arm of the law. Also, the FPS genre has been the most popular in gaming for the past all the years, so I thought people might enjoy looking back on its early days. I say look back, because some of these games are best remembered than replayed. Trust me on this.
BONUS FEATURE: FPS Retrospective
The Complete Life Bytes Series
Of course, I can’t cover every single game in the most overcrowded genre ever conceived, but I’ll do my best to hit the highlights from all the different eras, starting with the emergence of the shooter in the early ’90s, and continuing on to the present day. Or at least until I get tired of it.
However, while this is intended to be a chronological retrospective of the entire first person shooter genre, I’m only going to be discussing games that 1) Were highly influential and/or innovative or underrated, and 2) Have either been made freely available by the publisher, or are available for purchase from a digital distribution platform, such as gog.com or Steam. (You’re on you own with EA’s Origin, though. Sorry.)
There might be the occasional exception to this rule for games that have neither been made freely available nor purchasable through a digital platform. I’ll try to minimize these, but due to the nature of covering older games, there will probably be a few. Whenever one does come up, I’ll try and find somewhere you can buy a physical copy. (And no, I’m not using any affiliate links, so any stores I send you to – digital or otherwise – are just regular links I don’t make any money from.)
That said, I’ll only be providing links to purchase the GOG versions of titles that are available on both GOG and Steam. No, this is not because I work for GOG (although they should totally hire me), but because I believe in DRM-free gaming. Plus, I really dig the GOG community. Sue me.
I’ll be continually adding games to this post until I reach the end of the feature, just like I did with Baldur’s Gate. You won’t get any notifications when the page has been updated though, so check back often for new entries.
Also, please be sure and share the link, because your Likes and Shares validate my immense, yet surprisingly fragile ego. And if I’ve missed one of your favorite games that you’d like to see included, let me know in the comments, and I might try to squeeze it in.
Yes, there were technically some 3D, first-person games before Catacomb 3D, but I started here because this game really does mark the birth of the FPS genre. Even though I didn’t hear of it until years later, well after I’d played other FPS games, it was id software’s first foray into the genre. And id is the father of the genre. Or maybe it was the mother, considering the whole birthing aspect…but you never really hear “The mother of the FPS genre,” do you? Or the mother of any genre, in any media, now that I think about it. Somehow, things are always “the father” of this or “the granddaddy” of that, but the closest moms get is “The mother of all” moniker in front of what are usually terribly offensive, misogynistic things. Most anything from George Broussard and 3D Realms comes to mind…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Other FPS titles don’t exist yet, because the father of the genre just gave birth (somehow) to the first one: Catacomb 3D. It’s kind of amazing that FPSs grew into what they are today from these humble beginnings, because after spending about ten minutes with this migraine-inducing mess of pixels only a mother could love, I’m surprised that anyone ever thought making a second go of it was a good idea.
Maybe if I’d played it when it came out back in 1991, I would have gotten it. But playing it for the first time in 2015, all it gave me was a headache. Literally. I had to stop playing because the badly faked first-person perspective was just so off that, whenever I turned my character left or right near a wall, I felt a tiny dagger slip into the squishy bits of my optic nerve and twist.
As for the gameplay, there’s not really much to say because there isn’t very much to it. You’re plopped down into what appears to be a dungeon, although it could really just be anywhere with stone walls covered in glowing, radioactive lichen, but it’s probably a dungeon. Within moments, 
you’re attacked by gorilla monkeys with spears or something, and you pew-pew them with magic missiles or fireballs until they’re dead. At least, I think they were magic missiles or fireballs, but I’m not really sure. I spent most of my time with the game rapid-firing death pixels, and it wasn’t until I was nearly finished torturing myself that I noticed I could hold down the fire key to build up a graphic on the right of the screen that slowly turned into an enormous mushroom cloud. Presumably, this amounts to charging the magic missile fireball into a thermonuclear detonation, which would at least explain the aforementioned radioactive lichen clinging to the walls of the place, I guess.
The rest of the catacombs are filled with glowy doors of different colors with giant keyholes in them. You run around, collect the keys, open the glowy doors, collect treasure chests and pew-pew evil whatevers in the name of I don’t know what. Adventure, I suppose.
Oh, and you make this obnoxious fart noise whenever you bump into a wall, which happens constantly. So if you’re into fart jokes, it’s got that going for it.
I didn’t get very far in the game, and I’m not going back. I don’t have nostalgia goggles for this title since I never played it before, so I have no protection against the onslaught of awful. I guess it was fun for its time, but that time is over. And unless you’re a fan of self-induced migraines, the game should probably remain a footnote on a Wikipedia page covering the history of the genre.
I almost didn’t put this game on the list, because it’s not really a shooter. It is first-person, however, and it has real-time combat, so it kind of counts. But mainly, it’s here because the things done in Ultima Underworld would greatly influence future games across many genres, including the First Person Shooter.
The first time I saw this game was over at a friend’s house. He was That Friend of mine; you know, the guy with the rich parents who bought him the latest and greatest everything. He was playing UU on a 486 with a VGA monitor, Sound Blaster, and who knows what else. Probably quantum-based RAM with a super double Turbo function or something. Point is, he had a top of the line rig.
He gave me a whirlwind tour around the Stygian Abyss, killing a goblin here and a giant spider there. He showed me how it was VIRTUAL REALITY, and you could look up and down, everything had textures, and you could hit things with swords. I was hooked immediately, even if he did drone on at length about how you even got experience points just from walking. FROM WALKING! (Imagine a kid with a bowl cut and a not inconsequential dandruff issue leaning back in his expensive office chair and swiveling around while madly throwing his hands in the air and screaming these words. Got it? Congratulations. You’ve just met my friend. Ritalin hadn’t been invented yet.)
He let me borrow his copy, and I eagerly ran home to install it. The problem was, I was installing it on a crappy 386 with minimal RAM. The game chugged.
But I played it, nonetheless. From the moment Richard Garriott’s faux-British accent boomed really bad VO from my tiny speakers, I was hooked. I loved the game, even if it hated my computer. It was immersive before we even knew what immersion was in gaming, and you really can’t understand it now if you didn’t play it back then, when there was nothing else like it.
The good news is that it still holds up today. I played through most of it a few weeks ago, and had more fun that I remember having had back when it was new (probably because I’m not playing on the PC equivalent of an abacus anymore). The controls took a bit of getting used to at first, because you move by way of holding down the mouse button, but I slipped back into the groove fairly quickly.
Ultima Underworld would go on to influence just about every other game in existence, including the System Shock series, the Thief games, the Elder Scrolls, Deus Ex, Bioshock, etc… But back in 1992, it was just freaking awesome, even if I didn’t really understand why it was so much more of a resource hog than the next game on my list. And yes, Ultima Underwold came out before Wolfenstein 3D. Google it, if you don’t believe me. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
While id software did make several sequels to Catacomb 3D, I’m not playing any of them on account of how they’re all sequels to Catacomb 3D. Instead, I’m moving directly on to their next shooter, which is the first FPS I ever played, and what most people consider to be the legitimate beginning of the genre.
I remember downloading the shareware version of Wolf3D from a local Bulletin Board System back in ’92. It was near the end of my junior year in high school, and the sysop of the Around The Clock BBS broke into chat after I dialed in, to tell me about this amazing new game I just had to try. Having played Castle Wolfenstein on my Apple][ and remembering it as a really fun game, I headed over to the Files section and started my download of Wolfenstein 3D Shareware. Then, I went and ate dinner. And watched some TV. And then went to school the next day, because these were the days of 1200 baud modems, noisy phone lines and non-resumable file transfers. That shit took time.
Anyway, once I finally got my hands on it and installed the thing, I was hooked. I burned through the shareware levels, and decided that I actually wanted to buy a copy. I’d never actually bought any shareware game before, seeing as how the demos were usually enough to warn me off of most of the crap that was out there, but Wolf3D was actually good. And I wanted more.
Unfortunately, my parents didn’t feel the same way about putting a check in the mail, or giving their credit card info to some unknown game studio they didn’t care about, so I had to either wait until retail copies started showing up, or for the sysop of the BBS to buy it…and then make it available in the secret file section. (Hey, don’t judge me. It was the early ’90s, and I was a stupid high school student. Besides, we didn’t know piracy was wrong yet, because the MPA didn’t start releasing those hilarious You Wouldn’t Download A Car PSAs until 2004.)
Sadly, the rest of the game didn’t live up to those initial Shareware levels (which was often the case, back in those days, when the best of the game was shoved to the front to convince people to buy it), but it was still a good time.
Playing it today, though? Eh, it’s still a good time, if you only play for a few minutes and make sure to have your nostalgia amplifier cranked up to 11.
I still remembered where some things were on the first few maps, which surprised me. The level design isn’t quite as maze-like as Catacomb 3D was (and as later FPS games would become), so there’s a lot less wall bumping and farting. (Although the farting has been replaced by a muted “oomp” sound in Wolf3D. Sorry, fart joke fans.) There are, however, a few notable things to consider that you might not know about if you’re a younger gamer, or may have forgotten if you’re an old bastard like me.
First, these games weren’t about story or even level progression. This was back when points still mattered, so the game is as much about treasure hunting as it is about killing Nazis. In addition to fully exploring every room in each map, you’ll spend much of your time running along the walls while frantically mashing the spacebar like a coked up lab rat, because that’s how you find secret rooms in older FPS titles. And there are LOTS of secret rooms to find, in almost every game.
You also don’t really aim in Wolf3D – or any of the early FPSs – so much as you point your gun in the general direction of an enemy and press shoot. Auto-aiming was the name of the game back when people were still figuring out how to navigate in a fluid, first-person environment, and the sluggish nature of keyboard controls meant that twitch gaming didn’t apply to the first person shooter in its infancy. That would come later, after God invented mouselook.
John Carmack had resolved the headache-inducing perspective issues from Catacomb 3D by the time Wolfenstein came around, so you’ll likely be able to play it for as long as you feel like shooting pixel Nazis. Admittedly, that’s not likely to be very long, but it can still be a fun diversion, and is definitely worth checking out, for the sake of history.
The genre still had a lot to learn before it could really come into its own, though. Like, I thought I was going to kill several Nazi bastards with one clean shot, but it turns out that barrel manufactures hadn’t yet started lining their products with deadly explosives back in 1992.
Next up on the list is a little title from a kid who would eventually become the wellspring behind the first epic rivalry between FPS developers…
I’m the same age as Ken Silverman, although technically older by nearly a year. He accomplished more while he was still in high school than I’ve done in my entire life though, so he’s got me beat there.
Back in 1992, Ken wrote a little tech demo called WALKEN (Walk + Ken) after playing Wolfenstein. I guess he got it in his head that he could make his own Wolf3D, so he did. Just like that. WALKEN was eventually picked up by Epic Megagames (who would later drop the Mega and become an industry powerhouse), made into an actual game and distributed as Ken’s Labyrinth.
Sidenote: I’m apparently entirely incapable of spelling labyrinth. I keep wanting to put the r before the y, and thank god for red squiggly lines or I might look like even more of an idiot than I already do.
I remember playing around with Ken’s Labyrinth a little bit back in the day, and I unfairly labeled it a crappy Wolfenstein clone and dismissed it entirely. This was a mistake, because the game is actually pretty charming.
Of course, when I was 18 years old, I didn’t quite grasp the concept of charming nearly as well as I understood boobs, blood and guns. I didn’t want to play some cute little shooter. I needed edgy X-TREME shooters. Because when you’re an 18 year old boy, you’re kind of an idiot.
Unless you’re Ken Silverman, that is. Shortly after finishing Ken’s Labyrinth, 3D Realms tapped the teen to create a new engine for their games. It was called Build, and it would go on to power some of the biggest shooters of the ’90s. And, in the long list of dumb things George Broussard has done, not throwing money at Ken to keep him working on new tech is right up at the top of the list. And that’s saying something.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again. This entry is about Ken’s Labyrinth, so let’s focus. As I said, it’s a Wolfenstein 3D clone – the first one, I think – and it’s every but as good as its inspiration, from a technical point of view. Gameplay wise, it’s a lighter affair and was clearly done by a kid with a good heart who wanted to make a shooter, but didn’t see the need to fill it with blood and guns and gore.
Playing it today is almost zen like, in the sense of relaxation it gives you, which is odd considering the genre. But that’s what it does. From the colorful artwork to the calming music, the game just feels like a soft, comfortable slipper. You know, the kind that’s all fuzzy on the inside and keeps your feet warm in the winter.
Basically, you just run around and pew-pew things with a red dead dodgeball. There are no scenes of epic violence, no shooting Nazis or Nazi dogs, and everything is handled in a very family-friendly way, which kind of reminds me of my own kid playing “Hunger Games” in Minecraft. Sure, you’re running around shooting things, but it’s less about killing than it is about pretending.
Ken’s Labyrinth is a journey into the world of make believe, fueled by an engine written on the hopes of a wannabe who became an industry golden boy before quietly slipping out of the rat race to devote his time to doing whatever the hell he felt like.
Ken has put a wealth of information and files up on his website, including the complete Ken’s Labyrinth, for free. You might as well give it a download and try it for yourself, especially if you have kids. I’m going to install it on my 8 year old’s laptop tomorrow, because I want to introduce him to the genre, but I’d rather not do it by splashing buckets of gore on his face.
This is a weird game. It’s a Raven Software title published by Origin and running on a version of id software’s Wolfenstein 3D engine that, as far as I know, was unique to this game. John Carmack himself wrote it, called it the Shadowcaster 3D engine, and it sits somewhere between Wolf3D and Doom from a tech standpoint, while it plays like an action-oriented version of Ultima Underworld, but with shapeshifting thrown in.
Like I said, it’s a weird game. I remember picking it up and not really being sure what to expect, but it had Origin’s name on it, so it had to be good, right? Well, kinda. It wasn’t Ultima Underworld, although it had a touch of item management. It also wasn’t Doom, because it had things like puzzles and a story mixed in with the pew-pew-pewing.
It starts off with your grandfather sitting you down in front of the fire one night to tell you that you’re actually a good shapeshifter with a MYSTERIOUS ORIGIN from another dimension who can save the world from the evil shapestealers, and then a giant flying gargoyle dog crashes through the window and grandpappy zaps you away in a sparkly blue flash.
You’re then dropped right into the game with some kind of…thing coming at you. You’ll probably die, because you don’t understand the controls. At first, you’ll think they’re like Wolfenstein’s – and they are, except that they’re also not. Then, you’ll probably think they’re like Ultima Underworld’s, and you wouldn’t be wrong, except that you also would.
They’re actually a mix between the two. Before you can fight, you have to select one of your hands (one of which can also hold things like wands, which is how you switch between spells and melee), then use the right mouse button to judo chop or fireball the various monsters into oblivion.
You also have to find keys and shift into different animal forms to get around various obstacles, at least until you hit that one spot with the water that I was never able to get past.
Playing the game today is actually a pretty smooth experience, once you figure out what the controls want you to do. It’s a nice blend between the action and RPG genres, and is what I’d consider to be the first Action RPG FPS, if those ever even existed. One big feature of the game is the ability to actually aim when you’re pew-pewing with spells, because they zap wherever you have the crosshair pointed, which seems like a little thing, but when you’ve been playing a lot of auto-aim, crosshair-less shooters, you come to appreciate the little things. You can also jump in the game, which is another revolutionary concept for the FPS genre (outside of Ultima Underworld). You have to activate a button on your HUD first, though, and then right click will send you hopping. It’s a little cumbersome, but hey. It’s something.
I’m actually probably going to jump back into it and play some more, just to see if I can finally get past wherever that water puzzle was that stumped me back in ’93. I’m sure I’ll recognize it.
A lot of people think Blake Stone came out after Doom, but it actually beat it by a few days back in December of ’93. People also think it uses the Doom engine, but people are stupid. It actually uses an enhanced version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine, but what confuses people is the fact that is has textured floors and ceilings, which wasn’t something typically seen in other Wolf3D clones (or games running on its engine). Of course, it didn’t help that Doom shipped a week later and basically crushed this poor game’s dreams of success, even if it did manage a sequel.
As far as Wolfenstein clones go, this one is pretty good. It takes the player from the brightly lit corridors of a dingy German castle and transports the action to the brightly lit corridors of sci-fi military bases. You start off with a pew-pew laser gun that never runs out of pew juice, then slowly grab new weapons that are totally not just sci-fi versions of Wolfenstein’s weapons. You also hunt for keys and open secret doors and, yeah. It’s basically Wolfenstein with ray guns.
There are a few differences, though. For starters, you don’t just kill everything you see. Some scientists are actually good guys who will help you out if you’re kind enough to not murder them. Of course, they look exactly like the other scientists who will happily kill you to death, and the only way to tell them apart is to try talking to them. If you say hello and they give you a howdy-do back, you’re good. But if you say hi and they try to vaporize your kidneys, then you know you’ve found a bad one. Pew him to death.
There are also vending machines where you can buy Soylent Green or whatever it is that people eat in the distant sci-fi future, which was a nice touch. But the biggest new feature is the fact that the Big Bad doesn’t just sit in his Evil Bedroom, watching you murder all of his henchmen while he does nothing until you knock on his door with a rocket launcher. Instead, he pops up every now and then while you’re playing. You pew at each other for a while until his health gets low enough, after which he teleports away back to his Evil Clubhouse or whatever. It’s a simple thing, but shows some of the early signs of innovation that would soon come to define the golden age of the ’90s FPS.
More than Wolfenstein, Doom is the game that truly established the FPS genre and made it a force that would change gaming forever, for better or worse. Usually worse.
I’m not really going to spend much time on Doom because, let’s face it, you’ve probably already played it. Even if you’re 15 years old and just dipping your toes into the classic gaming kiddie pool, one of the first games your grabbed was Doom. Or maybe Doom 2. Or both.
There’s a reason this game launched a genre, and that’s because it’s ridiculously fun. It’s tightly designed, has great enemies, satisfying weapons, smart levels and AI bad guys who can piss each other off until they spend more time trying to murder one another in the shotguns than they do aiming their death barrels at your face.
Doom improved on Wolfenstein in every way. It brought dynamic lighting to the table, for example, so you could run into a fully lit room with a lot of ammo and the big, shiny key you needed sitting on a pedestal, and just know that picking it up was going to turn out the lights and unleash hell. Literally.
Doom takes sci-fi chocolate and dips it in the peanut butter of horror to produce a delicious combination of genres that perfectly captured the spirit of “edgy” gaming back in the ’90s. It was dark, brutal and bloody, with a touch of demonic hellbeasts to stir up the religious right and give Tipper Gore’s bleeding heart more than a few ulcers. And we loved it.
But even more than its single player campaign of shooting monster demon muderbots in the face with shotguns was shooting your friends in their faces with shotguns, because Doom introduced multiplayer to the world, which changed everything.
LAN parties suddenly became a thing. You’d drag your giant PC over to a friend’s house, where you’d meet up with several other friends who were all dragging their giant PCs, too. Then, you’d spend an hour hooking everything up through either a crappy Ethernet hub or ridiculous BNC connections, and another hour getting all the computers talking to each other. But then – eventually – you would launch the game and meet your friends on the battlefield.
And it was glorious.
Pizza, soda, chips, friends and Doom were all any self-respecting geek needed over a weekend, and Deathmatches quickly became regular after-hours affairs at many a workplace. Doom was everywhere, and if you weren’t playing it in ’93, then you either knew someone who was or you hadn’t been born yet.
Playing it today is a bit underwhelming, though. If you screw your nostalgia goggles on tight enough so they just barely cut off most of the circulation to your hippocampus, then you’ll probably still have just as much fun with it today as you did back then. However, it’s a tough sell. It’s still fun, it’s still fast, and blowing a cacodemon away at point blank range with your shotgun is still a blast, but there are problems.
Doom’s maps may have introduced verticality to the genre, but it didn’t really expect you to use it. The predominance of the keyboard as the standard playing method at the time meant that it doesn’t really require nearly as much skill today as you thought it did then, simply because the game’s auto-aim handles all the hard parts for you. Just vaguely point your gun in the general direction of a bad guy, then press shoot and you’ll probably score a hit whether he’s above or below you, even though you’re always aiming at eye-level.
The level design is also much more confusing and maze-like than I remember it being, which is fine for multiplayer, but the key-hunting that plagued almost every damn shooter in the early years means you’ll probably spend a lot more time wandering around the same twisting hallways than you think.
Also, the best levels are in the Shareware version. Again. Shareware was a great model for a very brief period of time, but I’m kind of glad that time is over now. Shoving all the best levels into the demo version was a great way to get people to buy your full game, but it also meant that most people just kept playing those early levels over and over again even after they had the full version, because it was almost always downhill from there.
This game made the list for the same reason Ultima Underworld did, which isn’t surprising considering the fact that it was made by the same people. It’s also pretty much Underworld in space, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As long as you don’t mention the cyberspace bits.
We don’t talk about those.
I must confess to never getting very far in System Shock, back in the day. I think this was probably because I had a crappy PC that had a hard enough time running the Underworld games, let along the improved (and much more taxing) engine behind System Shock. Also, I really sucked at the game.
It was just too confusing, to be honest. Maybe I was just stupider then than I am now, but I don’t really think that’s true. I’m probably just getting dumber with age, which seems to be the standard progression protocol, at least here in Texas. I keep expecting to wake up one morning to discover that I’ve suddenly turned into a government hating, flaming racist. The longer you live in the South, the more likely that is to happen, for some reason. Show me an old white guy in Texas, and I’ll show you an angry Tea Party nutjob.
But anyway, that’s Texas. System Shock takes place in space, so we don’t have to worry about the cowboys right now. Instead, we have to contend with the most complicated game ever created by man.
“Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.” -Terry Pratchett
Seriously, when the very first screen of a game is entirely populated by tooltips, you’re in for a rough time. This was hard even in 1994, when games tended to be a lot more complicated than they are now, but even by those standards, System Shock was a beast. It didn’t help that the low resolution of the game meant that the surprisingly detailed textures became a cacophony of pixelated madness.
Playing it today is no better. In fact, it’s probably worse. I couldn’t even get the game running in DOSBox on OS X, as it kept throwing page faults and walls of giant blue text at me with each crash. I booted over into Windows and had better luck, but then I actually had to play the game.
And oh god. It hurt. The interface is basically the same as Ultima Underworld’s, but the sheer amount of complexity in the environment makes it a lot more daunting. Plus, I couldn’t figure out how to look up at the security camera to bash it with my lead pipe before I was murdered by a homicidal R2-D2.
Fortunately, a guy over in the GOG Twitch chat clued me into the existence of something called System Shock Portable, which makes the game MUCH more playable, by today’s standards. It allows for increased resolutions and – most importantly – the addition of mouselook. The higher resolutions helped to clear up the noise of the busy textures, while mouselook and WASD movement made navigation a cinch. Of course, everything comes at a price, and the difference in mouse acceleration between free look mode and using the inventory cursor meant that I was either spinning around in circles like a hyperactive madman every time I so much as nudged my mouse, or slowly dragging my mouse, then lifting it up to put it back where it was so I could drag it some more until I finally managed to move the cursor the two inches I needed it to go so that I could finally drop that audio log I found into my inventory.
UPDATE: System Shock: Enhanced Edition has been released from Night Dive Studios, which bundles up the best community mods and packages everything nicely into a self-contained game that just works. I’d recommend grabbing it, rather than fussing over getting the original release to work correctly.
The game certainly doesn’t hold your hand, either. In fact, it seems to shun your hand altogether, and probably wouldn’t even talk to you at parties. I spent at least half an hour walking around and around the FIRST TWO ROOMS of the game, because I needed to find a keycode that I couldn’t find. Seriously, I don’t think it even exists. I listened to all the audio logs I’d picked up, and nobody mentioned the code. I read through my emails and listened to SHODAN ramble on and on, describing every damn area of the entire freaking space station in excruciating detail, but she never mentioned the door code. And I never found it.
Fortunately, I’ve played other games descended from System Shock, so I took a stab and put in the Shock Code. This, if you don’t know, is a code that has appeared in many games of the Looking Glass lineage. When in doubt, try 0451 and it’ll probably work. Or, in the case of System Shock, just 451, since the first door has a three digit code.
After finally getting through the impenetrable door while still never having actually found the stupid code, I was plugging along fairly well with the game, which mostly felt like a slightly more cumbersome version of System Shock 2 thanks to the Portable mod, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then, I jacked into cyberspace and everything went to shit.
I don’t know what liquid Kool Aid acid trip everyone was on back in the ‘90s that forced them to envision cyberspace as bizarre, LSD-fueled hallucinations into polygonal madness, but there really is nothing good about any version of cyberspace from anything produced in the ‘90s. System Shock is no exception to this rule.
Once I was jacked in, I was immediately thrust into a wireframe world of floating insanity. I was bumping into walls and picking up spinning cubes of data something or others, then I got hopelessly lost despite the giant arrows littering the place. Eventually, I was cyber-killed by a cyber-dog. And I gave up on life.
Following hot of the heels of Doom 1 was Doom 2, released a year later. If you want to know what it’s like, take everything I said about Doom The First and apply it to Doom The Second, because it’s basically the same damn game. They added the Super Shotgun though, which takes the original shotgun everyone loved from Doom 1, then throws a second barrel on it and removes half the animation.
Seriously, the shotgun is fun because you shootgun, then watch (and hear) the cool pump-action animation. In contrast, the Super Shotgun has, maybe, 3 frames of animation for reloading. It’s utter crap, and it ruined an otherwise great weapon for me.
Apart from the additional weapon, there’s really not much else that’s new in Doom 2. It’s more or less a level pack with a new gun. The real distinction between the two games is that Doom 1 was shareware, while Doom 2 was a commercial release you had to put on pants for if you wanted, because you had to go out in public to buy it at an actual store. Where people were and crap. It was horrifying.
The levels are a bit more tightly designed than in the first one, with slightly higher levels of complexity; but at the end of the day, it’s really just MOAR DOOMZ. Which isn’t a bad thing.
Animation!
Where to even start with this game? I’m trying to find something nice to say about every game I put on this list, but I never liked Rise of the Triad. I remember downloading the shareware version in ’94 and booting it up, then deleting it within the hour. I’m not sure what it was that I didn’t like about it back then, but it was probably mostly because it wasn’t Doom. But that’s kind of a stupid reason to not like a game, so I booted it back up and gave it another whirl, just to see if age and maturity had finally set in, and I could look at the game a little more fairly.
But no, I still hate it. The maps are just empty arenas of Shit Going On. There’s jump pads and platforming in an engine that was never really designed to handle verticality very well to begin with. Then there are the digitized enemies in place of art. This was a big thing in the ’90s that a lot of developers thought was super cool, but I was never a fan of the practice. I liked shooting demons and aliens and even evil human bad guys when they were cartoons, but I didn’t particularly relish the idea of spraying my shootporn all over real people. (Even if they did end up looking more like a confused mess of congealed pixel jello by the time they were digitized, downscaled, and rendered in the game.)
To its credit though, RoTT did do several interesting things with the aging Wolfenstein 3D engine that would eventually become standard features in future game. Originally planned as an actual sequel to Wolf3D before id backed out of it (because Doom) and left Apogee holding a bag full of Nazis, the team ended up adding several cool things to it, like the aforementioned jump pads (except they were more goofy than cool in RoTT, especially when no animation was given to characters who used them, so you just saw floating puppets flying around everywhere, stuck in mid-air a walk cycles), breakable windows, bullet decals, etc… It even kinda/sorta had dynamic lighting, even if it was rudimentary and faked. It was still a little cool. I guess.
I think RoTT found most of its fans through its multiplayer component, which I never bothered with. But it’s the only thing I can think of that might have saved this otherwise forgettable tech demo from obscurity, because it certainly wasn’t the single player game. The story is ridiculous, the AI is broken, the level design is garbage, and it just isn’t very good. IN MY OPINION. Your mileage may (and probably will) vary.
This game does have its fans. A lot of them, actually. So there’s something here for people to like, even if I can’t tell what it is. The game even got a remake in 2013 (which I also didn’t like), and legions of people still talk about how much fun RoTT is to this day. I don’t know what they’re seeing that I’m not, but like I said, the game did bring some cool new features to the table, and the multiplayer is probably pretty hysterical. I can understand the appeal, I guess. But then again, I never thought being able to play a character named Ian Paul Freely was comedy gold, either.
Remember ShadowCaster? Heretic is a lot like that, which makes sense because it was developed by the same studio. However, it’s much more Doom than Ultima Underworld this time around. In much the same way as Blake Stone was Wolfenstein with ray guns, Heretic is pretty much just Doom with magic spells. And it’s pretty damn cool.
Heretic would go on to spawn several sequels, which isn’t surprising. I believe this was the first game to feature the “gibs” that would later become a standard method of super murder in every FPS game ever released. Gibs, for those kids way in the back of the class who have no idea what I’m talking about, is short for giblets. It basically refers to killing someone so hard that they explode into tiny chunks of gore meat, which is a standard feature of modern gaming that everyone loves. And you have Heretic to thank for it.
In addition to adding gibs, Heretic actually let the player look up and down for the first time in a FPS not developed by Looking Glass, which was nice. There was also some simple inventory management, but nothing too taxing. Mostly, it was just a re-skin of Doom, but that didn’t really matter. Once you got tired of murdering people in space, you could switch to Heretic and murder people in a fantasy setting. Variety is the spice of life, after all.
When I say it plays like a re-skin of Doom, I mean it. Even the magic-based weaponry is straight out of Doom. You start the game with your Elven Wand, which not only shoots pew-pew magic at your enemies, but also serves as a stick you can beat them with when you run out of magical pew juice. It’s basically a fist/pistol combo. Then you have things like The Gauntlets Of The Necromancer, which is a really fancy way of saying Medieval Chainsaw. And there’s the Ethereal Crossbow which is really just a shotgun, the Dragon’s Claw that’s a machine gun, the Phoenix Rod that’s a rocket launcher, etc… You get the idea.
So yeah, it’s Fantasy Doom. Nothing wrong with that, though. It’s actually still pretty enjoyable, in limited spurts. You’re still running around and collecting keys because this is still the ’90s and game designers haven’t figured out better ways to funnel you through levels yet. But it’s fun, surprisingly visceral, and is just generally a good, solid murder game for whole family. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Dark Forces is not Star Wars Doom. It never was, no matter what that so-called “friend” of yours told you that time before you never spoke to him again. Yes, it’s a first person shooter. Yes, you pew pew bad guys. No, you’re not a Jedi. No, you don’t have Force powers or a lightsaber. Yes, you run around and shoot things. But that’s not all you do.
What separated Dark Forces from Doom was more than just an impressive Star Wars veneer. (And it was impressive. Each map had its own texture set, for example, with very few surfaces recycled between levels.) Whereas Doom was all random corridors and arenas designed to make good game-spaces, Dark Forces tried to create game-spaces out of actual places. Sure, they were limited by the technology (which was slightly more advanced than Doom’s, with room-over-room architecture, actual 3D objects for many elements in the world, the ability to look up and down, jump and crouch, etc…), but LucasArts did its best to at least try and recreate the feel of a, say, the inside guts of a Star Destroyer.
Dark Forces also had an actual story, with cutscenes sprinkled between briefings, mission objectives, and lots of flavor text. It also had puzzles. Lots and lots of puzzles. Too many puzzles, really. And some of them were just ridiculous.
There was this one bit in a detention center where you somehow had to figure out that you needed to find a secret room that would let you enter the elevator shafts you didn’t know you could go into, which would then allow you to cross over the tops of the elevators you didn’t know you needed to carefully position, just so you could access an area you didn’t even know existed. There was a lot of trial and error. And rage quitting.
A long time ago, in a bathroom far, far away…
It’s not an overly difficult game on the surface, but one thing Dark Forces did that every other FPS has had the good sense not to do was bring Lives to the party. Player lives, I mean. For some occult reason known only to whatever dark, antediluvian gods the project leader had probably sworn allegiance to, LucasArts turned back the video game clock to 1980-something, grabbed the most annoying holdover from the coin-op arcade days, and added it to their run and gun, puzzle-solving shooter. But they didn’t stop there. They also implemented an extremely wonky checkpoint system that would always revive you very near to where you died. Within inches, sometimes.
This was great when you’d just cleared a room of bad guys and didn’t want to have to cover a lot of the same ground you’d just run across before some random Stormtrooper punched your ticket, but it wasn’t so great if you hadn’t actually managed to clear the room yet. More often than not, Dark Forces just respawns you almost exactly where you died, which means the lasers that just killed you will start killing you all over again immediately upon your unfortunate resurrection. It’s even worse if you’re in, say, a hazard area where the very floor leeches health from your tired Rebel feet. And it’s even more worser (that’s a word) if you hadn’t managed to find the stupid exit before you died.
But random nitpicks aside, the game was a lot of fun – and it still is. In fact, when I started playing it again to refresh my memory before writing this entry, I got sucked right back in and couldn’t stop pew-pewing Imperial jerks until I’d finished the game. It’s not terribly long, unfortunately, but that was really more of an issue when it cost 50 bucks instead of the paltry $6 it’ll run you today.
At the suggestion of another friendly member of the GOG Twitch chat, I played through the game using the XL Engine, which brings a bit of the modern FPS to the old warhorse. Most importantly, it give you mouselook; but it also allows you to run the game in higher resolutions, which is a godsend when trying to play a 320×200 shooter on a modern display. However, the engine also applies texture filtering by default, so you’ll probably want to turn that off unless you’re an idiot. Applying anti-aliasing filters to detailed sprites just so you can blur up perfectly crunchy pixels is how the devil gets inside you, kids. Remember that.
A couple of words of warning about using the XL engine, though. First, you’ll likely hit a game stopping crash bug in the Nar Shaddaa level, but you can get around it by launching the engine with -nosound on the command line. It kinda sucks, but it’s not that big of a deal. Once you’ve finished the level, just quit the game and re-launch it normally. The other big problem happened to me at the end of the game, when defeating the Big Boss glitched and didn’t trigger the final event and I ended up having to finish the game by way of watching the ending on YouTube, which kind of sucked.
A lot of people think Duke Nukem 3D was the first game to run on Ken Silverman’s Build engine, but that particular honor actually belongs to William Shatner’s TekWar, which actually came out slightly before Dark Forces. But, since I didn’t really feel like playing two awful games built on a solid technical foundation, I thought I’d go with the lesser of the two evils. Just take my word for it on Billy Shat’s TekWar, though. No good can come of it.
Witchaven was billed as an Action Roleplaying Game, but it’s a lot more FPS than it is RPG. Yes, your character gains experience levels, there’s magic and swords, and you spend the game running through a castle/dungeon, but there’s never really any roleplaying going on, unless maybe you shout Elizabethan slurs at your computer when you play it or something. In which case, you’re probably a little scary, so let there be a plague on both your houses and let’s move on.
Technically, there’s not much S in Witchaven’s FPSing. Unless maybe you change the word from Shooter to Slasher, because there’s a lot of that. Most of the game is built around melee combat with various fantasy weapons like daggers, magical swords and halberds, all of which involve walking right up to the nearest braindead monster and clicking your mouse to slash, bash, or stab it to death in its squishy bits. If there’s any nuance to the combat, it’s that you might need to back up between swings so the beastie doesn’t hit you. SO EXCITING.
There are spells too, which all have very limited ammo in the form of scrolls you’ll need to be able to cast any of them. (You also need to be a certain level for some spells.) They’re as close as the game gets to shooting, if you don’t count the broken bow and arrow mechanic that I don’t count because it’s broken.
The game looks nice, I guess…if you’re into digitized real-world hands for you avatar, along with the different weapons. You can also finally smash barrels in this game, so there’s that. Personally, I didn’t like the graphics back in ’95, and I don’t like them today. There’s too much digitized work going on, along with rudimentary pre-rendered 3D for the monster sprites (although it could be rudimentary claymation, for all I know). I just never really liked that style, but you might. So hooray for you or whatever.
Hexen is the first sequel to Heretic, and probably one of the first recorded cases of Sequentialnumberingaphobia that plagues so many developers and publishers today. Why it couldn’t just be called Heretic 2 is a mystery, especially when the next sequel is called Hexen 2 instead of Heretic 3. And then there’s the actual Heretic 2, which came out after both Hexens and now I have a headache and need to lie down.
Hexen takes the brightly-colored, yet “dark” fantasy world of Heretic and throws a few heaping fistfuls of ’90s grunge at it. As a result, everything looks much darker and a lot more brown than the world of Heretic did. I don’t know, it’s probably edgy or x-treme or something.
For some reason they probably thought was a good idea at the time, the developers also decided to add some kind of rudimentary lighting falloff from the player’s perspective. By this, I mean that things up close to you are “brighter” while things in the distance are “darker”. But there’s never any actual change in the luminosity of textures because that sort of thing hadn’t been invented yet. Instead, they went with a sort of newspaper comic style of shadowing distant objects, by way of randomly slapping black pixel dots all over the screen. And it really looks awful.
Graphics aside, Hexen is basically just a grittier version of Heretic, so if you liked the first one, you’ll probably like the second one. Unless, of course, what you liked about the first one was the graphical style that Hexen took out behind the barn and crapped all over.
Full disclosure: This is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Terminator film series, but there were never really any good game adaptations until Future Shock came along. Unfortunately, it never really got the recognition it deserved, either at the time or in hindsight. I’m not really sure why that is, because this game had a couple of very important firsts.
Well, I take that back. I know exactly why Future Shock isn’t recognized for its contributions to the FPS genre, and that reason is called Quake. Everything that Quake did in 1996, this game had already done a year earlier, only no one noticed. It was the first fully 3D game, with polygonal geometry and world objects (cars, burned out buildings, etc…), and it was the first game to feature mouselook. In general, people tend to give these kudos to Quake, probably because whoever was in charge of marketing at Bethesda in the mid ’90s hadn’t figured out the Internet yet.
The game still features some sprites for weapons, various pickups and some level decorations (like bodies and mass skeletal graveyards…you know, things that really tie a room together), but most of the game was made up of textured polygons in 3D space. This meant that mouselook was a vital inclusion to make the game playable, especially with the level of verticality Future Shock brought to the table. I have very distinct memories of my palms actually sweating while I climbed precarious catwalks high into the air, or crossed tiny beams over large chasms while trying not to fall. No game since Future Shock has been able to do that to me.
The game also features a slight story along with mission briefings, but mostly it’s your typical Run Here, Pew That, Go There affair. However, the environments are very sparse, and it’s a little too easy to get lost in them. It’s not because they were designed as mazes, was the case with most FPSs up to this point, but because so much of everything looks the same. In part, this was by design, since you’re supposed to be running around the desolated landscape of a post-nuclear war, but it was also due to technological limitations and budget constraints. Still, once you getyour bearings, the game becomes remarkably immersive.
Or it did, at least. Back in 1995. As much as I love this game, it’s probably something best avoided today, unless you never played it and just want to experience what the first true 3D game was like for the sake of posterity or whatever. If you’re one of those people. However, if you’re one of the lucky few who actually played Future Shock back in ’95 and loved it, you might want to keep it safely locked away in your memory. If you do insist on trying it today, know that it runs decently in DOSBox, but there’s no frame limiter built into the game. This means you’re going to be constantly modifying your CPU cycles on the fly as you play, otherwise everything will move way too fast in some places and way too slow in others. It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s something to consider.
But the hardest part about playing it today is just playing it today. My nostalgia goggles are prescription strength when it comes to this game, but even they were having a hard time throwing enough rose tint at my screen while I tried to enjoy myself. The world is just too empty and too desolated, with not enough going on at any given time when you’re not being attacked by mechanical muderbots. This emptiness somehow worked in Future Shock’s favor back in ’95, but playing it today after having experienced better post-apocalyptic landscapes in other games, it’s really hard to find the immersion again.
Still, if you can stick with it and somehow temporally transpose your mind from the here and now to the there and then, there’s a lot to love about Terminator: Future Shock, but you’re going to have to work at it. You know, like with marriage.
How do I describe Duke Nukem 3D? It’s almost impossible to revisit without two decades worth of social change and personal maturity coloring my views, but there’s no doubting Duke’s influence on the genre. Apart from anything (and everything) else Duke Nukem 3D did, it brought Build into its own, and showed what the best 2.5D FPS engine was capable of. It also really ushered in the era of developers exploring inventive, crazy weapons and items that would come to define much of the ’90s FPS landscape. That, coupled with a high level of interactivity in the environment and some great multiplayer, was enough to make Duke stand out from the crowd. However, to talk about the other things the game did, I’m going to have to channel my inner 20-something and give you both his perspective from ’96, followed by my perspective as a 40-year-old father today.
20-Something Me In 1996: Holy shit! Duke is freaking amazing! The multiplayer is so sweet! I seriously, like, shrunk my friend and then squashed him to death with my foot. EPIC! And dude. Dude. DUDE. The game has, like, boobs in it and shit. And you can pay strippers to dance for you, it’s so edgy! 
And Duke says all this crazy shit from, like, Army of Darkness and shit. It’s SO funny. Oh, and you’re on a mission to save the world’s chicks because alien bastards are abducting them getting them pregnant and shit. And they’re all naked too, but they’re covered in green goo so you have to mercy kill them. And you can blow up buildings and shit and even play pool. Seriously, dude. You gotta try this game. It’s so dope and shit! Everything about is just the bomb dot com and shit. Word to your mother. And shit.
40-Year-Old Me In 2015: Ugh. This is actually one of the worst Build engine games. The distortion from looking up or down is terrible, the enemy AI is crap, and the only really good levels were in the shareware version, which were mostly only fun in multiplayer, which nobody’s even playing anymore, so there’s not even any point in that. And then there’s the misogyny. Good lord. I get that he’s supposed to be an over the top action hero, but does Duke have to be such a freaking pig? And why is an action hero defined by strippers shaking pixel boobs, anyway? I never want my son playing crap like this, that’s for sure. Objectifying women to an almost laughable (if it was so disgusting) degree, running around spouting catch phrases like it’s not at all obnoxious, this is probably one of the worst retro games anyone could let a kid play. Just…ugh. Oh, and about those catch phrases. Enough with the damn movie quotes. It’s not funny. It’s just appropriating someone else’s material for you own use. It’s lazy and stupid, and Seth MacFarlane’s already got that market covered.
There weren’t many FPS games of note released in 1996, and for good reason: because Quake changed everything. This, more than any other shooter on the list thus far, is the game that truly defined the ’90s FPS. Everything else was just getting us here. Everything after was just refining and building on Quake’s foundation. This is what brought the modern FPS to life, with its true 3D texture-mapped, polygonal maps, character models, weapon models, effects, a soundtrack by Trent Reznor, and two guns that actually fired Nine Inch Nails into people. The game had everything.
Of course, it would take a little bit of time for GLQuake and Quakeworld to fully manifest id’s masterpiece, but even out of the box, the game was great. It was schizophrenic, had no idea what its theme was and no story to speak of, but the gameplay was like nothing anyone had ever experienced before. Rocket jumping became a thing. Mouselook became the accepted control method. WASD keyboard movement became standard. Everything we know and love about first person shooters today truly started with Quake.
And it still holds up. Use something like Fitzquake to play it today, and it’s never played better. It’s just as fast and as crazy as you remember it, and every bit as good as you’ve heard if you never played it. Throw in some of Steve Polge’s Reaper Bots, and you even have excellent single-player deathmatch (which is nice, since most of Quake’s environments were designed as deathmatch maps more than they were as single player gameplay environments).
I can’t say enough good things about Quake. Just go grab it and play it for yourself. If you played in back in the ’90s, you’ll be thrilled by mainlining the nostalgia heroin. And if you’ve never played it, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. You won’t be sorry.
Note: The FPS really took off in earnest in 1997, after which each year just gets bigger and more overcrowded than the last. From here on out, I’ll be breaking every year into manageable chunks, so as not to overload your browsers or my server.
With Quake having just come out in 1996, Outlaws was behind the curve when it meandered onto the scene in 1997. A lot of people obsessed with chasing the technology dragon overlooked its 2.5d graphics, and they missed out on a great game.
Sure, it was blocky and filled with sprites, but everything else about it was great. First, it was a Western game back when there was no such thing as a Western game, outside of maybe that horrible Custer’s Revenge game on the Atari 2600 where the whole point of the game is to rape Native American women. (Seriously. That was an actual thing, back in ’82.)
Second, the cutscenes and music really sold the spaghetti western vibe the game was going for. You basically play Not Clint Eastwood on a tale of revenge, and it’s every bit as campy and cliched as you’d expect it to be – which is a good thing. It all just…works.
I remember playing on the hardest difficulty settings, where getting shot once or twice was the end of you. It felt “realistic” to me at a time before the genre had ever considered adding any realism. On the standard difficulty settings, it was a basic Doom clone with cowboy paint – but that paint job went a long way. Plus, the levels were all designed with at least some amount of practical logic to them, since you were meant to be running around towns and settlements and such, although the corridor-crawl is still present in the various caves and such you’ll be running through.
You also had to reload your guns in Outlaws, which I think was probably the first action-based FPS to feature that mechanic, although I could be wrong. It happens.
If you’re a fan of 2.5d shooter or westerns in general – or at least the spaghetti westerns of the ’60s – then you should totally check it out. You won’t be disappointed.
Riding high on the success of Duke Nukem 3D, 3DRealms began milking the Build engine for all it was worth with Shadow Warrior. They also went back to their well of shocking-for-shock-value’s-sake and created another game with an unapologetically sexist hero, but this time cranked up the shock value by making him an extremely stereotypical Asian character.
Oh, and there’s lots of bewbs, too. Basically, just replace Duke’s strippers and captured women with anime babes, and you have Shadow Warrior’s female characters.
You play as a character named Lo Wang. The first episode is called Enter the Wang. You routinely shout, “Who wants some Wang” as you play. Get it? HAW HAW HAW!
The game is offensive as can be – but it’s done in a tongue in cheek way, and makes no apologies for it. I remember not really liking the game very much because of this back in ’97, as it felt infantile to my refined 20-something brain. Which is saying something.
Revisiting it now though, and accepting it for what it was, the game isn’t bad. It’s got some great weapons representative of the inventive design of the era, it’s difficult and demanding, and it might even make you chuckle once in a while. Not because of how funny its horrible jokes are, but by how truly awful they turn out. It’s like a MST3k version of an FPS, if that makes any sense.
The title was recently rebooted in a much better game of the same name, but the original is still fun to run around in and pew pew enemies. It’s level design can get pretty convoluted though, so expect to spend a large chunk of playtime wandering in circles while George Broussard mocks you through the mists of time.
Returning to the trough with their dead horse, 3DRealms continued to crank out more Build engine games with yet another Build-powered series: Blood. (The sequel, released a year later, limped along on the LithTech engine.)
Blood is everything that Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior weren’t. It was still grotesquely violent and still mired firmly in B-movie sensibilities, but the puerile stabs at humor were mostly gone. It still had plenty of jokes, but it was a darker game. With hardly any boobies in it at all!
Being a horror fan, I was immediately drawn into Blood’s gothic world. You start the game in a grave, wielding a pitchfork for crying out loud. The whole game is a love letter to horror fans.
And it works. Still works, too. I replayed it at length recently, and enjoyed my time with it every bit as much in 2015 as I did in 1997. I’m not sure what it is about Blood that works so much better than either Duke’s non-shareware episodes or most of what Shadow Warrior had to offer, but it does.
Maybe 3DRealms was just maturing. Maybe their design skills were improving. Maybe it was just an ephemeral, inexplicable something that Blood did right. It could be the weapons, but all of 3DR’s games had great, inventive ways to murder angry sprites. It could be the level design, but it’s still on the weak, maze-heavy side of the design equation. Maybe it was the art direction, voice acting, or music. I honestly have no idea, but Blood was – and remains – my favorite Build engine game.
UPDATE: The always groovy Dave Allen pointed out that, perhaps Blood holds up because it wasn’t actually developed by 3D Realms. And he’s right. Turns out, it was only produced by 3DR; it was developed by something called Q Studios, which was absorbed into Monolith’s monolith (who would later go on to create some great shooters, after they figured out how to make LithTech not suck). This goes a long way to explaining why Blood feels like it handles its subject matter so much more skillfully than Duke3D and Shadow Warrior did.
I’ve never liked Baldur’s Gate. There, I said it. Grab the torches and the pitchforks, and it’s pistols at high noon or whatever. I don’t care. There are many reasons why two of Bioware’s most famousest games never clicked with me, but I’ll go into most of those whenever I get to the late ’90s section of Life Bytes. For now, let’s just say that I’ve been trying to like these damn games for well over a decade, and it just ain’t happenin’, kids.
First, let’s just get the 800 pound dragon out of the way up front: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I hate it. But I also love it. But I hate it, too. I’ve always loved D&D, ever since I got my first red box starter kit. I created tons of characters with detailed back stories, complex relationships and interesting motivations. I designed intricate campaigns with branching plot lines and living NPCs. And then I didn’t do anything with any of it.
BONUS FEATURE: Baldur's Gate
The Complete Life Bytes Series
I never actually played D&D, because I didn’t have anyone to play D&D with. Sure, I had friends; I even had nerdy friends. But my geek friends were on the shy side, and way too self-conscious to roleplay where other people might see their loincloths, while my friends of the non-nerd persuasion would only get as close to Dungeons and Dragons as it took to punch whoever was playing it. Any friends I had between the two extremes who might’ve actually played D&D had religious parents of the sort that thought rolling dice is how the devil gets inside you. (This being during the Satanic Panic years of the ’80s coupled with living in the Deep South, parental prohibition of RPGs was a pretty common childhood trauma.)
In short, I never really got to play with the AD&D rules apart from pretending to play the game in my head whenever I’d crack out my rulebook and work on a new character. And Baldur’s Gate is nothing if not slavishly devoted to the AD&D rules.
Which are stupid.
And I hate them.
Honestly, some of them just make no sense at all. Sure, they’re logical from a mechanical perspective, but the fiction wrapped around some of the game systems just makes no sense at all. Take mages, for instance. They have to memorize spells every night, then go to sleep to fully commit them to memory (for some reason) before they can be cast. This makes sense from a gameplay perspective, as it adds an element of pre-planning to encounters. But on the other hand, it’s batshit crazy.
Imagine being a mage in the D&D universe. You work hard and master a new spell, memorize how to cast it and then excitedly fall asleep, eager to wake up the next morning and cast Magic Missile at the pre-dawn darkness or whatever. So you do that. AND IT IS AMAZING.
Then what? You’re standing there, all zippy-zap happy with yourself, AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW YOU DID WHAT YOU JUST DID. Because you forgot the instant you cast the spell.
Imagine this same logic applying to anything else in the D&D universe. Learn to tie your shoes? Great job! Just pray they don’t come untied during the day, because you’re not going to remember how to how to do that neat bunny rabbit trick until you teach yourself anew and fall asleep all over again. Learn a new sword technique? Awesome! You use it to kill an orc that was attacking you, but now you’re just standing there, clueless and clutching your sword, wondering where the pointy end goes. You’ll need to learn how to fight again before bedtime. Meanwhile, you were just murdered by an angry rabbit. Sorry.
D&D mages are all madmen. They have to be. Every moment of their lives dangles on the precipice between absolute power and complete imbecility. Sisyphus had it easier.
But anyway, back to Baldur’s Gate. I’m determined to figure out what people love about these games – and boy, people do love them – so I’ve started playing through the first one. Again.
Why? SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
You are welcome.
If you want to jump down this lunatic rabbit hole yourself, you can pick up the original game (with all expansions) DRM-free for $9.99 over at GOG.com, or you can grab the Enhanced Edition for $19.99, also at GOG.com and DRM-free. I’m playing the Enhanced Edition, if you’re curious.
Oh, god. I forgot about this useless mess of pixels called a companion. Her name is Imoen, and her voice is the best example of why having limited voice acting in these games is a blessing. Although ostensibly a thief of some repute, she is basically useless in all things that don’t involve annoying the living shit out of me every five seconds.
She’s also the first companion you get, once you finally make it out of the tutorial town with all of its creepy green-robed monks groping at your tender bits under the guise of “helping” you. Yeah, I know what you’re about, Mister Raperobe. We all know.
It begins.
Anyway, once you leave the safety of Candlekeep, your foster father or stepdad or cradle-robing sketchy uncle spirits you away under cover of darkness. And is immediately blown up.
You get ambushed, and he tells you to RUN! So your character slowly – and good lord, do the characters in this game putter about with all the speed of a tranquilized sloth – meanders off the screen while a whole bunch of fizzledly-plop happens with magic and particle effects until your great grand-dad or wise old mentor or whatever the hell he was finally blows up and dies, not necessarily in that order.
After that, you wake up the next morning and fuck me, if it isn’t Imoen coming merrily down the way, cheerfully proclaiming that you’re a queer fellow before acknowledging that, yeah, she knows the guy who raised you as his own child was just brutally exploded before your very eyes the night before. But hey, she really wanted to get out of Candlekeep and see the world, so heya! She’s coming with you, whether you like it or not.
So, fine. Come on, maybe you’ll die soon. I don’t really care.
Ugh.
We quickly come across a couple of shady dudes named Xzar and Montaron, because you always meet people with high scoring Scrabble names like Xzar in these sorts of games. They both seem intractably evil, and Xzar is obviously insane, but who the hell cares? I need meat shields. Join up!
They want to explore some mine or something, but I’m supposed to go to the Friendly Arms Inn and meet someone named Khalid or something. According to my uncle grandpa or whatever he was, Khalid will help me in my quest. I don’t doubt this, because there was a guy named Khalil who owned a convenience store near my house when I was in high school, and he never checked IDs. I figure they’re probably related, so I’ve already got an opener.
Unfortunately, before we get there, Imoen runs the fuck off to chase butterflies or something because god knows the pathfinding in this game is EXCEPTIONAL, and the next thing I know, she’s being attacked by a wolf. So we run over to save her sorry ass, and Montaron bites the big one. Sorry to see you go, weird little dude. But them’s the breaks.
I mourn his passing by taking all his gear, then we head on our way. Finally, we arrive at the Inn.
And we’re immediately attacked.
Xzar gets blown up, but we kill the bad guy.
Let us mourn his passing.
I loot both their corpses, then take a pee on Xzar’s cold body because he quoted Hannibal Lector earlier for some reason, which just kind of pissed me off because this is supposed to be the one damn fantasy world where Anthony Hopkins doesn’t exist.
Anyway, it’s just me and gods-damn Imoen again because she just refuses to die, so we head into the Inn to meet Khalid.
Hopefully, he’ll kill her for me…
Hooray! Half of us made it.
I meet Khalid in a corner of the inn. He st-st-stutters, either from an unfortunate speech impediment that I would never make fun of, or because he’s a terrified little weasel, crapping himself at shadows. It could go either way, really.
He introduces me to someone named Jaheira, who talks with that perfect THIS SOUNDS FOREIGN accent used by C-list actors everywhere, and tells me that they need to go to the same damn place the other guys I picked up needed to go to.
Everybody wants to go to the Nashkel Mines, I guess. Which is kind of like Nashville, but with less banjo and more medieval stuff or something. Whatever. I just don’t care anymore.
Jaheira tells me, “We’ll leave as soon as you’re ready, though it should be soon.” Which I take to mean, “Take your time as long as we leave right the hell now, idiot man-child.” So we leave.
Or try to, at least. As soon as we hit the door, a disembodied voice scolds me from the beyond. “You must gather your party before venturing forth,” it commands.
GODS DAMMIT! Where the hell is Imoen?!
I find Imoen continuously walking back and forth between a very fat man and a very inanimate chair. Clearly, she was stymied by their lack of movement. Mother frakkin’ Imoen…
I take the shoe-licker by her hand and lead her to the door, and now we leave. But not before I notice that I’m apparently carrying around two corpses with me.
The dead guys we picked up along the way are still dead, and their portraits are blanked out on my screen. Why? I don’t know. Because the game doesn’t tell you shit. It’s like that. Instead, it wants you to CONSULT THE MANUAL.
Which, it must be said, was pretty common for games back in the olden times. However, whereas most manuals often included as much flavor text and lore as they did instructions, Baldur’s Gate wasn’t about to hear any of that world building noise, and instead hits you with a GIANT TOME OF ARCANE MATH. 125 pages of it, to be exact. And don’t even think about skipping it, or you’ll be lugging around corpses with no clue what to do with them other than continue apologizing to everyone you meet for the smell.
It turns out, I can resurrect the poor bastards at a temple. Great! There was a temple back in Candlekeep, where I grew up. We’ll just fast travel back there, bring these decomposing wretches back to life, and head on to fortune and glory in the mines.
TO CANDLEKEEP!
Except of course it couldn’t be that easy. We trek back to the place I just left not two days ago, which takes TWENTY HOURS of game time to get back to, and I strut up to the door. I say howdy do to the friendly guard at the door, who then tells me to piss off and I can’t come in.
Why not? Because suddenly those little green raperobe monks need A SPECIAL BOOK THAT I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS before they’ll let me back in gates of the town I spent my entire life in, minus the past couple of days when I was out saving the world and watching my stepdad foster uncle whatever be blown into tiny fleshchunks right in front of me. You’d think that’d get them to cut me a little slack, right? WRONG.
Fine. Bitches. BACK TO NASHKEL!
“Egh…how tedious all this becomes.”
We walk all the way back to Nashkel, Tennessee, where I wander around, looking for a temple. Along the way, I meet up with some kind of untamed witch or something who has a voice almost as annoying as Imoen’s. She tells me that some bandits are after her, so I help out and murder them by clicking I don’t know what until they’re all dead. Then, she joins my party and I walk into the Inn to rest from my wounds, where I am subsequently MURDERED IN THE PANCREAS BY AN ASSASSIN.
MOTHER DAMMIT, THIS GAME.
I load my quick save and try again. And again. And again. I eventually kill the amazing murderbot sent to destroy me, but not before she KILLS EVERYONE IN MY PARTY except myself…and gods damn Imoen.
“Heya! You’re a queer fellow!”
ARGH! @%(*%(@#%*@%). Fine, Imoen. Just…fine. Let’s go find the stupid temple.
We find the stupid temple, which happily resurrects my fallen comrades for a paltry 100 damn gold pieces per useless twat, which is up from two useless twats at this point, to four useless twats. Not counting Imoen, of course, who remains a useless twat, but who stubbornly refuses to die.
400 gold coins? They aren’t worth a single piece of eight.
So we’re all resurrected, and we go back and rest at the Inn, which is now blissfully free of assassin murder droid wizard thingies. A good night’s rest later, and it’s finally off to the mines…
We make to it to mines without much incident, although I slay enough Gibberlings – whatever the hell those are – until I just stop feeling. Anything.
I meet some dude named Something Stupid That I Don’t Remember, and he tells me something like, “Oh, wailey wailey! The mine’s is overrun and the iron has all gone bad and save us, won’tcha please and thank you kindly!” Only he gives me just one day to do it, (but the joke’s on him, because I end up sleeping at least three weeks inside those damn mine shafts while I heal between every incessant battle with ridiculous kobold maniacs).
We enter the mines. We kill things. Lots of things. I feel nothing. I eventually even stop looting the corpses of my fallen enemies because I’ve lost the will to care anymore. Plus, it’s an enormous pain in the ass and I keep running out of inventory slots, and what the hell does any of it matter, anyway? I mean, what’s the point of it all, when you get right down to it?
Hope is a fragile tinderbox.
We are lost.
*blink*
Um, sorry. Kind of zoned out for a second there. I’m back. Where were we, again? Oh, yes. The mines. We’re fighting kobolds and killing kobolds and ignoring the bodies of kobolds while working our way ever deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine depths of Tennessee’s forgotten iron mines. Until…we aren’t anymore.
We go down what appears to be yet another shaft, and suddenly emerge into daylight. This can’t be right, though, because we haven’t cleared the mines or whatever the hell we were supposed to do yet, so we have to go back in.
Only we can’t go back in.
BECAUSE OF COURSE WE CAN’T GO BACK IN.
This is what I missed.
The exit apparently crumbled behind us and there’s no way back in from this side. We’ll have to go all the way back around to the main entrance, then make our way down THE ENTIRE FREAKING MINE SYSTEM AGAIN.
It was at this point that I felt myself beginning to lose the will to live…
Fast travel back to Nashville. Zoom down to the mine entrance. Go inside. Murder more kobolds. Descend. Murder more kobolds. Descend. Murder more kobolds. Descend. Aaaaaaaand…here we are, right back where we were before we left out of the exit that didn’t look anything like an exit.
I start sliding my cursor around the screen, looking for something – anything – I might have missed. And I found it. Apparently, there’s a “cave” inside the mines, which I thought were already kind of a cave but you know what? Fuck it. What the hell ever, I don’t even give any shits anymore.
ONWARD!
I walk into the cave, kill some more kobolds, then meet a funky wizard named Xan, who asks if he can join my party. Sure, pal. Why not? The more the merrier!
But my party is full. He can’t join unless I leave someone behind. Oh, what to do? What to do?
GOODBYE, IMOEN!
She protests, but screw her. Seriously.
Cry some more.
Xan joins up, and I move to another room within the cave, where there’s a bad dude named Mulahey who’s behind the whole tainted ore business with the kobolds or something. They’ve been dripping some sort of vial on the iron that makes it go bad or I don’t even freaking know. Or care. I ATTACK.
It’s at this point that I suddenly discover that I’ve recruited YET ANOTHER USELESS TWAT into my party. Xan has apparently memorized exactly zero spells the whole time he’s been sitting alone in this cave with literally nothing else to do other than memorize his damn spells. SO HE DIES.
Fortunately, so does Mahoney or whatever his name was, and now I can finally end the quest and reveal the truth except mother humper, my inventory is full again and this guy was carrying a metric ass ton of crap that I have to lug back and gods dammit anyway.
So I make with the round robin of inventory distribution until I’ve picked his bloated corpse clean, and we go back out the exit that supposedly was rendered impassable when we passed through it earlier, but which is now totally fine for whatever holy hell reason, and we leave. BUT NOT BEFORE PICKING UP IMOEN. AGAIN.
Imma shank a bitch
We head back to Narwhal and I go up to the mayor to tell him the good news. Except it wasn’t the mayor because who the heck can tell people apart in this damn world of endless pixel clone people. Instead, it was a dude named Minsc.
He wanted to know if he and his hamster could join my party and sure, you’ve got a miniaturized giant space hamster or whatever, but adding you means I can kick Imoen to the curb again, so you’re a beautiful bald bastard and I love you.
GOODBYE, IMOEN!
I pick up Minsc and start looking for the mayor again. I wander over near the inn where I was attacked by the murderbot assassin earlier, and I’m attacked. Again.
Neera, my untamed wild mage, dies in the fight, but then a monk appears and asks me if I have a moment to talk about his lord and savior, The Sun or something. I didn’t really pay much attention, but he asks if he can join my party. He’s a monk in Dungeon and Dragons, which means he’s probably a Kung Fu master or whatever the Forgotten Realms equivalent of Kung Fu mastery is, so I take him on.
But my party is full again, so I have to let someone go. Jahiera has, up to this point, been fairly useless in the sense that she has served absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than entangling the entire party in her magical Entangle vines every damn time she’s cast the stupid spell. So I let her go.
I get waylaid a lot.
She openly questions my wisdom, then stomps off in a huff, taking Khalid with her. Apparently, they’re a package deal. Explains the stuttering, at least.
I head inside the inn to rest and start identifying all the different magical items I’ve picked up that I don’t know what they are. This involves a lengthy cycle of having my crazy, Hannibal and Oppenheimer quoting madman of a mage memorize two Identify spells a day, then sleeping all night so he can cast them in the morning. And then memorize them again, then sleep all night again, then cast them again, then repeat until I’m a hollow shell of my former self.
Eventually, we identify everything (only 1/10th of which are actually useful items) and head over to a merchant to sell all the crap I don’t need. I haggle with him and buy some plate mail to protect my sorry ass on the field of battle with these assclowns I call companions watching my back, then we head back outside to try and find the mayor. Again.
After much clicking on and talking to random people who look just like the mayor but totally aren’t, I eventually stumble across him. He thanks me for clearing the mines, pays me some gold and I’m on my way. To find out what way that is, I go to open up my journal, when I suddenly realize that I’m down a party member.
With Jaheria having taken her boy toy with her when I kicked her to the curb, I have a vacancy. Which can only mean one thing…
NOOOOOOOO!
Sigh. I think I remember Imoen mentioning that she’d wait for me back at the Friendly Arm Inn, so I make the laborious trek back there to fetch her sorry hide. Twenty some-odd hours of walking later, and we arrive. I check the ground floor. She’s not there.
I check the next floor. Every room. She’s not there.
I check the third floor. I get yelled at by poncy noble persons aghast that I had the unmitigated gall to walk into their rooms when they left their doors wide open. She’s not there.
Then, it dawns on me. SHE STAYED IN THE MINES!
Mother suck a dammit, Imoen. Why are you so awful?!
Resigned, I return to the mines. Or try to, anyway. We are waylaid by a pack of wild dogs. We kill them. Then we’re waylaid again, this time by a group of thugs led by some dude named Pat Senjak and his totally literate life partner, Vanna White. Except she goes by the name Doratea in D&D, for whatever reason. It’s pronounced like tortilla, and now I want tacos. I shouldn’t play games on an empty stomach.
Anyway, Senjak tells me I’m going to die if I don’t buy a vowel or whatever, so I get ready for a fight. Then, his little gang of thieves starts dropping dead for inexplicable reasons when a wild Dorn suddenly appears!
Dorn is a half-orc something or other, who is on a mission of vengeance against Pat and Vanna because I guess he got the one puzzle without an R, S, T, L, N or an E in it and he’s never quite moved on, so he starts wailing on them. I join in. We wail until people explode. Good times.
After the fight, Michael Dorn asks if he can join my party. At first, I’m hesitant because I remember what a weakling Worf actually was, but hey, whatever. People can grow. Join up!
Bonus: I have a full party now. Sorry, Imoen!
I go to check my journal when I notice that I leveled up. FINALLY! Let me see what new skills I can get…
Ding! And then you don’t get any points.
So I leveled up and gained absolutely nothing. Of course. Fine. My journal says we need to go to a place called Beregost that I passed through earlier, and talk to a guy named Tranzig about something. ONWARD!
We head to Beregost and are waylaid by wolves. We murder them.
Arriving in Beregost, we head to the inn and, for once, we aren’t attacked by murderous assassin droids, which is nice. We find Danzig rocking out to some death metal up on the second floor and, yep. I spoke too soon. He attacks me.
I kill him and search his warm corpse. He’s carrying a note! It tells me that I should travel to Larswood or Peldvale next, wherever that is. I note that my journal tells me I should travel to this place OR that place, when we both know full well that it really means I’m going to have to go to this place AND that place. Lying piece of crap journal.
Having no idea where these places are, I decide to head back to Nashville and start looking from there, which makes a kind of sense, from a video game logic perspective. Natural progression, sort of thing. We head back and fan out, then stumble upon a carnival. A CARNIVAL!
It’s got whimsical tents and everything. Some guy named Zeke barks at me to come rescue a woman who was turned to stone by giving him 500 gold coins. I decline. (So far, it’s exactly like an actual carnival.)
Sidenote: I swear I keep hearing the same background laughter sound from Rollercoaster Tycoon. It’s eerie.
I walk into a random tent and a guy tries to pick my pocket by way of ANNOUNCING IT TO THE ENTIRE PARTY. I murder him in the face and take back my money.
We head back outside and come across a guy calling himself The Great Gazib and the Amazing Oopah, who is apparently the world’s only exploding ogre. I talk to the guy, then an ogre appears and explodes into ogre bits. Neat.
I talk to Gazib again, and Oprah explodes again. Then, he comes back and Gazib runs off and the Queen Of Daytime TV tries to kill me for unclear reasons. We murder it in a violent rage, after which some random performer starts reciting poetry at me like nothing at all just happened.
This is a place of madness.
Carnivàle
I look around for the Great Gazib, but can’t find him in the sea of pixels that look exactly like the Great Gazib but aren’t, and I don’t feel like bothering with it. I leave and wander the wilderness like Kwai Chang Caine.
After a lot of being waylaid by wolves and dogs and bandits, I eventually discover Larswood. (Hetfield Forest, however, remains elusive.)
We take no more than five steps into the woods before Rasaad starts talking about his damn cult again. He really won’t shut up about it, but the dude can explode people with his fists. I consider it a fair tradeoff.
We run into a guy named Teven, who demands I surrender my yadda yadda whatever. Rassad hits him with the five-point-palm exploding heart technique. He explodes.
We find Stonehenge and some guy named Osmadi, who thinks I killed his brother and attacks me. I murder him, but he has friends who are cave bears. They kill Dorn, Xzar, and Neera, but Rassad levels up his explode fist. So there’s that. Silver lining and all.
A guy named Corsone meanders over to me, apologizes for Osmandi trying to murder me and all, then tells me about some bandits and leaves. I guess that completes the Larswood portion of my quest. Onward to Peldvale!
I make a quick return trip to Tennessee first though, so I can resurrect my useless companions at the temple. After everyone is alive again, I check the map, and there’s a Bandit Camp to the north that I can’t fast travel to yet, so I take a gamble and bet that Peldvale is on the way there.
Found Peldvale!
Ignored Peldvale!
We walk straight through this important questing area because screw it, who cares? I just keep shouting, “North, Miss Tessmacher! NORTH!” at my party until they stop asking questions. We go north.
Found the Bandit Camp! We storm the camp, murdering bandits left and right. We push our way into the biggest tent, where we find the bandit leader. We murder the shit out of him.
And he returns the favor.
Dead bandits are dead.
Everyone dies except for me, Dorn and Rasaad, and I’m barely holding on. I got poisoned somehow, and don’t have any antidote potions on me. If I die, it’s Game Over because none of my worthless buddies I’ve been bringing back to life this entire game can be bothered to haul my sorry carcass over to the temple when I bite the big one, but whatever. Screw them.
I just keep sucking back healing potions until I don’t die from the poisoning. Eventually, it goes away and I’m all better. I spy a chest in the corner of the tent, so I go open it. AND ALMOST DIE AGAIN.
Turns out, it was trapped, because of course it was. I get zapped with lighting and almost die from static cling, but I find a note in the chest that tells me I need to go to someplace called Cloakwood next, so it’s an overall win. It talks about something to do with a hidden base and a competing iron mine. I half expect some Jedi to suddenly come down and settle a trade dispute with Naboo or something equally lame, for all the excitement this plot has going for it so far.
But at least there’s no Jar-Jar, so there’s that.
Of course, there’s always Imoen…
Never mind.
With most of my party dead, I decide to schlep their useless bodies back to Nashville again, so I can bring them back to life at the temple. Again.
We get there, I pay 100 gold coins for most of them, although anyone who has leveled up suddenly costs 200 gold pieces, and everyone is alive and happy again.
Well, almost everyone. As soon as I RETURN THE GIFT OF LIFE to Minsc, he goes bugfuck and tries to murder me in the kidneys. It seems he’s come back from the dead full of rage because I haven’t done whatever the hell it was that he wanted me to do as fast as he wanted me to do it, so he decides that murder is the only option.
So long, Minsc.
Rasaad explodes his pancreas, and Minsc is no longer of this world.
Which means I’m down another party member again.
Dammit, Imoen!
I start making my reluctant walk of shame all the way back to the Narwhal mines. To find Imoen. Gods help me.
I know I don’t need her. I know she’s useless and does nothing but annoy me, but I can’t abide an empty party slot, and Minsc’s sudden and unexpected betrayal has left one open. There’s nothing for it. I must find her.
Except she’s not there. Anywhere. I search every nook and cranny of those mines; I even go back to the cave within the cave where I thought I’d left her when I picked up whatever useless mage it was whose name I don’t remember. But nope. VANISHED.
Then it hits me. I picked her back up after what’s-his-name died, and didn’t drop her again until I met Minsc. Back in Nashville. DAMMIT, IMOEN!
Ugh.
I leave the mines and head back to town, where I find the daffy girl still standing there, staring at her shoes. She jumps at the chance to re-join my party for the umpteenth time. I guess she digs me. Whatever.
I check my map, and it looks like I can actually fast travel to Cloakwood Forest, even though I haven’t been there yet. Hooray!
I fast travel. I wander around, not noticing that I’ve already dispelled the entire fog of war for the area; and when I do notice, I chalk it up to maybe one of those notes I read that sent me here had a map scrawled on the back of it or something. I don’t question it too much, until I eventually realize that I’m not in Cloakwood at all. I’m in the FIRST DAMN AREA OF THE GAME after the tutorial. You know, where my grandpa uncle stepdad was blown up.
I check my map again, and see that Cloakwood is actually farther north. I only thought this was Cloakwood because I guess we didn’t have Dora The Explorer when I was growing up, so I never learned how to Map. I mostly just learned how to change my shoes after school for inexplicable reasons thanks to Mister Rogers, and what doing acid probably feels like thanks to The Electric Company.
Anyway, we head north and finally get to Cloakwood. Hooray, progress!
There’s a giant house here. Seriously, it’s huge. On the outside. But then I go inside and it’s like some kind of freaky reverse TARDIS barn, because it’s absolutely tiny in here. The impossible geometry of this mad world is as inexplicable as it is horrifying. I mustn’t dwell too long on it, lest I lose my delicate grasp on what precious little of my sanity remains.
Outside
Inside
AWAY, INTO THE FOREST!
We step into the next section of Cloakwood Forest and are immediately assaulted by a kid named Tiber, who is all panicked that his brother, Chelak, was named after a resin secreted by the female lac bug because his parents clearly hated him. Also, he took some kind of spider-slaying sword into the woods and hasn’t been seen since. Things do not bode well for Shellac, but I promise Tiber that I’ll keep my eye out for his desiccated corpse, should I come across it.
We push further into the deep woods, in search of the hidden Iron Throne mine. AND WE FIND IT!
Except we don’t, because that would be too easy. Instead, we find a cave that looks a lot like it could’ve been a mine, if only it had tried harder in school. We walk in and find a morbidly obese, naked spider man. No, I’m not even kidding. Here, check out the screenshot.
So fleshy
What in the actual fuck is that? Honestly. I’m too traumatized to even try and remember exactly what we did in there, but I do recall that it involved dying. A lot.
SO MANY SPIDERS. And Fatty McGee sitting in the middle of the web there was just barking orders the whole time, and I’m not even sure if it was a man and dear god, how does it go to the bathroom and holy hell, does it have a mate? And if so, how do they even…NO. STOP IT.
Some mysteries are best left unanswered.
We kill all the spiders by luring them out of the cave and killing them outside, a few at a time. We do this for two reasons. First, because killing two or three spiders at once is easier than killing a dozen at the same time. Second, because who in the nine Hells could possibly concentrate on fighting when that…thing was undulating all over the place in there. Just. No.
After the spider slayings are done, I go back inside and quickly loot the stash fat boy is sitting next to. Or standing on. Or squatting beside, or lying on top of, or I don’t know what. It’s impossible to tell. Inside, I find a bunch of loot and, yep. Surprise! The desiccated remains of the unfortunately named Chelak brother. I pick him up because he obviously weighs nothing now that his insides have been liquified and sucked out, so he fits neatly inside one square of my inventory. Which I guess represents a pocket or something. I have no idea.
Anyway, we had back to Tiber and break the news to the poor lad. I pull out the dried up husk of a body from my back pocket and ask him if he can identify this pocketful of his brother. He does, then runs off crying. Like he didn’t see it coming, the big baby.
He lets me keep the sword though, which comes in handy as I spend the next seventeen years of my life murdering – and being murdered by – giant spiders in the incalculable number of screens that make up Cloakwood Forest.
At some point, I looted the corpse of some creature or another, but ran out of inventory space. I handed a tiny little gem to Imoen so I could pick up a huge sword from the body, and we went on our merry way across the rest of the map. Well, I say we. What I meant was, everyone but Imoen.
Dammit, Imoen!
Giving her that gem was just crossing the damn Rubicon or something with her, because it broke the camel’s back AND SHE REFUSED TO MOVE. My entire party walked all the way back over to her to see what her damn drama queen problem was, and she just stood there like the useless lump of pixels she is.
Apparently, carrying more that a fistful of arrows and an aggressively cheerful attitude is just too much for her delicate flower of a body to handle. She was over-encumbered BECAUSE OF THE GEM THAT DIDN’T WEIGH ANYTHING, so she was just stuck. Completely. Like a turd in a punch bowl.
I took the gem and gave it to someone else who can carry more than half a pound and not die from exhaustion, and she was back to her normal, annoying self. We pushed on.
We killed more spiders, and were killed by more spiders. Much quick saving and re-loading were had by all, mostly thanks to all of the traps Imoen set off that she never detected, despite Detecting Traps being the one damn thing she’s supposedly good for. We pushed on.
And on.
And on.
Seriously, Cloakwood goes on for days. It stopped feeling like “exploring” about three screens ago, and now it’s just Clicking Through Bioware’s Cut And Paste Trees for the next few hours. In one section, I meet Eldoth. He looks like kind of a d-bag, but he offers to join my party. I’m not sure he’ll be good for anything other than simply Not Being Imoen, so I hire him immediately.
Goodbye, Imoen!
Eldoth tells me about some scheme he has to liberate some gold from somebody I don’t give a shit about because I’m not paying attention, and he asks me if I’d be interested in helping him out. I tell him sure, whatever, and we push on.
MOAR CLOAKWOOD!
Wait. I think we found the mines. Finally! We rush in.
Nope. Not a mine. Just a cavern full of murder dragons. Move along, move along.
EVEN MOAR CLOAKWOOD!
Hey, I think we actually found the really real mines this time! I can tell, because the next area that popped up on my map is called Mines. I’m good with context clues.
We rush toward the mines, where we’re immediately assaulted by Iron Throne guards. I fight them for a while, but then I accidentally have Xzar cast Horror instead of whatever the hell other button I meant to push, and IT IS AMAZING. All of the bad guys get little shiny disco balls of terror over their heads, and they run around all skibber-skabber instead of trying to poke me with pointy things. It is most excellent.
I meet a guy named Lakadaar next, who asks me what my business is. I tell him that we’re here to investigate the evil Iron Throne he works for. He nods and says, “Okey dokey.” Then, he tries to kill us all.
Xzar uses Horror. IT’S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
We walk right by.
We run into some more guards, but I forgot to rest, so Xzar has forgotten how to cast Horror because I didn’t have him memorize it again and he’s an idiot. So I click another random spell I haven’t bothered with until now, and Neera casts Sleep on a group of thugs.
AND OH MY GOD, it’s even better than Horror, because it basically throws The Sandman at bad guys and knocks them right the frak out. Then, they just lie there like little drooling morons (not entirely unlike Imoen) and I get to stab snoring people in their throats until they die. Good times.
ZzzZzzZz. STAB!
We storm the fort and kill a bunch more bad guys while they dream of gumdrops and lollipops, or whatever it is that evil guardsmen dream about. Could be naked fat spider people, for all I know. To each his own.
I run into yet another assassin, who was called Drasus back when he still had a body. But he doesn’t anymore, because my Kung Fu monk found a magical katana. And that’s all I have to say about that.
A guy inside the guard barn tells me that the miners are being held to the east, and asks me not to kill him. I spare his miserable life, and head off to save the enslaved miners.
GO EAST.
We go east, to another guard house. We head inside, murder some more baddies, then find an elevator in the basement. It takes us down to the mines. At last!
I find myself actually starting to have fun with this game for the first time in ever, which is unsettling. I shake it off and remain focused. I have a job to do. This is no time for feelings.
Once inside the mines, I kill a few guards and talk to some half-naked miners. I don’t know why they’re half naked or why precious little mining seems to be going on, but I don’t ask too many questions. I walk up to one of the freaky freaks who’s standing next to a giant circle on the wall. It looks a lot like the door of a bank vault.
He tells me that it’s actually a giant plug stuck into the side of the mines, to keep the river out. Wait. What? There’s an actual plug leading to the river? So the mine is underwater, but someone went ahead and left this big hole in it, just in case anyone ever needed to come along and open it to flood the mine? HOW CONVENIENT FOR MY PLOT NEEDS!
Almost as dumb as the mystical drain plug on the Lost island. ALMOST.
Of course, we can’t simply pull the plug. It’s somehow locked, so I have to find a key first. And maybe try and free all the naked man slaves wandering around the place so they don’t get drowned or whatever. I’ll see what I can do.
I wander around the mines for a bit, killing the odd guard here and finding the occasional secret door there, until I find another new party member! This guy’s a dwarf cleric who goes by the name of Yeslick. Yes, lick. That’s his name. And he’s locked up down here in the mines with the naked man slaves and nope. Not even going there.
He asks to join up with me, which I’m fine with because he seems a lot more interesting than the ukulele-strumming hipster douche we picked up earlier. Sorry, Eldoth. Them’s the breaks, kid.
After Yeslick joins up and Eldoth whines at me, a guy named Rill comes up and asks me for 100 gold coins so he can bribe the captain of the guard in order to sneak his fellow slaves out of the mines before I murder them all with plug water. I acquiesce and emancipate his proclamation. He runs off to free his people, like a good little Moses.
I continue working my way through the mines, when I come upon a murder death kill room. There are corpses everywhere and the buzzing of flies echoes off the dark walls. An ogre mage appears and declares me a dead man.
I laugh, and Rasaad katana kills him.
Down, down, down.
We finally make it to the bottom of the mines, and a secret door reveals…BOSS FIGHT!
Evil baddy Davaeron appears and goes all pinky-purple with a Ghostbusters 2 slime wall protecting him while a bunch of guards and murder spells try to kill us.
Funkadelic!
We fight off the guards, and slowly work away at Davaeron’s funky fresh teleporting dance moves until he’s all out of pink slime. After that, it just takes a few sword thwacks to take him down. We manage to kill him without anyone in our party dying, which is a good thing. I AM LEARNING.
He was a pain in the ass, though.
Anyway, I get a surprise cinematic telling me that I need to go to Baldur’s Gate next.
Wait. What? You mean THE Baldur’s Gate? Really?
Finally. THE TITULAR CITY!
On my way out of the mines, I bump into Stephan, Davaeorn’s apprentice. I squeeze him for information by way of clicking various dialog options with impunity. He sings like an exposition canary, and I find out that the whole iron shortage was concocted by the Iron Throne in order to drive up demand so that they could then come in with their iron supplies and be the Big Damn Heroes and sell their stock at record profits. So basically, this game is the plot of Wall Street, but with swords. Whatever, Bioware.
I let him live and catch an elevator back to the plug floor.
We pop the cork and flood the mine.
QUEST COMPLETE! And no sign of Imoen this time. Life is good.
Onward to Baldur’s Gate!
It’s about damn time.
I travel through the wilderness for ages, like some sort of cartographically challenged caveman, until I eventually get to the Big Ass Bridge leading to the city of Baldur’s Gate. We strut across it all heroically, but before we can enter the city, we’re accosted by some guy named Scar who demands six gold pieces per party member for entry. He then insists that I investigate the suspicious death of someone named Mufasa. Or maybe it was some mega-boring crap about a trading group short selling their assets or OH GOD WHAT IS WITH THE ECONOMIC NONSENSE of this game? NO ONE CARES.
I tell the jerk what he wants to hear, then cross his palm with silver and he lets me in.
FINALLY!
We finally enter the city of Baldur’s Gate. The fog of war is literally everywhere. I don’t know where anything is, and I can’t even see very far in front of my face. Has no one heard of a visitor’s center in this place? A tourist map would go a long way.
I consult my journal, which is predictably useless, as usual. The main quest notes just basically say to GO TO BALDUR’S GATE AND DO A THING, so I guess that optional side quest from Scar is optionally mandatory, because I don’t know what the hell else to do in this giant city. My journal entry for his quest tells me to go to the southwest corner of the city and investigate the Seven Suns, which totally sounds like a Heaven’s Gate style cult. I guess I need to get there before they drink their cyanide Kool Aid and go up to the alien mothership or whatever. Rasaad will probably love these people.
The Seven Suns!
We take five steps, and Dorn pipes up about some other city called Lusker or something, and tells me how it’s totally just like Baldur’s Gate and some other things about his vengeance quest I don’t care about. I just nod until he stops talking.
We press on.
We make it to the docks, and some creepy guy named Kesheel comes up to me out of nowhere, talking about how strolling along the docks is good for thinking. He then tells me what I think is supposed to be a joke about poop decks or something, and goes away.
Oh…kay…
A block later, another guy comes up to me, uninvited. This one is called Kerrachus, and he warns me about the dangers of slippery cobblestones and goes away. Good to know, dude.
We finally make it to the southwest corner of the city as instructed, and I still have no idea where to go, because the inky blackness of the damn fog of war permeates my very soul. I wander all over the place for about half an hour, then find the damn Seven Suns building about 10 meters from where I entered the stupid area.
Sigh.
We go inside. A merchant comes up to me and tells me the place has been overrun by shape-shifters because I guess whoever wrote this piece of shit story was really into David Icke at the time. He has no other useful info, so we go upstairs.
There are several more merchants here, who all look and talk exactly the same, and say the exact same damn things whenever I talk to any of them. Maybe Icke has been right all along. I decide to keep my eye out for trans-dimensional reptilian alien overlords. Because you never know.
There’s nothing upstairs, so I start pixel hunting until I find a door I missed back on the first floor. Except that it’s actually more like stairs, which lead us down into the basement.
We are immediately attacked by something called a Doppleganger. We kill it and talk to some guy named Asshole, who turns out to be the leader of the Seven Suns, and is being held captive by the shape-shifting goons.
Icke was right!
Oops. Sorry. His name is actually Jhasso, but either moniker fits. He accuses us of being in league with the devil and talks about his noggin.
We assure him that we’re quite nice people, actually, and tell him that Scar sent us for help with getting Simba to Pride Rock before the hyenas eat Nala and what does any of it matter, anyway? He just goes on about how the shape-shifters took over his business and drove profits into the ground. It’s just more boring economic shit and I don’t care anymore.
I end the conversation, and Jhasso runs off upstairs, emboldened by the one Doppleganger my weakling mage was able to kill by whacking it on the head twice with his walking stick, and vows to reclaim his business. What an Jhasshole.
We go back to the first floor, where the fat Santa-looking merchants from earlier suddenly all start attacking me, because they’re actually Dopplegangers who apparently didn’t give a damn that the guy they’ve been holding prisoner in the basement for the past several months just ran past them on a holy quest to balance his checkbook or whatever. I kill them all.
We go upstairs, and murder the merchant bastards up there, too. Because screw them.
We leave the building, and a guard walks up to tell me that I need to go see Scar over at the Flaming Fist headquarters building. Wherever the fuck that is.
We go back to the bridge, but Scar isn’t there. We then spend the next hour aimlessly wandering around the eleventy-hundred screens that make up the urban sprawl of this accursed city, only to finally find the damn Flaming Fist HQ was ALL THE WAY BACK IN THE SOUTHWEST CORNER WHERE I ALREADY WAS.
Sigh.
Useful signage
It starts raining. Dorn gets struck by lightning. No, really. He just shrugs it off and we push on. Badass.
We find Scar, and tell him that Timon and Pumbaa were really shape-shifters or whatever, and he pays us for our time before offering us another quest I don’t give a shit about.
I decide to just wander around the city until we trigger the next story event.
We eventually stumble into the giant Iron Throne castle I didn’t notice earlier, and some guy named Triadore comes running up to me, babbling about how he has no time to chit-chat, just before he starts chit-chatting with me. He tells me that there’s madness here that he cannot stand any longer. FINALLY! Someone in this game I can agree with. I tell him to calm down, then he yells at me some more and leaves.
We wander deeper into the castle. A guard stops me and looks ready for a fight. I slip him 200 gold pieces, and he looks the other way. We head upstairs.
An archer named Dra’tan approaches me, because you can’t throw a damn rock in a fantasy world without hitting someone with ridiculous apostrophes in his name, and he asks me where I’m going. I tell him that we’re on our way to the fifth floor to deliver a message to someone I don’t know, which is risky because I’ve never been here before and I have no idea if there even is a fifth floor, but screw it. I live on the edge.
He buys my story, then warns me about more damn shape-shifters. Yay.
On the next floor, another guard accosts me. I bribe this one too, since I guess there’s no such thing as an honest cop anymore, and we continue making our way upstairs.
We meet a bartender, who asks me if I want a drink. I tell him no, so he tries to murder me. Seems fair.
I murder him right back. And his little friends, too.
However, I start to get the nagging feeling that I shouldn’t have done that, so I cast a magical fluxus capacitorus spell and reverse time with the Load Game button. We try again.
I ignore the bartender this time, and go up to a little dude named Destus Gurn. Oh, boy. HE’S AN ACCOUNTANT. He throws a wall of text at me about trade negotiations and blah blah blah. I pick a random dialog option, and he tells me I can go upstairs.
Numbers, numbers. Math, math, math.
Before I leave, I notice that there are a bunch of bookshelves here. I remember that asshat back in Candlekeep saying that I needed to bring him a book titled I don’t know what, so I have Xzar steal every tome from this library. The right one is bound to be in there, somewhere.
We head upstairs, and some guy who sounds like Foghorn Leghorn tells me to fear his wrath, for it is great indeed, I do declare. I try to tell him that I’m someone else, but he sees through my clever little ruse and attacks. His friends rush to his aid.
Neera tries to put them to sleep, but fails. Xzar tries to horrify them, but isn’t scary at all today. Things go badly.
I reload.
The fight is intense, but we eventually win. I lose my mages and the monk with the Kung Fu grip, but I’ll resurrect them at a temple soon enough. No big deal. Meanwhile, one of the Iron Throne leaders tells me that the REAL bad guys are back in Candlekeep.
OMG!
SHOCKING!
I let him live, and find a bunch more books in a cabinet. I steal them before I leave.
We walk outside, and a city guard tells me that Scar wants to see me again, but I’ve no time for needy bastards. Instead, I head to the nearest temple and resurrect my slightly-less-useless-than-they-were-before companions, and we ready ourselves for battle.
TO CANDLEKEEP!
We arrive, and saunter confidently up to the jerk who wouldn’t let us in earlier. However, despite carrying AN ENTIRE LIBRARY’S WORTH OF BOOKS with me, I apparently DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT ONE, so I still can’t go in.
FINE. I guess talking to Scar again was important, after all. I hope so, anyway. Because if he doesn’t have whatever this magical mystery book is, I’m screwed. I don’t know where to find it, or even have any idea what it’s called.
Back to Baldur’s Gate!
We fast travel back to the Flaming Fist headquarters, murdering anyone and anything foolish enough to waylay us along the way. My party starts bitching at me about needing rest, but screw them. Ain’t nobody got time for that. They can sleep the next time they die and I don’t resurrect their sorry butts. That shit’s getting expensive.
I talk to Scar, who refuses to help me because I haven’t bothered investigating whatever other crap he wanted me to look into that I assumed was optional, but I guess isn’t. I poke around the Flaming Fist HQ for a while, hoping to find the secret book of wonders hiding somewhere, but come up empty. We’re on our way out when Scar approaches us again.
He tells me not to bother with that other thing that was super important five seconds ago, and tells me that Duke Ellington wants to see me about the Iron Throne. We go meet him.
The Duke of Earl then asks me to investigate the Iron Throne that I’ve already investigated, then commands me to report back to him with the findings I’ve already found. He offers to pay me 2,000 gold pieces for my trouble, then ends the conversation.
I start it back up again, and tell him that I’ve already done all that shit and to show me the money. He tells me I need to go back to Candlekeep, which I already know, but then he GIVES ME THE BOOK OF SECRETS! This little bastard was just sitting on it the whole time. Jerk.
I get a quick little cinematic with a picture of a book titled Baldur’s Gate while I’m in a city named Baldur’s Gate and playing a game called Baldur’s Gate. OMG, SO META!
Inception
After the little scene, the game dumps me back outside Candlekeep, where I drop all of the useless books I’ve been lugging around for absolutely no reason, and I free up a ton of inventory pockets in my pants. I walk up to the asshole at the gate.
“Oy! Asshole! I’ve got yer book, ya miserable bastard.”
He lets me in.
We make our way to the central Keep and start climbing the stairs. Every now and then, we’re stopped by some old friend or another who I don’t even know, but who tells me what a great boy I was growing up, and how everyone loves me but screw you if you come back home without a book we want, you wretched little orphan. Whatever. We keep climbing.
Eventually, we find the Big Bad Guy named Realtor or something. Probably goes back to the whole economics plot of the game, maybe something to do with a property scheme. Forget it, Jake. This is Baldurtown.
Anyway, he mocks us, so we murder him. And a bunch of his friends. WE HAVE SAVED THE DAY!
For our efforts, we’re thrown in jail. Because of course we are.
Good job!
We’re just chilling in our spacious cell when some guy in a red robe swings by and totally doesn’t believe that we’re bad guys because he remembers me from when I was a little tyke and used to pee in the town fountain or something. I don’t care. He teleports us away to the secret catacombs beneath the Keep, and we make our escape.
We’re attacked by a woman named Phlydia, who thinks we stole her book. We probably did, though. I’ve lost track of all the crap I’ve nicked since this whole mess started, so we kill her and move on. She was a Doppleganger anyway, so who really cares?
The catacombs go on for days, and are trapped to all hell and back. We “explore” the entirety of the labyrinthine nightmare, only to find that the exit was pretty much right next to the damn entrance.
Sigh.
We leave. Or, at least, I thought we were leaving. Apparently, there are multiple levels to these catacombs. OH, JOY.
I kill a few guys, slap around a bunch of skeletons, then quick save and rest. I’m greeted with a dream sequence that usually signifies the end of a chapter. THANK GOD.
I wake everyone up, and we move on. We run into a guy named Elminster, who’s dressed like Rincewind from Discworld. I accuse him of being a Doppleganger, but he says, “Nuh-uh! Am not!” so I’m like, “Oh, okey dokey, then. I believe you!”
I tell him that I’ll follow him out of the catacombs, and he leads us onward. We start walking past some monsters, but Elminster Rincewind doesn’t seem at all concerned. I start to wonder about his lackadaisical attitude toward our imminent peril, when suddenly…yeah, he’s totally a Doppleganger. And so are his friends.
FIGHT!
Xzar and Neera put most of the little buggers to sleep, but Elminster is apparently a Greater Doppleganger, which I guess means he’s immune to nappy time or something. We punch him to death and leave.
We emerge into a cave system that’s above the catacombs, but below the Keep. Which makes total sense in this place of insanity.
My cold, dead hand.
We then run into a guy named Prat, who turns out to be a total badass, despite his stupid name. He kills us all. Repeatedly. I try sending my entire party after him as a distraction, hoping to run away to the exit while they all die in agony for the greater good, but the caves are filled with all sorts of nasty monsters that chop, slice, bite, and/or explode my insides before I can get very far.
This is going to require some effort.
And we were so close!
I managed to cast Horror on some of Prat the prat’s friends, and we killed him a lot. Once he was dead, we ran away while his horrified buddies were busy shitting themselves.
Then, we ran into basilisks and were turned to stone. And we died. A lot.
Like, seriously. A lot.
I search through all my spells, and I don’t have any anti-petrification anything, not that it matters because petrification is apparently insta-death. Which is really annoying when I get hit and immediately die, then have to sit and wait for the stupid dead hand animation to play over and over and over again.
We go back up to where Prat was, and start picking off his friends one by one, who are now scattered all around the caves. We murder some spiders while we’re hunting them down, but none of them – even the mages – have a protection from petrification spell, which I learned is a thing that exists because I CONSULTED THE MANUAL. Again.
I need the Sword of Gryffindor!
So I go back and try to fight the basilisks some more. I manage to make it through once, but my entire party gets turned to stone and is dead to me, which I figure might make the endgame a little too difficult.
I reload and try again. And again. And again. One time, I manage to kill the little bastards, but Neera dies. She’s finally a decent mage at this point of our quest, and I hate to lose her. So I reload and try again. And again. And again.
I’m about to give up, when I go digging through my characters’ inventories, looking for anything that might help me. I find a quiet spot in the caves, load the mages up with Identify spells and rest a bunch of times, because spiders keep waking us up. Eventually, they sleep long enough to learn the spells by whatever magical, scroll-under-the-pillow brain osmosis they’re using, and I make them start identifying every unknown thing we own.
Which is a lot of stuff, because we haven’t had a chance to find a good resting spot since we stormed the Candlekeep Keep. I find some scrolls in Yeslick’s pockets and Xzar identifies them. Turns out, the little bastard was sitting on a Protection From Petrification scroll all this time.
Dammit, Yeslick!
Of course, no one in my party can actually learn the spell for some unknown reason handed down by the freaking AD&D Lawgivers, but whatever. I cast it on myself and charge the basilisks alone.
They try their best to turn me to stone, but since I’m immune to that trickery, they’ve lost their nuclear option. I wail on them with my +1 Long Sword until they’re basilisk pudding. I call out to the useless twats to come join me, now that the danger is over.
They come running. We continue onward, toward where I hope the exit is.
We run into a guy named Diarmid, who thinks I’m Prat because I guess evil henchmen lackeys don’t get invited to company picnics, so they’ve never met each other in person. He tells me that we must not keep whatever the hell The Sarevok is waiting, and laughs about how we got that poor bastard Jeet locked up. (That’s me, by the way. Just in case you’re a little slow on the uptake.)
He thinks everything went as planned, so I tip my hat and tell him good day, then get ready to stab him in his miserable back the second he lets us walk past him. Yeah, it’s like that, bitch. You lock me up in jail, you get prison rules. Deal with it.
Except I never get the chance, because the little weasel hightails it out of there like his ass is on fire.
Recognize!
I stand alone.
We exit the caves, and I get a new little cutscene that tells me I have to go back to Baldur’s Gate again, because what would an adventure be without the indescribable joy of incessant backtracking. I have to hunt down whoever this Sarevok person is.
Fine. Let’s do this. To Baldur’s Gate! AGAIN!
But first, I decide to get some rest before we try to fast travel and end up being waylaid by +10 Ogres Of Malfeasance or something. We light up a campfire, bust out the marshmallows and tell ghost stories until we drift of to dreamland.
That’s when a giant, skull-faced baboon with horns shows up. It’s another one of these damn dream visions I keep getting that mostly consist of pretty bad narration and a wall of text. Apparently, the blood of someone called Bhaal runs through my veins and has something to do with my origins that I was either never told about, or wasn’t paying any attention when I was. It could go either way, really.
Anyway, evil baboon dude is Sarevok, I guess. And I need to go kill him. FOR REASONS.
Awakened from our momentary slumber, we find ourselves getting bitched at by a guard for sleeping out in the open. He tells me to go to the Inn if I need to sleep and not, you know, back to the prison cell where I’m supposed to be right now, since everyone thinks I’ve gone on a murder rampage across the Sword Coast. But hey, whatever. This guard’s cool. He’s not going to bust us.
MUPPET OF DOOM
We try to go to the Inn and crash for the night, but we’re outside of the town walls and that bastard at the gate won’t let me in again, unless I bring him another damn book.
FINE. Screw you guys, we’re leaving. We’ll just sleep whenever we get to Baldur’s Gate, and my companions can bitch about being tired all they want because I just don’t give a damn anymore. We’ll find an Inn when we get there, then go to sleep and wake up the next morning, ready to complete the final and epic chapter in my battle against whatever the fuck has been going on all this time.
ONWARD!
We get a good night’s rest in the most expensive suite at the Blade and Stars because why the hell not, we’ve earned it. I check my journal, which tells me GO BACK TO BALDUR’S GATE AND DO ANOTHER THING that I don’t know what it is, so I guess that means it’s time for more directionless wandering. VERY HOORAY.
I mosey about the city for awhile, just walking around and enjoying the sites like a damn tourist because I don’t really know what the hell else to do. We’re busy movin’ on up to the East Side and looking for a deluxe apartment in the sky high, high when a guy named Marek comes up and harshes our mellow.
“Could we have a moment of your time?” he asks. Uh oh. The royal We. No good can ever come of it.
I ask him what he wants. He tells me that he and his companion, a presumably invisible dude I can’t see named Lothander, work for the Iron Throne, and they would very much like it if I would stop murdering all their friends, please and thank you.
I tell him to get stuffed, and get ready for a fight that never happens, because they just disappear. Weird place, this city.
We walk a little farther, then some asshat yells, “I SURV THA FLAMIN’ FIST” in what I can only assume is the equivalent of whatever a Texas accent is in the Forgotten Realms universe. He calls me a murderer since the whole world is against me now I guess, because I’m the hero Baldur’s Gate deserves, but not the one it needs. I murder him in the face.
Gawl durn it, y’all!
My reputation goes down, but what do I care? Everyone who’s never even heard of me has turned against us, so I don’t really give a shit what they think.
We press on.
I run into a guy name Delthyr, who tells me he represents “those who harp”. I have no idea what that means, but I’m assuming he’s talking about those women who play unobtrusive music in the corners of fancy wedding receptions. Or maybe he’s talking about people who drone on and on about the same thing, day after day, month after month until you finally just want to tell Gary that no, your stupid fascination with that television show you love is of no interest to me or anyone else and I swear to god, if you make that joke with the coffee pot one more time, I’m going to cut you and leave your body out by the dumpster for the dogs to choke on, you miserable piece of brown-nosing shit.
Wait. Sorry. I kind of blacked out for a second there. Anyway, Delthyr here represents those who harp, whatever that means and I don’t care. He tells me that Scar was assassinated, and Duke Ferdinand has come down with a mysterious illness and is probably about to die. He also says I’ve been accused of murder like I didn’t already know, and that Sarevok is the new Iron Throne president. Oh, and the Flaming Fist has a warrant out for my arrest, which explains all the fisters I’ve been murdering in the streets.
Delthyr walks away, then another exposition bot named Tamoko comes up and tells me that the healer curing Duke Wellington isn’t a healer at all. MOAR PLOT TWIST!
Ah, screw all of this. I’m tired and just want it to end. All of it. We decide to storm the Flaming Fist Castle and damn the torpedoes. If we’re going out, we’re going in a blaze of flaming, fisting glory.
CHARGE!
I’m in the middle of storming the castle and murdering fisters when Tamoko pops up out of freaking nowhere and demands that I not kill Sarevok. She says she wants to help him live his life as a man, not as the god he thinks he can be. I suspect this will lead to the Good Bioware Ending, so yeah. That’s not going to happen. I tell her to piss off, and I return to swinging my big ass sword at the bad guy in front of me.
We make our way into the castle, and are immediately attacked by all the everyone. It’s a tough battle, but we manage to murder them all, then head upstairs to finish the job.
Clark Kent is waiting for us. He’s a former fister who remembers me from when I helped Scar all those many, like, few hours ago. But he’s had enough of the new leadership and wants out. He warns me that the healer in the next room isn’t a healer at all, which I already knew, then runs off to a phone booth somewhere. Or possibly Kansas.
Smallville
We walk in and surprise Rashad by stabbing at him with pointy things until he dies. Before he shuffles off this mortal coil, he reveals himself to be a Greater Doppleganger, shocking no one.
After we’re done murdering Rashad, we wake up The Duke and tell him hush now, baby. Everything’s going to be alright. Daddy’s here. He looks at us like we’re crazy, but then just goes with it and asks me to carry him to the Harbor Master’s building, wherever that is. He coughs a bunch, then tells me that I need to find Slyth and the Family Stone, and someone named Krystin before Sarevok turns everything to shit.
I stuff him into one of my inventory pockets, and we make haste to the Harbor Master’s building, which I’m guessing is somewhere by the harbor.
QUICKLY! TO THE DOCKS!
But first, we stop off at a nearby Inn to try and get some rest because it’s a pain in the ass that this whole endgame takes place inside the city, where the damn guards won’t let you sleep outside. However, when I go into the Inn, the little bastard innkeeper turns me away because he’s fucking Yoda or something and senses evil in me, which he’ll have none of in his fine establishment, thankyouverymuch.
Fine. Whatever, dude. We’re outta here. We didn’t want to stay in your stupid hotel anyway. Jerk.
We fast travel out of the city, sleep in the woods, then head back to the docks. The second we step foot into the area, some dude named Kolvar runs up to tell me that The Black Network sends its regards, whoever the hell they are. He then tells me everything I already know about the Iron Throne and Sarevok and the little dying Duke I have in my pocket. I guess he was the backup exposition guy, just in case I went to the docks before I went to the Flaming Fist.
He wanders off, then we make our way to the Harbor Master’s building. Of course, everyone is bitching at me about being tired again, because it apparently takes EIGHT DAMN HOURS to travel outside the city walls and back in again, so everyone is already sleepy after we just sneaked outside to sleep. Whatever. I gotta do something about this Duke in my pocket. He’s creating an unsightly bulge.
I whip him out and give him to the Harbor Master, who scurries off into the darkness. I guess that wraps that up, then. Nothing left to do now but storm the Iron Throne and murder the crap out of Sarevok.
TO BATTLE!
One, two, we’re coming for you. Three, four, better lock the door…
Or, more accurately, TO WALKING! And being talked to by a whole bunch of rats fleeing a sinking ship. Apparently, the other members of the Iron Throne have had enough of whatever it is Sarevok has been doing, and they’re all shipping out on the next boat to anywhere but here. Can’t say as I blame them, either. I’m about to paint the walls with some blood up in here.
We make our way to the fifth floor, where some woman named Cythandria starts shouting at me about how she’s Sarevok’s lover and that I’m gonna be real sorry and so on. She also says I share some sort of “true” heritage with Sarevok, because it wouldn’t be a hero myth without a MYSTERIOUS ORIGIN, so I’m probably Voldemort’s final horcrux. I’m fine with that.
She puts up her dukes. Let’s do this.
I rush her, but she has two giant friends appear out of nowhere. We make a break for the stairs, and head down to the bar where we pick off Ughh and the other Ughh without Cythandira’s magic getting in the way. Once they’re dead, we head back up for the witch or concubine, or whatever the hell she is.
We beat the crap out of each other for awhile, before she eventually cries uncle and begs me not to kill her. She tells me that Sarevok is hiding out in the Undercellar, which I can get to through the sewers. Because of course, we have to go to the sewers. What kind of roleplaying game would be complete without a trek through some damn sewers.
I let her live, though. Because I’m a gentleman and shit.
We leave the Iron Throne castle and hop down the nearest sewer grate. It’s time to end this.
Why did there have to be sewers?
We roam around the sewers for hours, killing gelatinous bits of goo called Mustard Jelly or something, talk to a few rats that go squeak, get prophesied on by the Sewer King, and murder the entire Ratchild kobold gang. Eventually, we meander down yet another identical tunnel and emerge in some kind of brothel. In the sewers. Sounds hygienic.
Slyth and Krystin are here, and I kill them for having stupid names. After they’re dead, I search their corpses. Slyth was carrying an invitation to the Ducal Palace, so I guess that’s where we’re headed next.
I find an exit from the brothel, but we’re stopped by a guard who demands 10 gold pieces from each of us before he’ll allow us to enter the place we’re already in. We pay him just to avoid any unpleasantness, then promptly leave.
We pop up inside an Inn where the owners don’t think I’m an evil bastard, so I rent a room and let everyone get some rest so they’ll stop bitching at me about being exhausted. We awake refreshed and ready for more murder.
Next stop, the palace!
I’ll be the belle of the ball!
We make our way to the palace, but keep running into Flaming Fist assholes along the way, which sucks because I can’t kill any more of them, or else most of my goody two-shoes companions will leave me because they don’t want to work for a murderer. Well, a mass murderer, anyway. Semantics.
I just keep quick saving, reloading, and doing my best to avoid confrontation as we make our way to the palace.
Finally, we approach the palace gates, and are met by a guy named Bill, who asks to see our invitations. I show him the pages we ripped off the cold, dead body of Slyth. He doesn’t seem to mind the blood stains, and lets us in.
Once inside, another Flaming Fist yahoo yells his stupid Texan battlecry and demands to see our invitations again. We give them to him, and he leaves us alone. Lot of security in this place.
When we walk into the main room, some mucky muck named Lila Jannath starts speaking. And I mean, with actual speech. There’s so little in the way of voice work in this game, I can only assume this means shit’s about to get real.
I get ready to kill. But first, I have to sit through a lot of bickering nobles, before Sarevok finally chimes in. He blames all the world’s problems on everyone but himself, then moves to America and the Tea Party elects him President. Or they probably would, if I didn’t stop him right here and now. For freedom.
But first, I have to deal with all the people who just turned into Greater Dopplegangers. And by deal with, I mean murder with extreme prejudice. I’m in the middle of disemboweling one of them when Saverok pauses the action to call me an assassin, then instructs all of the people who are already trying to kill me to, I dunno, kill me harder or something, I guess.
I eventually finish off the last one, then some guy named Belt thanks me for saving his life and he is eternally grateful and whatnot. This pisses Sarevok off something fierce, and he comes at me with his spiky horn helmet.
Bring it on.
He farts all over the mother fucking room, and nearly kills us with his gas cloud. And here I was thinking I was about to have an epic confrontation with the Dark Lord. Instead, I get freaking Pig Pen from the Peanuts gang. Fine. Whatever.
Fart joke.
We wail on each other and I gag on his stink cannon for awhile, until he eventually chickens out and runs away. Belt comes up to me and tells me that the only way to end this is to end this, so I give him a gold star for obviousness, and he teleports us to the Thieves’ Guild.
The thieves tell us that Sarevok came storming through only moments ago, and tore off down the stairs. We take off after him.
Descending into the basement, I come across an injured little…thing called Voleta Stiletto. She or he, or whatever it is tells me that Sarevok has gone into a mother humping maze, which just freaking figures. It’s not enough that I’ve thought this game was over three different times already, but now there’s a damn maze to contend with.
WHAT NEXT IN THE PARADE OF CONSTANT AGGRAVATION?!
Fine, then. I guess we’ll be maze runners.
Sigh.
I cast the bones and summon the ancient oracle of Googleardium Leviosa to guide me through the maze. (In the common tongue, that means I looked up a damn map on the Internet because screw you; I don’t do video game mazes.)
Screw this.
We make our way to the exit, killing various beasties and setting off a bunch of traps on the way that Imoen wouldn’t have bothered to notice had she been here anyway, so I don’t feel the least bit bad about leaving her wherever the hell I left her. I hope she died screaming.
Lying near death at the exit is a guy named Winski Perorate, who was apparently Sarevok’s mentor or something. He tells me that we are of the same blood and a whole bunch of other stuff I’m too worn out from trudging through this maze to bother reading, so I click out of the conversation and leave him to rot.
We exit the maze into a cave of some sort, or possibly an underground graveyard. I have no idea where I am anymore. We plod along for a brief walk before we’re set upon by other Iron Throne board members who are pissed about their stock options or something. I explain to them that I’m trying to take Sarevok down, but they don’t give two shits and just start slinging spells at me.
We get our asses kicked a few times, but Yeslick eventually manages to silence their mages before one of them can launch what I can only describe as a thermonuclear magic death missile, and they go down pretty easily after that.
We loot their corpses and push on. The Tomato girl from earlier appears out of nowhere again, and she still doesn’t want us to kill Saverok. We tell her that we still do want to kill Sarevok. She tells us that now she wants to kill me, so I kill her and move on with my life.
We stand ready at the doors of some dark temple.
Eldritch horrors await.
LET THIS BE OUR FINAL BATTLEFIELD!
We throw open the doors and rush inside, where every bad guy starts casting protection spells. That can’t be good.
Within seconds, the spells start flying. Sarevok shouts at me, and a couple of his allies materialize in Ghostbusters slime and start flinging death balls at me. My mages fling death balls right back at them.
Sarevok uses his ungodly fart power, and we’re caught in the cloud. We retreat, killing one of his allies along the way. Probably confused because someone forgot to program an AI subroutine to counteract my strategy of Not Knowing What The Fuck I’m Doing, Sarevok’s other allies don’t bother with me after that. Instead, Sarevok himself sprints over to me and starts bashing my head with his sword.
I bash him right back, while Xzar and Neera throw magic missiles in his face. Rasaad is five-point-palm exploding his heart all over the place, while Yeslick is shouting something in dwarfish, and Dorn is…doing whatever it is Dorn does. This goes on for a few minutes, with a few healing spells tossed into the mix for good measure, when suddenly…
SAREVOK IS DEFEATED. The game is won!
It is over.
Finished.
VICTORY IS MINE!
I can hold my head up high, now that I’ve finally completed this game after 16 years of not giving a crap about it. I still don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about, though. It’s not a bad game, but it’s certainly not a great one, either. But, like I said, I’ll go into more on that when I get to the late ‘90s section of my Life Bytes series.
For now, I will say that I eventually ended up having a lot more fun with Baldur’s Gate than I ever thought I would going in. Sure, it took me over half the game to get there, but once I did, I enjoyed playing it more often than I didn’t. Except for the sewers and the mazes and all the stupid bits, of course.
The game created a final save file for me when I killed the Big Bad, which it said I can import into Baldur’s Gate 2, should I be foolish enough to try it. I might, but I don’t think I have another one of these features in me for a while, especially not while this one has less than a few hundred Likes or shares.
So if you want me to give Baldur’s Gate 2 or any other game this treatment, let me know by clicking one of the social media buttons. It won’t kill you. Share this with your friends, post the link on your favorite forums, etc… Feed me the precious lifeblood of attention I so desperately crave, and I’ll probably relent.
Until then, goodbye and enjoy the rest of the Life Bytes series, whenever I get around to finishing it.
THE END…
…BUT NOT REALLY.
(Click here for the journal of endless torment I call My Time With Baldur’s Gate 2.)
See?
I’ve been trying to get these entries out every couple of days, but I’ve been under the weather with a severe case of manflu recently and I’m probably dying, so cut me a little slack. I’ve also been spending a ridiculous amount of time over in the GOG.com Twitch channel, watching streams and getting to know the amazing community. Seriously, I think it’s on a different Internet than the one I’ve been using for the past 20 years or so, because everyone there is decent. Nice, even. Generous, in fact.
Not a day goes by that some community member isn’t raffling off a free game for anyone to grab in the chat, along with the standard gift codes the GOG streamers give away during most broadcasts. I’ve been getting to know a lot of interesting people, and we’ve had a bunch of great, spontaneous discussions involving everything from Star Trek to the ’90s RPG crash, to Polish scandals and vampire erections. (Don’t ask.)
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
We also have a lot of irreverent fun. During one show, for example, a guy from Canukistan (up Canada way) by the name of flaose started streaming a playthrough of Realms of Arkania, and he grabbed different users from the chat to use as his party members in the game. I ended up being cast as a grumpy, mostly inept wizard who clearly thought he was above everyone else in his party, even though his spells had a 97% failure rate and someone dumped a bucket of poop on his head. No, really. It was a lot like middle school.
I’m enjoying finally getting back to writing this series, and I have the GOG community to thank for that. I just hope the massive amount of people who aren’t reading it are enjoying whatever the hell else they’re doing that’s so damn important that they can’t be bothered to give me a click. The lousy so and so’s.
Once I’m done – and if I think this little project ends up being anything worth reading in its entirety – I might try to wrap a little narrative around it, using my experiences with GOG community in the present to frame my nostalgic romp through the past. Which I guess I’m kind of already doing every now and then with these little chapter intros you’re probably scrolling past anyway. Still, it’s an idea.
Everything has been leading up to this. Seriously, the previous five chapters were just setting the stage for The Big Picture. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I just had to introduce the various highways and byways along my slow slouch toward techno-Bethlehem so I would have a framework upon which to hang The Whole Rest Of My Life. Which starts now.
Or rather, then.
Back in 1989, to be exact. Freshman year. High school. The year I became a man. (And by man, I mean a scrawny, bird-like boy creature with a stupid haircut and a really real computer.)
Freshman year was rough. Not middle school rough, where the only thing I really had to worry about was whether or not I was wearing the right shoes or could at least pretend to like the right bands, but it was actually rough. As in shank a bitch rough.
Back then, my high school was separated into two distinct campuses: West Brook Senior High, which was for 10-12th graders, and Little Brook, which was for the plebeian interlopers in 9th grade; like me. It was also on the other side of town and completely walled in by a giant fence and iron gates, with armed prison guards stationed at every entrance. We called the warden a principal, and tried to avoid making eye contact. It was a basically Shawshank, but without all the Morgan Freeman.
It was around this time that I realized I was an introvert. I’d always known I was a nerd, but now I was a nerd who didn’t even like other nerds most of the time. Back in elementary school, I could throw a pre-LAN party for my birthday by putting a bunch of small television sets into our living room and hooking each one up to as many game consoles as possible, and nobody cared. But then The Hormones happened.
As my friends started to take an interest in things other than video games, fantasy books, or the stars both Trek and Wars, I became more and more solitary. I began to look inward for fellowship, and I found my friends in books and movies and, most importantly, in games. My best friends started to have names like Shamino and Dupre, Bernard and Green Tentacle, Christopher Blair and Jeannette Devereaux, Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley, etc… And I loved every minute of it.
Even the shitty minutes.
Especially the shitty minutes.
Get picked on at school for being a nerd?
Escape to games.
Get bullied for being too skinny or too fat or too whatthefuckever?
Escape to games.
Openly mocked by your crush?
Escape to games.
Your best friend moves across the country?
Escape to games.
I could go on, but you get the point. It didn’t matter what was going on in my life, as long as I had my books and my games and my movies to rely on. But mostly, it was the games.
With games, I actually got to interact with “people” who respected and needed me, and we’d go on epic quests and save worlds together. One day, I’d be a crawling though an eerie dungeon while slaying evil creatures with my companions at my side, and I’d be a swashbuckling pirate with my own crew the next. A fierce warrior with loyal troops. A tunahead rescuing my girlfriend. An archaeologist searching for Atlantis with my research assistant. A Persian prince. A karate master. A travel agent in the land of the dead. I could figuratively become anyone I wanted, any where I wanted, any time I wanted. The worlds were mine.
Once I had the key, that is.
Which was technically an 8086 IBM clone with a 10 megabyte hard drive, EGA graphics, a 1200 baud modem and a turbo button. But to me, it was the Narnia wardrobe, and my personal Stargate to other worlds. I jumped into it as often as I could.
The first game I remember playing on that big, beautiful grey beast was Maniac Mansion. I can’t be sure if it was actually the first thing I played, but it’s the game that pulsates the hardest deep inside the squishy folds of my nostalgia hypothalamus, so let’s go with it.
Maniac Mansion is a point-and-click adventure game and the place where cut-scenes come from. (It’s true. Ron Gilbert coined the term. Go on and Google it, if you don’t believe me. Philistines.)
I had no idea what I was doing while I was playing the thing, but I knew that I was loving it, whatever it was. I got to put a hamster in a microwave, break a crystal chandelier with the power of rock, and have an evil, sentient space rock arrested by the Meteor Police on live tv. Good times.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
I was hooked. In a bad way.
Seriously, I even watched the horrible Maniac Mansion TV show that nobody but me seems to remember. That’s dedication, my friends. That’s dedication.
Next time: How appropriate. You fight like an Avatar.
I got my first Nintendo in either ’85 or ’86. I can’t remember exactly which year, because you just don’t pay close attention to time when you’re a kid, since you have so damn much of it. It’s not until you get older and start noticing how much more sand is in the bottom of the hourglass than the top that you begin keeping track of all the individual grains. Or something like that, anyway.
I played with the NES off and on throughout my childhood, but I only have a couple of standout memories involving the console. The first one involves a guy named David, who was my best friend at the time and who now goes by Dave for some reason. And my own NES isn’t even part of this story, since I didn’t have one at the time.
I was hanging out over at his house one day, when he showed me this cool new game he had called The Legend of Zelda. It was an amazing thing to behold, all golden and glistening in the moonlight. (Except the moonlight was just a normal incandescent light bulb illuminating an already lit bedroom in the middle of the afternoon in a suburban neighborhood, but just shut up and let me set the scene.)
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Now, I’d been playing RPGs for a while at this point, but I’d never played anything like Zelda before. It was half Nintendo game, half RPG. Or maybe half Nintendo game, one fourth RPG and one fourth Adventure. It really doesn’t matter, because I’ve never been very good at fractions and what it did was take a little bit of computer game magic and sprinkle it into a console game. THAT YOU COULD SAVE.
You see, up until Zelda, games reset every time you turned the console off. There was no such thing as Save Anywhere back in those days, because it was all Save Nowhere until Zelda came along. It really was a revolutionary thing, to be able to save your progress in a console game. Before Zelda, the closest you could get was writing down an impossibly long “password” or “code” when you quit a game that you could then come back and put in the next time you wanted to play that would kinda/sorta pick up where you left off. But not really.
Zelda changed all that. You could save exactly where you were and what you were doing, along with your inventory and stats and all that good stuff. But there was also a problem with it, especially if you weren’t familiar with the idea that you could actually save a console game. And especially especially if you were easily confused by the often questionable Japanese-English translations of early games.
Which is how it all went wrong…
So I was over at David – er, Dave’s – house, and he was showing me this really cool new game called Zelda. He took me through a bit of a dungeon and showed me how to fight Octoroks and plant bombs to blow up hidden passageways to secret rooms, and all sorts of fun stuff. Then, he quit his game, handed me the controller, and left the room.
And I was left sitting there, looking at this screen:
Seems harmless…
Notice there at the bottom where it says ELIMINATION MODE. Now, what do you suppose that means, exactly? Because to 10 or 11 year old me, that meant something amazing. Probably. I’m not sure I remember exactly what I thought it meant at the time, but from what I can recall, I believe it had something to do with me thinking that messing around with ELIMINATION MODE would let me increase Link’s ability to ELIMINATE THINGS. I guess I thought it was a stat screen or something. Maybe I thought it was an arena mode where I could just go fight endless waves of monsters. Like I said, I don’t remember exactly. I was a dumb kid. Leave me alone.
Anyway, what ended up happening was that I selected ELIMINATION MODE and then used it on the Link character my friend had probably already spent hours upon hours playing, presumably to buff his stats or whatever the hell I was thinking it would do. But it didn’t actually do anything like that. Nope, what ELIMINATION MODE actually did was DELETE THE SAVEGAME I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW EXISTED.
I guess Nintendo of America hadn’t bothered to figure out what Delete meant yet, so they just ran the original Japanese through whatever the 1980s equivalent of Google Translate was (probably a guy named Steve down in Accounting or something), and just dumped the results out on the screen with nary a second thought.
(This actually happened a lot, back in the olden times of yore. Some of the poor translation jobs have even been picked up by pop culture and are part of the non-gamer lexicon now. Things like, “Someone set us up the bomb” and “All your base are belong to us” are pretty much universally understood now, but they weren’t then.)
Just like ELIMINATION MODE wasn’t. Which is how I ended up wiping my friend’s savegame and then shutting off his NES in a panic when I realized what I’d done. I don’t remember what happened after that, but I probably experienced a sudden drop in my desire to play video games and we went outside and rode our bikes or something. Like cave people.
The other main memory of the NES I have is buying games from Toys ‘R Us. Back in the ’80s, there was a giant wall dedicated to nothing but NES games at Toys ‘R Us. But it didn’t actually contain any games. What it had was a picture of the front and (if you were lucky) the back of the box, with a stack of little paper ticket things underneath. The idea was that you’d grab the ticket for whichever game you wanted, which you would then take to the nice teenager working behind the bulletproof pawn shop deathglass cage near the front of the store, who would then match your ticket with the proper game and sell it to you.
So badass.
Also around this time, game shows for kids were beginning to get popular. Often, the grand prize on these shows would be a Toys ‘R Us shopping spree, with the idea being that you would get five minutes to run all around the store, stuffing your cart with as many toys as you could before time ran out. And it was a sucker’s game.
But I had a Plan. If I ever went on one of those game shows, my young prepubescent mind would conspire, I would know exactly what to do. I’d ignore all the stupid plastic toys and gewgaws that so entranced the insipid shoelickers of my peers, and go straight for the damn game aisle. And that’s when I would bankrupt the store.
I reasoned that I could probably pull every ticket for every game off that wall in five minutes, with time to spare. Then, I’d be left with 50 copies of every NES game available, 49 of which I would sell at cut rates to friends and family out of the trunk of my dad’s car. I would have every game I ever wanted AND get rich while doing it. It was the perfect plan.
Of course, I never got a chance to test that theory, because I never made it on one of those kid game shows. The closest I ever came to anything like that was being featured for all of five seconds on The New Mickey Mouse Club, where I barked like a dog for reasons unknown to me other than that some crew member shoved me in front of a camera and told me to. And I never even saw it when it came on, nor have I ever seen it to this day.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Did I mention how much I hated middle school?
Next time: It all comes together. Or not.
Interestingly enough, what brought me back to completing this series was something I’ve never been interested in before: Twitch streams. Specifically, the 96-hour gog.com stream for their Insomnia sale promo. The chat room there (also accessible via IRC, I would later discover) was not only filled with pleasant people, but there were absolutely no Internet People in it. And by Internet People, I mean the horrible trolls who stalk the various strands of the world wide web in search of prey. It was impressive.
During one of the streams – all of which were great fun to watch – a guy named Geordy Jones started playing a game of Master of Orion 2. With it sitting on my GOG shelf having never been played, I quickly downloaded it and fired up a game myself. I used the same settings as Geordy, and my plan was to follow along and learn the game as he played. And then I blew up.
But more on that later. For now, let’s get back to it…
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Enter middle school in the ’80s, otherwise known as Lord of the Flies with Izods and Swatch watches. Sixth grade was a pretty terrible year for me, which is saying something considering most of middle school was a never-ending parade of unrelenting sorrow, but I made some new and lasting friends who were on the nerdier side of the social spectrum, and that was fine by me. One friend in particular – his name was Mark – even had a laptop. A LAPTOP!
In truth, it was more of a “portable computer” in the same sense that almost anything is portable as long as you can put wheels on it and have a vehicle powerful enough to pull it a few feet. It was a monster of a thing, really. The screen was some sort of neolithic LCD affair, all monochromatic and impossibly slow. I’m not sure if it technically even had a refresh rate, but if it did, it was less interested in Hertz as a frequency and more in Hertz as the rental car company. But only very slow and unreliable rental cars. It was the broken down Pinto of monitors.
BEHOLD ITS GLORY
Anyway, we were playing around with it one day when he showed me the most amazing thing mine young eyes had ever seen. He pulled the phone cord out of his football phone (whimsically shaped phones were an ’80s thing best not reflected too deeply upon) and plugged it into the computer. WHAT SORCERY WAS THIS?!
He pushed a few buttons, and a minute later the machine began to emit these strange mating calls of antediluvian god-beasts, until they were eventually silenced and replaced by words on the screen…
Welcome To CrazyBBS!
I was enthralled.
It was an electronic Bulletin Board System, and my first exposure to a brave new world that would eventually become the Internet, right there on that tiny, crap-ass little screen. He showed me message boards and ASCII games called Doors, file shares and messaging. It was amazing, and I was amazed by it.
Then, he pushed a button to page someone called a sysop (pronounced sis-op, and I’ll hear no more on the subject from you psy-sop buffoons, thankyouverymuch). A moment or two later, the screen wiped (ok, that took more than a few moments, since the magical little gnome inside the wonder box had to erase and redraw the screen with his tiny little gnome hands), and someone named Pebbles started to chat with us.
She was a girl.
A girl our age.
One of the first gaming websites. But without the web.
As soon as we were done chatting with her, Mark unplugged the phone line from the computer and back into his football phone. Then, I immediately called my Mom to ask if I could spend the night. And the rest is history.
(Sidetone: I don’t actually believe he had a football phone, now that I’m thinking about it. But I had one shaped like a frog, so it’ll do for the sake of Painting You A Mind Picture. So shut up.)
I became obsessed with BBSs after that. I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me a modem, which eventually paid off when my birthday came around. That January, I made a wish, blew out some candles, and unwrapped the most beautiful package I had ever held: my first modem.
Three hundred bauds of pure telecommunicative bliss.
Respect.
Of course, in these modern times of broadband and cell phone data plans, 300 bauds seems quaint. And maybe it was, but I didn’t care. Sure, it was slower than delivering data packets by way of hopping on a Big Wheel and 360 Spinning your way down the street to your friend’s house, but it was magical. For the first time, I didn’t have to be a scrawny little nerdbody. I could be whoever I wanted, and as long as I could type convincingly, people would never even know that I was a little 5 pound nothing of a boy.
So I learned to type. Fast. Very fast. But I developed my own system, which would later come to haunt me in typing classes when I would get into heated arguments with the teachers regarding their inefficient and ridiculous keyboarding rules taught unchanged from 1943. But they would eventually shut up and go away once I’d shown them how much better my method was by way of typing a whole lot faster than they could, and I’d be left alone for the rest of the semester. Which was nice.
So anyway, I learned to type fast. And smart. I developed a better vocabulary and learned the rules of grammar, not to get good grades on some stupid test in school, but so that I could pass for Not A Stupid Kid on BBSs. And it worked.
Those were happy times for me. I made some great friends, met interesting people, and made a lot of useful connections over the years that I would later learn is called “networking” and is something that responsible grown-ups supposedly do. But all I knew then was that I was talking to people who took me seriously, and I loved it.
Bulletin boards would stay with me through the rest of the ’80s and well into the ’90s, until the dot.com boomed and the Internet became a viable thing. So don’t worry, they’re hardly making their last appearance in this series. This is just how I dipped my first toe into the turbulent waters of online living. Of course, I eventually had to say goodbye to my 300 baud modem and get with the times.
Which led me to getting my first IBM-compatible PC: an 8088 with a 10 megabyte hard drive, an EGA monitor AND a Turbo Boost button. I was hot shit.
“Enhanced” Graphics Adapter
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Next time: It’sa me!
It’s been, what, three years or so since my last entry in this series? A lot can happen in three years, although most of what happened probably isn’t any of your business. Or it’s really boring. Whichever. Anyway, let’s pretend this never happened (wow, a wild Jenny Lawson plug appears!), and just move on to…
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
I played a lot of games on my Apple ][. A lot of games. But only a handful managed to wedge themselves firmly between the squishy folds of my memory so tightly that they’re inseparable from my thoughts of childhood. There was In Search of the Most Amazing Thing (which I’ve already talked about) and there was Rescue Raiders, which was a favorite of my Dad’s, much to my horror. He was always stealing the computer to play it. An unforgivable crime.
He would do things like insist that I do my homework immediately after dinner under the pretense that it would probably build character or whatever, but I knew his real agenda was just to squeeze in some time in the chopper before I could get to the computer.
And if he was in the middle of a particularly tense battle, I could just forget about claiming my birthright whenever I got finished with the reading and the writing and the arithmeticking. He’d sit there for however long it would take him to either save the day or go down in flames – sometimes for what seemed like hours – all the while making this obnoxious little sucking sound with his teeth each time he pressed the fire button. Each and every time.
Seriously, it wasn’t right. It was both a sucking and a hissing sound at the same time, as if he was both inhaling and exhaling simultaneously with a blatant disregard for the laws of human physiology. And it was super annoying.
But computer time wasn’t always competitive. Not when Ultima was involved.
Ultima II was my first Real Computer Game, and my first exposure to the roleplaying genre. I loved it immediately.
The brainchild of famed game designer, private astronaut, rabid collector and all around groovy dude, Richard Garriott, the Ultima series literally consumed my childhood. Starting with picking up a copy of Ultima II at Software Rental (the cleverly named store that rented software for the five minutes or so back in the ’80s when you could actually rent software) and ending with never (because I still go back and play through some of the games every now and then, to this day), Ultima came to define much of what I remember about growing up geek in the ’80s.
It had dungeons and it had dragons and, in the case of the early Ultimas, it had spaceships and time travel and ultimate evil overlords that you could only defeat with the aggressive use of punch cards. (Seriously. Don’t ask.) It had magic and wonder, and over the course of the series, it became its own world. My world. Mine and my dad’s.
Suffering a bit of downsizing around the time Ultima II came out, my Dad suddenly served a brief stint as Mr. Mom for a period. During this time, my Mom went back to teaching, and my Dad stayed at home and took care of the housework and the picking up of the kids from school, and that sort of thing. And ordering a whole lot of crap with UPC symbols and coupons clipped from god knows where, but we ended up with a cool porcelain Pillsbury DoughBoy cookie jar and some sweet Kool-Aid plastic dinnerware. Or maybe just a pitcher shaped like the Kool-Aid Man and some cups. It’s all a bit hazy.
Anyway, one Friday we went and rented Ultima II along with a nifty little program called Copy][Plus that let you copy most any game the store had in stock. It cost more to rent, of course, but since you could use Copy][Plus to copy Copy][Plus and then use it again whenever you wanted, it was a good investment. So we copied Ultima II (and later III and IV, but not V because it needed, like, 64 whole Ks of RAM, and I only had a measly 48), then set about on our quest to save the world. (Yes, we pirated three of the first four Ultima games. But Lord British officially pardoned me a little while back, so everything’s fine now. Don’t call the cops.)
Every Ultima came with a cloth map. Ultima 2 took place on Earth. Others took place in Brittania. My second home.
We invented co-op gaming before there was co-op gaming, by way of sharing a save file between us. The deal worked like this: Dad would play in-between doing the dishes or watching his stories or whatever the hell else he did while I was at school, and I’d play in the evenings after I finished my homework. We’d fill each other in on what we did and what we discovered at the end of each shift, and we worked our way through the game one little bit at a time.
Eventually, it became a race to see who would be the one playing when we completed the game. (Spoiler: it was me.)
One random morning when I’d woken up and gotten myself ready uncharacteristically early, I sat down to squeeze in a little play time and try once again to defeat the evil sorceress Minax, whose castle we’d made it to, but who neither one of us had yet figured out how to defeat. Until that morning.
It was tense, but I figured out whatever puzzle it was that had us stuck. I think it involved needing a ring or some such to pass through some forcefields or whatnot, and I’d put it on and away we went. But the crafty witch just kept teleporting all over the place every time I’d hit her, so the final battle was a long and tedious affair of running all over creation to slap her around a little bit until she eventually croaked.
It ran long. And I got my first (and only) free tardy note from my Dad for being late to school due to a video game. Because some things are important. (It wasn’t my first free tardy note, though, or my last. I regularly got them whenever the space shuttle launched before school, because I was a huge nerd and just had to watch it go up each and every time I could.)
And we kept playing. We played Ultima III and defeated the evil giant robot demon with the aforementioned punch cards. We played Ultima IV, and became virtuous avatars of enlightenment. Then we played Ultima V and it crashed after the intro because I didn’t have enough RAM and Richard hates me.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Next time: I develop a new obsession…
Looking for the perfect Valentine’s Day card for that special someone in your life? Then you’ve come to the wrong place! These are for married people.
In what seems to be turning into an annual tradition here at Coquetting Tarradiddles, I’ve worked up a stunning new batch of the best expressions of marital love you’ll ever see, just in time for Valentine’s Day! I suggest you send one or all of them to your spouse. Remember: it takes little embers to keep stoked the flames of passion. Or something. Whatever.
I went the meme route this year, as opposed to the someecards direction I took last year. Why? Because variety is the spice of life, and I care enough about my readers to use the very best mostly adequate free software that requires minimal effort on my part. It’s just one of the many ways I work tirelessly to bring you a superior blogging experience.
YOU ARE WELCOME.
TOP TEN VALENTINE’S DAY CARDS FOR MARRIED PEOPLE
2015 Edition
Nothing says, “I love you” better than frugal spending.
For real, though.
When you find something that works, you stick with it.
This is a universal truth of marriage.
Mmmmm, pizza.
Every year.
Mmmmm, pizza.
With tweezers.
The original vampire diary stories or something.
The truest expression of love.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
If you want, you can check out 2014’s Married Valentines, or be my Facebook Valentine. You know, if you love me.
ANOTHER DAMN UPDATE: Another day, another shooting in America. This time, it comes just four days after I wrote about guns again. It happened at a church in Charlston, South Carolina, left nine people dead and the gunman got away. And again, it’s being identified by the city it happened in because of course is it. And it’s just “a shooting” and not terrorism because the shooter is white. And he’s a shooter, not a thug. Also because he’s white. And he attacked the congregation of a black church with “Confederate States of America” on his car, but it’s not about race. Because he’s white. In America.
UPDATE: Just two days after I wrote this – two fucking days – and we have another shooting here in America, this time at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, in Marysville, Washington (about an hour north of Seattle). This marks the 87th school shooting since Sandy Hook happened, way back in the distant past of barely two years ago. Go ahead and tell me again about how we don’t need to make it harder to buy firearms because you’re afraid of Obama or don’t feel like filling out some damn paperwork. Go on. I fucking dare you.
This is not about the shooting in Canada. Well it is, but only as a springboard for something else. Something that won’t make me any friends at all here in Pew Pew, Texas…
But while this isn’t specifically about the shooting that happened in Ottawa today, I’ll be damned if it’s not pretty telling that, when something like this happens in the US, the breaking news headlines are usually along the lines of, “Shooting reported at this place in this city in this state.”
Because we have to pin that shit down to a specific location, otherwise we might get it mixed up with any one of the other shootings in our seemingly endless stream of crazed gunmen.
But when it happens in Canada, it’s just, “Shooting reported in Canada”.
Imagine the headline, “Shooting reported in United States”. It would never work, because shootings here are so common that such a headline just wouldn’t contain enough information to be informative.
But “Shooting reported in Canada” does, because shootings like the one that happened today are the exception in Canada, rather than the miserable rule of reality we live with here in the states.
Why is that, do you think? Keep in mind that I live in Texas, where the only suspicious people are the ones who don’t have guns. They’re up to something. Probably liberals. And gay. And communist socialists with Muslim tendencies. Or something. Because that’s just how Texas works.
But the simple truth is that we have more shootings here because we have more guns here. That’s not me being “anti-gun”. It’s just math. The more Legos your kid has, the more likely you are to step on one during a midnight visit to the bathroom. It’s how probability works.
You have more guns / You have more people shooting guns / You have more people getting shot
Sorry, NRA people. Them’s just the facts.
Now, before you label me as a soft on crime, liberal loving Democrat progressive namby-pamby whatever, hear me out. Because I’m not anti-gun. I’m fine with guns. I think you should have a right to buy guns and own guns and shoot guns and make sweet, sweet love to your guns when you’re home alone and no one’s watching. Whatever fuels your engine, chief. Not my business.
But I do think it should be slightly more difficult to buy a gun than, say, a pack of gum. (And don’t start with the old NRA line of “We need to enforce existing laws before making new ones!” – because you won’t let us enforce the existing laws. That’s the whole point.)
Right now, at least here in the Lone Star State, you can go to any gun show (there’s at least a dozen going on within driving distance of wherever you are in Texas, whenever you’re in Texas) and buy as many guns as you want. No ID required. No background check. No waiting period. Just go crazy.
So people go crazy. And they buy guns. Lots of guns. And they’ll be damned if they’re ever gonna let them damn shifty-eyed Feds know that they have them because that’s what Hitler did and then Nazi Socialism something-something whatever. It’s a slippery slope, sort of thing. Because isn’t it always?
The problem is, these same God, Guns, and Jesus folks are the ones pushing for all the damn VoterID laws that they claim are all about maintaining the integrity of the electoral process, and not at all about disenfranchising the voting rights of minorities and the poor. Some of them probably even believe that, too.
Except that it kinda falls apart when you need an ID to vote, but not to buy a gun. Or many guns. Or all the guns.
So I got to thinking…what if we applied the rest of all that good ‘ol boy, southern Tea Party faux-Libertarian rhetoric to guns? What would happen?
Well, let’s see. We’ll start with the Mexicans. According to the hard Right, our neighbors from down south are stealing our jobs, soaking up our tax dollars, bringing infectious diseases that will kill us all, cashing in on our benefits, exploiting our resources, and just generally being royal pains in our patriotic asses.
So we need to build a wall. And have an armed militia patrol it. And keep ISIS out because radical Islam and tequila go hand-in-hand. And then we need to identify, round up, and deport every illegal immigrant currently living in this country, whether they’re eight years old or eighty. And we need VoterID to keep them from usurping our elections.
But they can buy guns.
That’s right. They’re supposedly a terrible threat to the very fabric of our nation, but what the hell. We can’t start requiring ID and background checks and waiting periods and all that bleeding heart crap when it comes to guns. What’s the worst they can do? Gather together to stockpile weapons while “training” in the forest and plotting the violent overthrow of the federal government?
Wait. No. That’s crazy ass white people. Never mind.
“But when you make guns illegal, only criminals will be armed!”
True, but nobody – NOBODY – is saying to make guns illegal. Or to ban guns. Or to do anything at all to whatever precious boom boom phallus you already own. This is a strawman the Right loves to trot out whenever the issue of gun control comes up, as if anyone is seriously proposing any such thing.
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be harder to buy a gun, though. Because when you start requiring ID and background checks and waiting periods, do you know what happens? The law-abiding citizens can still buy all the guns they want, but the criminals can’t. Not at a gun show, anyway. Not legally. They’ll have to buy their guns on the black market – which they will – but it would cut down on the number of guns they have legal access to, and it’d make the ones that are out there more expensive to buy. Illegally. Because that’s how contraband works, whether it’s guns or drugs or unpasteurized milk.
No one is saying we should get rid of all the guns, because everyone knows that’s just not feasible. We have so many guns floating around the country already, that if we stopped all gun production right now, we’d still have plenty of firearms out there to last us years and years to come. So shut up with that shit.
All I’m saying – all anyone is saying – is that it shouldn’t be quite so freaking easy to buy a gun. And you should have to prove who you are to buy one. And you need to be an American citizen to buy one. (The Tea Partiers should like that one, at least.) And you need to have a clean record. And you need to not have mental health issues that might cause you to snap and start murdering a bunch of people.
“But knives kill people! Why don’t we make it harder to buy knives?!”
Because don’t be a fucking idiot, that’s why. Yeah, knives can kill people, but last time I checked, they had a pretty limited range and a helluva reloading time. Well, compared to a semi-automatic rifle with a full magazine, anyway.
Tell you what. When a knife comes along that can murder 900 people per minute, give me a call. We’ll do lunch. Until then, shut up. (And don’t tell me 900 rounds per minute isn’t a thing. Because it’s totally a thing.)
“But we need to be able to stand up against the oppression of the federal government if they ever go too far!”
Yeah, call me when you have a Navy and an Air Force. Also, tanks. And drones. Lots and lots of drones. With missiles. Read up on military strategy and tactics, too. Historical and modern. Then, whenever you finally figure out that your little AR-15 and your band of merry men don’t stand a chance against the combined might of the largest, most highly funded and well-trained military force the world has ever seen, you can go ahead and shut up, too.
Anyway, I hope I’ve made my point. Because the shooting in Canada was awful, but the shootings here are awful, too. And they’re plural. Because they happen way too often, because we can’t seem to pull our collective heads out of our cavernous asses long enough to come together and say, “Hey. Hey, guys? You know what I was thinking? I was thinking maybe we all might live a little longer if we stopped being so damn stupid about every damn thing all the damned time. For once.”
Ah, but I’m a dreamer.
Goodnight, kids. I leave you now with an actual conversation from the future. Seriously, it’s totally legit. I have a flux capacitor and a Mr. Fusion and everything.
Yeah. It’s like that.
We get it. You voted. We know, because you posted the pictures of you voting to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and wherever the hell else you could, so that everyone would know that you voted. And that you did it as hard as you could. We’re all very impressed.
Now can you please shut up about it?
For real, though. Just stop talking. I understand that voting makes you feel very accomplished and patriotic and dutiful and any other noble-sounding adjectives you feel like throwing on to the pile, but it doesn’t really mean much of anything. I mean, you do realize that, don’t you?
And no, I’m not going to sit here and preach about how the two party system is an illusion and that all politicians are the same and are controlled by the secret IRS Benghazi Bilderberg Trilateral Illuminati Brotherhood. Or corporations. Or whichever nebulous, creeping evil is creeping nebulously into the trendy-verse today.
What I am going to do is tell you what really matters in a democratic republic, and it’s nothing at all to do with voting. Voting is just the People’s Choice Awards in a three piece suit with a flag pin tacked on. It doesn’t really do anything other than contribute to the validity of the election cycle and perpetuate the myth that going to the polls is The Most Important Thing You Can Do as a citizen.
Hint: It’s not.
The most important thing you can do is not give a damn about who is in office. Because it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.*
(*Ok, sometimes it does, like when the crazies are in charge. But I’ve already written enough about the Tea Party, and it’s Tuesday. I don’t like to repeat myself on Tuesdays.)
What matters is holding politicians accountable to the will of the people. Of the majority of the people, not just the really loud and obnoxious ones that stand outside of abortion clinics or coat shops and throw pig’s blood on people. The majority of people are most of us that are just trying to survive and leave the world a little better than we found it. Or at least so far as it applies to you and yours. Or me and mine. Whichever.
In the end, the only time voting actually matters is when direct policy decisions are involved. Those matter a lot. But deciding who gets to hold an office? Meh. Remember that time the incumbent ran on a position of strength while the challenger ran on a platform of change? Good times. It’s like that episode of Law and Order where they solved a crime that one time.
The duty of a good citizen is not to just show up on election day and stuff a ballot in a box. Any idiot can do that – and a lot of idiots do. The job of true patriots and concerned citizens has more to do with what happens after the election, not before or during.
It’s the petition drives, the grassroots efforts (real ones, mind you), the social media campaigns, the protests, the rallies, the educating, the investigating, the exposing, the policing, the holding of their damn feet to the proverbial fire that really affects policy.
Also, just because someone chooses not to vote does not mean that they give up their right to do any of these things. They don’t give up the right to complain about injustices, they don’t give up the right to push for change, and they sure as hell don’t give up the right to pay their taxes and be a damn citizen. They just didn’t participate in the reindeer games of voting for Your Guy or Their Guy, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less of a citizen than you. It just means they have priorities. (Or they honestly don’t give a crap. Apathy – like shit – happens.)
If we just go to the polls and vote, then wipe our hands and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, then we have failed as a people and as a nation. Because leaving everything up to elected officials never ends well.
For example, if we’d left things up to our elected officials here in Beaumont, Texas, we’d still have a corrupt school board ruining the city. Instead, citizens took action, local residents filed complaints and fought tooth and nail to draw attention to the problems that were occurring, and they demanded action. And it – eventually – happened.
Because that’s how it works. It didn’t matter that we had one of the most golly-shucks-geewillikers morons in the nation for a governor. It didn’t matter than our city mayor didn’t give a damn. It didn’t matter than the Chamber of Commerce couldn’t care less, or that getting the state’s interest at all was an uphill battle of Sisyphean proportions. It didn’t matter, because the people didn’t leave it up to elected officials who either didn’t care, or were directly involved in the corruption and scheming. They took action, they worked hard, and they saw it through. Because the elected officials were the problem, not the solution. Which has typically been the historic case in all things…
If we’d left things up to our elected officials, we’d still have segregation.
If we’d left things up to our elected officials, we wouldn’t have labor laws.
If we’d left things up to our elected officials, we wouldn’t have environmental protections.
If we’d left things up to our elected officials, minorities and women wouldn’t even be able to vote.
In short, if we’d left things up to our elected officials, we’d be a freaking banana republic in every damn sense of the word. (Some would say we already are. I wonder how we got this way?)
So while I’m very glad that you took time out of your busy day to spend more time posting about how awesome you are for voting than it took to actually cast your ballot, could you please – and I say this with all the kindness and sincerity it deserves – please, pretty please, just shut the fuck up about it?
kthxbai
It all started with a picture. Well, no. That’s not quite right. It started with an aborted Facebook status that led to a picture. But, no. That’s not entirely true, either. I think it really all started the day the first caveman looked up at the stars and asked, “What’s it all about, really?” Except it came out as, “Grunk, bloof-bloof, hocktack” and ended with a sharpened mastodon tusk sticking out of his friend’s chest. Or sticking into it, as it were.
Which is where Republicans come from.
But in this particular instance, it really did all start with a Facebook status. I was thinking about the Ebolasteria that’s sweeping the nation, and came up with something along the lines of, “I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of People Who Deny Climate Change and People Who Are Scared Of Ebola would just be one big circle.” But it wouldn’t fit into a tweet, and I didn’t feel like making a 140 character version, so I just made my own Venn diagram. Which is here:
Science, yo.
Jim Wright (of the fantastic Stonekettle Station) picked it up and shared it, and then it shot around the world in as close an approximation of something “going viral” as anything I’ll create probably ever will. So that was nice.
And yeah, I know it’s a shitty Venn diagram. The point is the joke, not the technical accuracy of it. Don’t read too much into it. Or do. That’s your business. What the hell do I care?
But getting back to the Eboliolia for a minute, please stop being stupid. I saw a post from a friend today about how a lab tech who “might” have handled specimens from PATIENT ZERO (if I was a news anchor, those two words would’ve flown onto the screen in extruded 3D letters along with scary music and some sort of impressive swooshy sound just now) is currently quarantined on a Carnival cruise ship and OMG! OUTBREAK! THIS IS HOW EASY IT IS TO SPREAD IT TO THE PUBLIC AND THEN IT WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!
Look at that Mickey Mouse virus. Notice how Disney hasn’t sued Ebola over copyright? OMG! FOLLOW THE MONEY! CONSPIRACY!
Except that it hasn’t “spread to the public”. At all. This person is someone who might have handled the specimens, so yeah. Not the public. Also, he or she handled them 19 days ago and is showing no symptoms of Ebola or any other signs of any illness at all. Because, you know, it is possible to handle dangerous biological material and not get infected by it. It’s something people (doctors) in the business (medicine) call “a Tuesday”.
Because Ebola, while plenty scary if you get it, isn’t actually all that easy to get. It’s certainly not as easy to get as the flu that hundreds of thousands of people won’t bother getting vaccinated for, even though plenty of Tea Party wackadoo sites will tell you that Ebola is airborne and if someone sneezes in the next county, el niño (remember him?) could blow the expelled particulates directly into your own nose holes and then it’s all over, and it’s been fun and thanks for all the laughs.
But here’s the thing. If you want everyone who treats Ebola patients to be quarantined for a month after having anything to do with an Ebola patient, then what you want is to run out of doctors and nurses and lab technicians pretty damn fast. Either they won’t want to get anywhere near a patient for fear of being quarantined, or they’ll jump in and help and then get benched for the next month while not treating far more people with far more contagious diseases (who will then go on and infect a whole bunch more people who also won’t get treated because all the doctors are just chillin’ in the Quarantine Lounge).
I see a lot of parallels between Ebola and the early days of AIDS. It’s scary and deadly and I heard that you can get it if you share a Coke with someone who shared a needle with someone who shook hands with a guy who went to the same gym as my cousin’s best friend’s neighbor who has it. WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE.
Except we aren’t. And, much like HIV and AIDS, you’re not going to get Ebola from your neighbor just because he happens to cough in his front yard while you’re out getting the morning paper that you don’t subscribe to but that those bastards keep throwing onto your driveway anyway for no good damn reason at all. If you’re in direct contact with someone infected, then sure. Your chances go up…if they sneeze/cough/bleed into an open wound or directly into any of your face holes. (Or deposit any of their bodily fluids into any of your other holes. Whichever. I’m not judging.)
Which is a lot like how AIDS worked and still works. And, just like the early days of HIV, people are pretty sure you can get it all sorts of ways that THEY don’t want you to know about. Whoever the hell THEY are, anyway. Probably something to do with the Trilateral Illuminati Benghazi Bilderberg Brotherhood. I heard they run things.
The simple truth is, the real world isn’t an episode of Walking Dead. It’s not even a game of Pandemic. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find that all of Arkansas* has been infected (although who would really even care).
*Feel free to replace Arkansas with the crappy state of your choice. Texas is a good one, except that I live in Texas, so I’d rather not wake up dead, thankyouverymuch.
IF there’s an outbreak, it won’t happen overnight. It will happen slowly, and spread the fastest through the most closed systems, because that’s how viruses work. If you lock a bunch of people into a confined space and then don’t let them out when one of them gets sick, then they’re all getting sick. (Except for the one person who is strangely immune and who becomes humanity’s last, best hope for a cure. It’ll probably a farm boy or something. Raised by foster parents. Born under mysterious circumstances. Keep an eye out.)
You know, kind of like how a lot of people want to see us wall up Liberia and let them all die. Which is exactly what people who suggest closing off the country want, even though they won’t come out and say it.
And it’s what they want with anyone who gets Ebola here. Or who treats someone with Ebola. Or lives with someone who treated Ebola. Or knows someone who lives with someone who treated Ebola. Because people are scared and people are stupid.
So don’t be stupid, ok? Please? Just this once?
See the game for what it is: midterm politics. Ebola is just the latest football being kicked around by the opposing teams, and everyone who thinks it matters (in the way the media and pundits are telling you it matters) are exactly the sorts of jellyheaded morons they need votes from. Because the thinking people aren’t cheering and jeering in the stadium.
We don’t care that you think Obama is soft on Ebola, or that you’re angry that he’s being too aggressive with getting it under control. (Which opposing idea the Conservatives will be mad about at any given point depends on whenever Obama does exactly what they said they wanted him to do before he did it, of course.)
We don’t care that you want to play politics and rile up your functionally illiterate bases. We really don’t. It’s just what you do. You’ve always done it, and you’ll keep on doing it long after we’ve all forgotten about Ebola and moved on to the next big thing.
But for pete’s sake, can the regular people please just shut up about it? Maybe people have always been this reactionary and dumb, and it’s just that social media outlets have given their voices more volume than just being the crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table who rants about the gubment and taxes and whatever. But that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
YOU ARE (probably) NOT GOING TO GET EBOLA.
Do you know how I know that? Because the Swine Flu didn’t kill you, did it? (Remember when that was going to be the end of civilization?) Because you didn’t get AIDS from shaking hands with a gay guy once, did you? (Well, unless he stabbed you with one of those HIV joy buzzers Pat Robertson goes on about…) So what do you think your chances of getting Ebola are? Honestly.
Will there be more cases? Sure. It’s almost guaranteed at this point. We may end up with literally DOZENS of people who contract it. But will there be a major, apocalyptic outbreak? Probably not.
Which is actually something a lot of these crazies want, I think. They’re fascinated by the End Of Days. They’ve been telling us Obama is the Anti-Christ for years, but they’re running out of time waiting for him to destroy the world. So when something like Ebola comes along, well…cross your fingers, kids. This might be the one!
Sigh.
UPDATE: But wait! There’s more. And it just gets worse from here. Way down here in America’s armpit, we’ve ratcheted the crazy up to eleven, thanks to the ever-lovin’, swivel-eyed lunatic Joe Deshotel. This lovely man – a state representative and “businessman” by trade – has decided to embrace that most sacred and time-honored tradition of Not In My Back Yard, and is working with the state to ensure that anyone who might be diagnosed with Ebola in southeast Texas won’t be treated in southeast Texas. Instead, at the moment of diagnosis, the unfortunate patient will be whisked away to an undisclosed location while all of his or her “home furnishings” are burned at the Veolia company’s incinerator in nearby Port Arthur. This is what you get on the other side of the equals sign when you add Stupidity to Hysteria and multiply by Pandering, kids.
(To its (dis)credit, Louisiana refused to mix the burned remains into the steamy étouffée of one of its landfills, what with the fear of infection from incinerated ash being so powerful and all. So Joe’s not the only idiot who has gone NIMBY crazy.)
12 News KBMT and K-JAC. News, Weather and Sports for SE Texas
So, just to put this into perspective, if you get Ebola in southeast Texas, you will be separated from your family, removed to an undisclosed location and everything you own will be burned to ash. Way to encourage people to self-report there, Texas!
I can tell you one thing right now, as a parent. If my kid even shows so much as a sniffle this year, I’m going to get him to cough directly into my face as often as possible. Because there’s no way in hell he’s being stashed into a closet somewhere I can’t get to, in the highly unlikely event that he – *insert superstitious warding phrase/motion/etc… of your choice here* – should come down with Ebola. (Of course, they’d likely quarantine the entire family, while isolating the diagnosed patient. But that doesn’t really make it any better.)
Or how about this? I could give the authorities a call and say that my creepy rapevan neighbor has been showing symptoms of Ebola, and could someone come take him away and burn his house down, please and thank you? In the interests of the public good, of course, and nothing at all to do with how obnoxious he is whenever he’s zooming up and down the road with all 350 of his fleshy pounds flapping in the breeze on a kid’s dirtbike at 6am on a Sunday morning. And the less said about the goat, the better.
Come on, people. This is insanity. First, we’re penalizing doctors and nurses and lab technicians for coming anywhere near Ebola. Now, we’re disincentivizing even going to the doctor if you feel sick. Why risk a possible Ebola diagnosis and be removed from your family while you lose your job for not reporting to work as everything in your house gets burned to ash in a damned incinerator in Port Freaking Arthur, TX?
There are a lot of bad ways to go out in this world, but having any part of it happen in Port Arthur is an indignity no one should have to face.
Not ever.
Look, kids. It’s really pretty simple. So far, there have been 8 confirmed cases here in the good ol’ US of A. Yeah, you read that right. Eight. (This is including people who were infected abroad, but have been or are being treated here, in the United States.)
To put that into perspective, more people from having sex every year. A lot more people. Like, around 49,902 more. I’m no statistician, but I think that means you’re roughly 1.21 gigawatts more likely to die from doing the humpty hump than you are from ever even catching Ebola, much less dying from it.
Here, let me use a few statistics that I trotted out during the OMG SWINE FLU FREAKOUT from a couple of years ago. I’m sure the data has changed a little, but probably not enough for a lazy bastard like me to worry about correcting. Just go with it.
I just got off the phone with AOL. Yes, you read that right. America Freaking On-Line. In 2014. They’re still around, and they’re still as awful as ever. But why was I on the phone with them, you ask? Pull up a chair; I’ll tell you all about it.
Way back in the early aughts, there was no such thing as hotel broadband. Or maybe there was and I just never stayed anywhere fancy enough to have it; but the point is, if you were going to be traveling and might want to connect to the Internet, you’d probably have to dial in. With a squeakybox modem and everything. And to do that, you’d want a local access number so you wouldn’t have to pay additional long distance charges at check out. You’d just pay for the local calls you’d made. This is where AOL comes in.
Almost 12 years ago, back in October of 2002, I was getting married (to my first wife, if you’re not a regular reader…I’ve since divorced and remarried) in a destination wedding at Walt Disney World, of all places. (Hooray, fairy tales!) And, while I stayed at one of the better resorts at the time (Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge), there was no such thing as in-room Wi-Fi. Or LTE or 4G or 3G or any smartphone with any of the Gs. There was nothing for me to use to hop online and post honeymoon pictures or check my email or anything, unless I dialed into a national service with a local access number. Eg: A-O-Freaking-Hell.
So I signed up and signed in, did my thing, and happy fun times were had by all. Eventually, the honeymoon was over and I was back home, where I didn’t need to dial into AOL anymore. So I canceled it. End of story, right? Wrong.
Although I’d called and cancelled the service, they still drafted their monthly fee from my checking account the next month. So I called back, they acted like I’d never cancelled, and I cancelled again. The next month came, and there it was again. Another draft. So I called back, and cancelled again. And again. And again. Nothing ever changed.
Eventually, I spoke to the fine people at my bank and asked them what I could do to stop the charges. They then politely informed me that the only thing they could do was reject the draft each month, which would cost me roughly $10 more than AOL was billing me for. Every month. In hindsight, I should’ve just done that way back when, but I didn’t feel like paying more to my bank than AOL was stealing from me every month, just to keep them from stealing from me every month. So I let them keep stealing from me every month.
I tried to cancel over and over again, every so often. I think I even dialed back into the service in 2005 to try and cancel it that way, but apparently all that did was record me as agreeing to an updated TOS policy when I signed on. Yippie skippy.
Eventually, I just gave up. I resigned myself to the fact that they’d just keep taking $25 (this is a rough estimate…I can’t recall the exact amount, but $25 is in the ballpark) from me every month, and there just wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Until I used my card at Target over a decade later…
Due to the big hack job that happened to Target earlier this year, my bank shut off my old debit card and issued me a new one, with a new account number (without telling me, of course…which led to an interesting experience of having no access to my money while I was out of town, but that’s another story). This was finally enough to break AOL’s death grip on being able to continually auto-draft $25 from my account each month, because they no longer had a working account number. I WAS FINALLY FREE! I even went out into the rain, tore my shirt off and stood in my front yard with my arms in the air like Andy Dufresne at the end of Shawshank. (Ok, I didn’t actually do that. But I wanted to.)
That was back in April. Flash forward to today, September 6, 2014. The mailman drops off the day’s letters and such, and I spy something from AOL in the stack. I open it up.
YOUR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE IS REQUIRED!
AMOUNT DUE: $135.67
Who the what now? I owe these bastards $135? For what? Not having used their service in a decade? Really?
So I started recording, and called them up. And this happened:
First, they were going to take it down from $135.67 to $108.67. Then, I got a supervisor who said he could lower it to $54.27, before eventually offering to lower it by 80% to $27.13. I probably should’ve just cut my losses and paid them that tiny amount, but…I’m me. I don’t do that sort of thing. (See also: this.)
I got off the phone having accomplished exactly nothing, which is about what I expected before I called. I know other people have had similar issues with these bastards, so I figured I’d tell my story here, post the recording of the call, and make it available to anyone who cares to give it a listen. It’s at least moderately entertaining, hearing me stumble over my words as I try to swallow giant gulps of ragefury before every damn predicate. So there’s that.
I highly doubt there will be any further developments on this, other than me getting turned over to a collection agency and – OH NOS! – having my credit score negatively impacted, which I’m ok with. I love how companies use the threat of negative credit reporting to try and bully people into submission. I guess it works on most people, but I abhor credit. It’s a parasitic industry that I just won’t go near anymore. I did in the past (and have the student loans and mortgage scars to prove it), but I stopped using credit years ago. I don’t have credit cards, I don’t take out loans, and I don’t buy things unless I have the money to buy the things I want to buy. (I paid mostly cash for my car, but did end up financing a small amount, because I let the dealership strong-arm me into the benefits to my credit rating. Like some kind of idiot.) But yeah, hammer away at my credit score all you want, AOL. I’m not using it.
If, by some miracle, something does happen with this nonsense, I’ll come back and update this post. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. I tried that once, after trying to cancel my service for the umpteenth time. All that happened was I passed out and hit my head on the way down. I don’t recommend it.
It’s called Gamergate. Because every scandal has to evoke Watergate as a shorthand for Something Bad Has Happened. And something bad has happened, only not what the Gamergate people want you to think. Not familiar with this whole Gamergate business? Don’t worry; I’ll fill you in. And I’ll stop saying Gamergate. Because it’s stupid.
You see, “gamers” – some gamers – are really, really upset about the lack of integrity in games journalism. Or that’s what they say, anyway. But mostly, it just looks like they’re mad about vaginas, and they’re not gonna take it anymore. And it’s all because one young woman, Anita Sarkeesian, had the nerve to successfully fund a Kickstarter campaign to produce a series of videos about video game tropes involving women. That’s it. That was the starting point. After that, a female game developer by the name of Zoe Quinn had an angry ex post all sorts of intimate details about their sex life, and about her alleged sex life with games “journalists”. So now her game only got decent reviews because she let game critics stick their joysticks in her squishmitten. Or something. But it’s totally not about being angry at women calling out misogyny in gaming or daring to code when they have boobies. It’s about INTEGRITY!
Except that it isn’t.
Let me explain why this is a whole lot of controversy about nothing. First, there’s no such thing as games journalism, with the possible exception of the excellent work Anita Sarkeesian is doing. Game reviews, previews, developer interviews, sneak peaks, etc…make up roughly 99 + 1 percent of what people call games journalism. It’s fluff. It’s entertainment covering entertainment. Sure, some publications delve a bit deeper, or have reviews that actually examine a game critically, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. Tom Chick and the gang over at Quarter To Three do excellent work, for instance. But IGN? Not so much.
The thing about games “journalism” is that it’s never had integrity. Ever. Flash back to the E3s of the ’90s and you’ll see why. Extravagant booths, lavish parties, enormous bags of swag…and that’s just the public side of things. It’s no secret that everyone thinks publishers buy good reviews by way of paying for advertising, or offering to provide (or threatening to withhold) advance review copies of games, developer access, etc… It happens all the time, and everyone knows it happens. And it’s never been an issue, other than when the Call of Duty bros get mad at Reviewer X because he liked Battlefield 9000 more, so he must be crooked and oooh, doesn’t it just make you so angry!
So why is it an issue all of a sudden? In a word:
Yep.
And that’s it. Women. Often, very attractive women are not only playing games, but they’re writing about them and creating them and making videos about them. AND IT’S JUST NOT FAIR! The subject of the “fake” nerd girl has been examined at length by all sorts of people smarter than I am, but the long and short of it is that guys don’t think “hot” girls can really be nerds. Because of reasons.
Look, dudes. I get it. I’m a child of the ’80s. I was playing computer and video games way back before they ever had a hope of becoming cool. They 
were the domain of the extreme nerds like I was (am), and girls just did not play them. (That was the thinking at the time, at any rate.) So it was a boy’s club; but not only that, it was an exclusive club for outcasts. Sure, we might get picked on by the jocks and popular kids at school, and no way would a good looking girl ever so much as talk to us, but at least we had our games. And our little club of fellow rejects. But the problem is, games aren’t like that anymore. Being a nerd isn’t like that anymore. Things are different. We won. Our subculture became mainstream. Hooray!
So why are so many of you pissed about it? Wait, don’t answer. I’ll tell you: resentment. You resent “normal” people just waltzing in and staking a claim in our fruited plains. They’re interlopers and Johnny-come-lately sumbitches! Especially the girls. And especially especially the pretty ones.
They didn’t have to suffer for their love of games. They didn’t get wedgies and stuffed in lockers. They’re the girls that laughed at us in school, so why should they get to join in our reindeer games? I get it. I do. Really. The only problem is, you’re all being stupid and horrible. And wrong. Very, very wrong.
See, one of the by-products of that boy’s-only club of outcasts we grew up in was the echo chamber of wish fulfillment it created. Games empower us to be who we aren’t in the real world, but part of that empowerment has always come at least partly by disempowering others – especially those we desperately wanted to have power over. Or who we at least wanted to like us. Or maybe just not laugh at us so much.
So yeah, women became objects in games. They became the damsels-in-distress of our daydream fantasies, and we’d save them with our mighty swords of +10 swashbuckling and Socks of Furious Wanking. They also became dehumanized objects of our desire for power over them. From the strippers in Duke Nukem to the prostitutes of Grand Theft Auto, the boy’s club empowered men by taking power away from women. That was the whole point. So yeah, I get it.
I also understand what it feels like to hate women. I went through a nasty divorce and spent time as a cuckolded husband several years back, which will do wonders to encourage a guy’s inner bastard. The earlier entries in this blog are a testament to the misogynistic, angry road I was on back then. Fortunately, I got over it. Why can’t you?
And you hate her for being attractive.
And you hate her for being successful.
And you hate her for having a vagina.
And breasts.
And really, seriously manicured eyebrows.
Ok, maybe not so much that last one. But you get the idea. You’re being a bunch of reactionary penises, and you know it. You have to know it. You have to see that all you’re doing to Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn and Jenn Frank and any other smoothleg that dares to come along and tries to enter our little pixelated world, is exactly what you IMAGINE they did to you, back in whatever childhood trauma turned you into a threatened, frightened dickbag. Because they didn’t do shit to you then, and they’re not doing shit to you now. So why are you giving them shit? Why all the Twitter hate? The angry blog posts. The death threats. The doxxing. Or this horrible thing* that lets you play “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” (*not a link to the actual, digesting app).
Seriously. Why? It’s not about journalistic integrity. We all know it’s not. Stop trying to come up with clever hashtags (#notyourshield) and rebranding campaigns to try and make your little truther movement into something grander or more noble than it is, which is neither grand nor noble. Stop complaining about so-called Social Justice Warriors, when all anyone is doing is pointing out the truth. No one is saying Rockstar has to stop making video games. Hell, George Broussard can still make games, if he wants. About whatever he wants. No one cares. No one’s stopping him. Or anyone.
I’m sure I’ll get some hate for this post, as the mere idea that I support what Anita is doing is enough to turn the mighty guns of 4chan directly at my braincase, but I don’t care. Tim Schafer wrote one tweet in favor of Anita’s latest video, then spent the rest of the day fielding hate tweets in response. Joss Whedon – a guy who has done a lot more than most in the field of creating fem
ale characters that are people rather than props – supports her, and he’s taken heat for it. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen Wil Wheaton throw a nod of encouragement her way, and he’s like the King Of Us (nerds). I’m not remotely in the same league as any of those guys, so I probably won’t get as much fallout. But then again, I won’t have as many people ready to jump up and defend me, either. Not that it matters. We’re talking about video games and Internet rage here. Sure, it’s scary Internet rage that has driven Anita from her home out of fear of reprisal from the angry dick community, but I’m not trying to pick a fight with anyone. I’m just trying to get some of you to stop picking fights with women who are not a threat to you. They never have been. They just want to be part of the club. Isn’t it time to take the No Girlz Allowed sign off the treehouse?
After all, the only thing people like Anita are doing is shining a light in the dark little corners of the gaming basement, and the rats are scattering. And biting. And trying to infect everyone they can with their hate on their way back into the shadows. Stop being rats, guys.
Please?
I come across a lot of misinformation and confusion regarding a variety of topics on social media, so I thought I’d take a minute to create a handy reference guide for the good folks of the Internet to use whenever you find yourself wondering about a controversial issue. I hope you find it useful in your online discussions.
If you find that I haven’t covered a topic you’re interested in, please let me know by clicking the “suggest a topic” link at the bottom of the list. I want to make this as comprehensive an information source as I possibly can, so please don’t hesitate to let me know what I’ve left out.
Now, let’s get down to business.
I read In The Final Minutes Of His Life, Calvin Has One Last Talk With Hobbes, and it made me write this:
Spoiler: Calvin doesn’t die in mine
***********************
Rough fingers clawed at the top an an ancient cardboard box, before grabbing at the sides to rip it apart.
“Where is it? It has to be here!” screamed a middle-aged man, panicked as he ran his large hands through his thinning yellow hair. He poured the contents of the dusty old box onto the attic floor and kicked his foot through the pile of broken toys and forgotten letters.
“Not here. It’s not here. MOM!”
A trembling voice called up from the hallway below. “It’s up there, Calvin. I promise.”
“No, it’s not! I can’t fi–” He stopped in mid-protest, as his eyes caught a glimmer of recognition when they spied a thin bit of orange and black. He knelt down and, with great care, pushed aside the scattered toys to reveal an old stuffed tiger.
“I found you,” he said, as a wave of calm settled over him. “Hobbes. I found you.”
Calvin reached forward and picked up what was left of his old friend. The mice had gotten to him, at some point during his long stay in the attic. Calvin’s thick fingers gently pushed at bits of stuffing that were poking out from various holes in his body, trying to push them back in. He ran his hand up to Hobbes’ face, and felt the empty space where his left ear should be. He glanced around the empty attic, half expecting someone to be looking, then pulled the toy to his neck and hugged it. “I’ll fix you, Hobbes. I can fix you.”
He climbed down the ladder, where his mother was waiting in the hallway. “See?” she said. “I told you it was up there.”
Calvin tightened his grip on Hobbes, and whipped his head around to face his mother. “HIM, Mom,” he snapped. “HE was up there. Not IT.”
She smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I told you HE was up there.”
Calvin held Hobbes out for his mother to see. “Look at him, Mom. Can you fix him?”
She paused for a moment and looked over the dusty, moth-eaten, mouse-nibbled old thing. “I don’t think so, Calvin,” she said. “He’s very old, and we sold my sewing machine years ago.”
“But I promised Christopher, Mom. I promised him!”
“I can try, Calvin. But look at him. I might be able to patch up some of the holes, but where’s his other ear?”
He felt at the empty space again, and bowed his head. “I don’t know. Gone. Mice, I think.”
“Look, Calvin. It’s not about what kind of shape he’s in. He’s an old toy, and he’s been in the attic for years. Christopher will understand. Just buy him a new one.”
His eyes grew wide as he pulled Hobbes back to his chest. “A new one?! This is HOBBES, Mom! There’s only one of him.”
She reached out her hand to touch Calvin’s shoulder. He pulled away.
“Never mind,” he said. “It’s fine. I have to go.”
“But–”
“No, I have to go.”
Calvin sprinted out of the house and hopped in his car. His mother had only just made it to the front porch as he screeched his tires and pulled away. She waved anyway. “Be careful, son. I’m so sorry.”
Ten minutes later, Calvin pulled into a parking garage and unbuckled Hobbes from the passenger seat. “We’re here, buddy,” he said, lifting his old friend into his arms. “Please, Hobbes. I love you.”
He speed walked through the garage and into the elevator, holding an old and tattered stuffed animal next to his chest through a hundred stares and curious glances as he made his way through the hospital. “We’re coming, buddy,” he whispered to himself.
Calvin pushed the call button for the elevator and looked down at Hobbes while he waited for it to arrive. “Hobbes? Please. I need you,” he said, almost crying the words. “Please?”
The elevator arrived, and Calvin stepped inside. He pushed the button for the fourth floor, and the doors slowly closed. There were a couple of nurses and a doctor in the elevator with him, but he didn’t care.
“Hobbes!” he whisper-shouted, as the doctor and nurses pretended to not hear him. They knew where he was going.
“PLEASE? I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry! I love you. Please. PLEASE!”
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened to the pediatric ward. Calvin stepped out. He lifted Hobbes to his face and whispered again, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “Please, Hobbes? Please? For me? For Christopher? I told him about you. He needs you. Please come back.” He pulled the tiger close again, for another hug. Tighter this time, than before. Desperate.
The world around him stopped. Doctors froze in mid-stride. The television in the waiting room paused on a newscaster. The nurse behind the counter stopped rubbing her neck. Then, everything dimmed until the only light on the floor shined on Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin closed his eyes. “Hobbes?” he asked, hesitation and hope dripping from the question mark. “Is that you?”
He opened his eyes.
“It’s me, Calvin,” said Hobbes. He was standing in front of Calvin on two legs. Taller, with no holes and both ears. Just like he used to be.
“Hobbes!” shouted Calvin, as he rushed forward to give him a bear hug. He wrapped his arms around himself and fell forward when nothing was there. He turned over and pushed himself up against the nurse’s station as he looked back at Hobbes.
“I’m not here, Calvin,” he said, pointing to the ratty old toy on the ground by the elevator. “There’s just that.”
“What do you mean? I can see you again!”
“No,” said Hobbes, shaking his head. “You can’t. I’m gone, Calvin. I’ve been gone for a very long time.”
“But you’re talking!”
“No. You’re remembering an echo of me. Before…”
“Before what?” asked Calvin, desperate.
“Before I died.”
Calvin was back on his feet again. “WHAT?!” he shouted.
Hobbes sighed. “I’m dead, Calvin. I have been for a long time. And you know it.”
“No! You’re right here! I FOUND YOU.”
Hobbes shook his head. “You never lost me, Calvin. You left me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you put me in a box in your mom’s attic, and you left me. But I know you still loved me. For a while.”
Calvin reached out his hand to plead with Hobbes. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to. I always loved you. I still love you!”
“If that were true, Calvin, I could be here right now. Just like I was when you were little. When you really did.”
He was sobbing uncontrollably now. “But I do love you, Hobbes! I promise! I’ve always loved you, and my son…my son loves you, too.”
“He’s never met me, Calvin.”
“I know, but I told him about you! I told him all of our stories. Our adventures, the trouble we’d get into. How special you were to me. He knows!”
Hobbes backed away and lowered his head. “I’m sorry, Calvin. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can!”
“I wish I could, buddy. I held on for as long as I could up there in that attic. I tried. I hoped every day that you’d come back for me. That you’d throw open that box and see me there, and pick me up and hug me, and…” his voice trailed off.
“Hobbes?” said Calvin. “I’m sorry.”
Hobbes looked back up at his old friend. “I know,” he said. “I know. I just wish you’d realized it sooner.”
The pair stood there for a minute, alone in a frozen hallway, remembering the past. Hobbes could hear his best friend’s childish laughter. Calvin could feel the warmth of his old friend’s fur. Then, it turned cold.
The light began to come back. People began to move. Hobbes began to fade.
“I love you, Calvin. I always have.”
“I love you too, Hobbes.”
“Goodbye, old buddy.”
“Goodbye.”
A moment later, and the world was back to normal. The toy version of Hobbes lay lifeless and still by the elevator. Calvin scooped him up. “Goodbye,” he said again. One last time.
He pushed the call button on the elevator again, and rode it back down to the lobby. He walked into the gift shop and found the only stuffed tiger they had. It didn’t look anything like Hobbes, but Christopher wouldn’t know.
“That’ll be $27.50,” the cashier said as she put the new toy in a bag.
Calvin handed her the cash. And Hobbes.
“What’s this?” she asked. “I don’t want this.”
“Can you please just take it?”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll put it in the donation box.”
“Thanks,” said Calvin, taking the new toy out of the bag. “You can keep the bag, too. I don’t need it.”
He left the gift shop, ripping the tags off the stuffed tiger and throwing them in a trashcan as he went outside. Finding a little bench in the shade, he set the tiger down and grabbed a handful of dirt from the ground.
He rubbed it into the toy’s plush fur.
That’s from when we had the dirt clod war with Susie.
He grabbed it by the tail and whipped it around a few times.
Remember when we used to play Catch-A-Tiger-By-Its-Tail?
He put it on the ground and stomped on it.
I’ll never forgive Moe for what he did to you.
He dragged it over some rocks, and tugged at its left ear.
We used to go everywhere together, didn’t we? Sorry I dragged you so much.
“There,” he said, eventually. “Now you look a little more like the real Hobbes.” He smiled. “This will work.”
He took the toy back inside, pushed the call button on the elevator, and rode it up to the fourth floor. As he stepped out, a nurse appeared from behind her station.
“Mister–” she began, before Calvin cut her off.
“What happened?” he asked.
“There’s been a complication,” she replied.
“Is Christopher ok?”
She put her arm on Calvin’s shoulder, and motioned over to the chairs of the waiting room. “Let’s go sit down over here,” she said.
“No!” shouted Calvin, pushing her away. “Tell me what happened!”
“I’ll page a doctor for you–”
Calvin pushed her aside and ran to Christopher’s room. The door was open. There were carts in the hallway. People were walking in and out of the room.
A doctor saw Calvin, and looked up. They made eye contact. The doctor looked away.
“I’m sorry.”
I never really got into Reading Rainbow. With the show having started in 1983 when I was eight years old and already an enormous geek, I didn’t need any encouragement to read. I was already doing that. A lot. Sure, I wasn’t reading anything too heavy at the time, and I was watching just as much Star Wars as I was reading any books with words in them, but I did read. At that age, it was mostly Encyclopedia Brown, Choose Your Own Adventure Books, the Lone Wolf series, and that sort of thing. The ’80s versions of Captain Underpants and Wimpy Kid, I guess you could say. The closest we had to Harry Potter back then was Lord of the Rings, which was a little too dense for eight year old me.
That said, I did tune into RR every now and then, especially after Star Trek: The Next Generation hit the airwaves. (OMG! IT’S GEORDI LA FORGE!) Like I said, I was a huge geek, so I couldn’t pass up a chance to see what old banana clip sunglasses looked like without his magical techno prosthesis. ST:TNG hit in ’87, which means I was 12 at the time, and my nerdiness had only grown. Not only was I reading more and meatier books by then (having finally sunk my teeth into LotR, for instance), but I was also reading a whole lot of words people had written down. Except a lot of them were on a computer screen instead of paper.
The Bulletin Board System craze was in full gear by ’87, and I was right there in the thick of it. I had an Apple 2 clone that I’d jammed a 300 baud modem into, and I spent most of my free time either calling local BBSs or trying to host my own with no software. (300 baud was so slow, and I typed so fast, that I could kinda/sorta make it look like I had some minimalist BBS software running when people dialed in. At least, that’s what I told myself, as whoever was on the other end of the line probably laughed him/herself silly.)
Interacting with people on BBSs taught me that I sounded like a kid, when I didn’t want to sound like a kid. So, I grabbed some books and I read them. I injected my vocabulary with some verbal boosters and, slowly, I started sounding older than I was. Not necessarily wiser – I was still in middle school, mind you – but I did come across as older. I found that people listened to me more, took me more seriously, and actually heard what I had to say. Even if most of what I had to say was some variation on the theme of OMG! GEORGE LUCAS IS A GENIUS!
Anyway, back to Reading Rainbow. Like I said, I never really got into the show, but I did enjoy it when I watched it. And, as I got older and it remained targeted to a much younger demographic, I somehow enjoyed it more. Chalk it up to being at that awkward stage when I wasn’t really old enough to Be Mature, but desperately wanted to be. One hand was clutching Tolstoy while the other still held tight to Happy Teddy (a stuffed animal, and my best friend). I watched the show with all the wistful nostalgia my early teen years could muster. It wasn’t often that I flipped to the show, but when I did, I’d usually pause on it for a minute and reflect on my younger years. Of about five minutes ago. (I was a weird kid.)
The other thing that happened along my Road To Reading was computer games. I started with the Infocom text adventures, and slowly grew with the industry, playing more and more advanced games as they became available. But I remember two things more than any others. First, there were Origin’s Ultima games. I grew up playing Richard Garriott’s Ultima series, 
which slowly turned from standard, minimally-plotted hack and slash RPG fare to nuanced, thoughtful, philosophical stories. Ultima IV remains the benchmark for this sort of design to this day. In that game, you didn’t start out hunting the big bad foozle who basically just spent the entire game sitting around in his dark lair for months while patiently waiting for you to finally arrive and murder him. Instead, you were presented with a philosophical system of belief involving eight virtues, and the game’s quest involved you becoming the Avatar and embodying the spirit of those positive values. That was it. That was the game. And it was amazing.
Then, there were the Lucasfilm/Arts graphic adventures (and, to a lesser extent, Sierra’s), where every game consisted of equal parts puzzle solving and dialog reading. So much reading. And all of it great. From Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion to Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango, the entire LucasArts catalog of graphic adventures were top shelf entertainment, and they taught me as much about logic puzzles as they did about writing. It was a great time to grow up.
Now, back to Reading Rainbow again. I didn’t get into the show when I was a kid, because I just didn’t need it. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time and place where the elements were right, with parents who 
could afford to (even when they couldn’t) provide me with things to fuel my interests. Whether it was buying me a book or a comic they thought I might enjoy (which is how I ‘discovered’ Lawrence Watt-Evans and one of my favorite books of all time), or picking up a cheap Apple 2 clone and taking me to the Software Rental store on the weekends, they encouraged my hobbies. I’ll always be grateful for that. But a lot of kids didn’t have it so good. Lots of kids grew up with parents that either didn’t or couldn’t give their children the same level of encouragement that mine gave me. Lots of kids grew up without anyone to take them to the library or the bookstore. Lots of kids grew up in households that didn’t value reading at all, especially not for boys who should be out playing football or whatever. Reading Rainbow was for those kids. Even when I was watching the show as a kid myself, I knew it wasn’t for me. It was for the kids who couldn’t get to the library very often, so when they did, they needed a list of books to check out that might interest them. It was for the kids whose parents didn’t encourage them to read, who were growing up in a world increasingly disinterested (if not openly hostile) to the whole concept of literacy itself. It was for the kids who needed it, and it served them well.
Flash forward to today, and LeVar’s recent Kickstarter campaign to get the show back on the air. Why did he do it? Why now, when kids have Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and – ugh – even Twilight to read? Why now, when comics are more popular than they have ever been before, and geekiness has become mainstream? Well, because it’s still not about those kids. It’s not about the kids reading Lord of the Rings instead of watching the movies. It’s not about the kids who have read every Harry Potter book. It’s about all the kids that, for one reason or another, haven’t. Or who just aren’t interested in Hero Myth stories and think there’s nothing out there for them. It’s about all the kids who aren’t reading – for whatever reason – because they need to be.
You don’t read much in video games anymore. Every game is fully voiced, with every line of dialog uttered by big name vocal talent, and there’s no such thing as manuals anymore. Back when I was playing Ultima, reading through the Bestiary or Spellbook was not only required, it was part of the fun. Everything was detailed in the 
fiction, and the manuals served not only as a way to tell you how to play the game, but also as a window into the word more detailed than the pixelated, tiled graphics could ever be. (And, speaking of those graphics, they were so minimal (by necessity) that you had to use your imagination, if you wanted to have any fun at all. That two-framed animation of an Orc with an axe? Not very scary. But if you could see it as a giant, angry beast intent on using its enormous battle axe to murder you in the face? Now that was something.) Add in “feelies” like cloth maps, coins, magical stones, etc… and everything brought you into the tiny world on your computer screen and made it come alive – in your mind. Games today, while amazing and fun and impressive and all sorts of other happy adjectives, just don’t do that anymore. They don’t need to. They can render every scale on a dragon’s back, down to the smallest detail. You just don’t need to pretend anymore, because it’s all right there for you to see. Shut off your brain. Click your buttons. Skip the cinematics. Hell, skip the single player story altogether and yell at people on the Internet. That’s today’s gaming.
So yeah, Reading Rainbow is coming back now, because we need it now. Kids have distractions everywhere that don’t require them to use their imaginations. Sure, an iPad puzzle game might help their spatial reasoning or work out their logic muscles, but there’s no need to imagine anything. There’s no need to construct a world in your head, because it’s always right there, in front of you. This is why books are so important again, if they were ever any less important before. If people don’t learn to imagine better worlds when they’re young, they’ll never be able to imagine a better world when they grow up. And we need people with a little vision to see past the horrors of the world today, and strive to forge it into something better. Books can do that.
LeVar can do that. He’s done it before, starting way back in 1983 when I wasn’t paying much attention. He did it for years, giving the gift of reading to kids who needed it, and he’s doing it again now. Interestingly enough, another ST:TNG cast member, Wil Wheaton, is also doing it, with his TableTop series. Tabletop games demand imagination, as they’re just not much fun without it. There’s a board, there are some playing pieces, maybe some dice and…your imagination. This is exactly what kids – of all ages – need today: imagination. (It certainly worked for my kid, so much so that he wanted (and got) an EPIC TableTop birthday party this year (Seriously, click the link. Epic is putting it mildly.), because he wanted to show his friends how cool tabletop gaming is. That was one of his major reasons for the party: to expose his peers to something he loves that he knew none of them had ever really experienced before. He’s only 8, but there’s some wisdom there, I think.)
Congrats! More butterflies in the skies!
In short, this is why we need Reading Rainbow again. Because the ability to enter another world, however briefly, is important. A world with some rules to follow and others to break, with monsters to slay and heroes to make. Books do this. Tabletop games do this. The best computer and video games do this. The best of everything in the world does this.
And we need more of it. Kids, adults, and everyone in between. The world needs more people who can dream.
So thanks for showing us how, Richard. And Ron. And Tim. And Lawrence. And Wil. And LeVar.
Yeah, I know George Washington didn’t ride up to Betsy Ross’ house and ask her to stitch the Stars and Stripes together. I know the Declaration of Independence wasn’t actually signed on July 4th. Yes, I’m aware that Independence day only celebrates when America declared its independence, not when it gained it. And I know about the War of 1812, thankyouverymuch. So let’s just not turn this into another one of those AH-HA! I’M SMARTER THAN YOU ABOUT ALL THE HISTORY THINGS kind of posts that you see everywhere these days. Because it’s not about that. This is about the America Flag. And modern color theory. And how awful the two can be when they meet.
A quick primer on color theory: No. I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll summarize with one sentence captioning a picture, and then you’ll know everything you need to know about it. And if you really want to know more, then go read this, if you must. Otherwise, just look at this and LEARN:
Ever wonder why getting yourself Spray Tanned Orange is a thing now? Like most horrible things, it’s because stupid people are imitating their favorites “celebrities” instead of ever having an original damn thought. You see, Orange sits on the opposite side of the Color Wheel from Blue. So, if you have anything that’s blue in your movie, like, oh I dunno, let’s say THE FREAKING SKY or something, then you make your actors orange. And that’s all you need to know about that.
All caught up on color theory now? Good, because I’m not going over it again. It’s time to start defacing sacred cultural iconography!
We start with the good old Stars and Stripes, in the familiar Red/White/Blue color scheme we all know and love. (Unless you hate America, or whatever. I have no beef with you, though. Please don’t blow me up or anything.)
Old Glory
Now, let’s apply a little Color Theory and totally screw things up for those of you who love America. (And I have no beef with you, either. Please don’t throw bullets or Bibles at me or anything.)
There are several different ways we can apply various color harmonies to the flag, and pretty much none of them are good. So let’s get some of the worst out of the way, right up front.
Analogous, with Red base
Analogous, with Red base (variation)
Using the standard shade of Red from the official US flag colors and applying an analogous color scheme to the flag is just awful. Don’t do it. You’ll make your eyes bleed (especially when you’re trying to color bucket 50 stars and the colors just keep merging and making your head swim and oh god I need all the aspirins.)
Analogous, with Blue base
Analogous, with Blue base (variation)
Doing the same thing with the official Blue as the base color is a little better, at least in the first option. The stars on the variation are just kinda sad looking.
Think that’s the end of it? Nooooooope! Let’s do some Split Complementary Blasphemy!
Split Complementary, with Red base
Split Complementary, with Red base (variation)
Using a Split Complementary color scheme with official Red as the base yields a flag at home in the North Pole, but on the North Pole of the Bizarro World, where Superman is evil and these red and green abominations are considered patriotic rather than the stuff of nightmares.
Split complementary, with Blue base
Split Complementary, with Blue base (variation)
Much better results with blue again, although it mostly just looks like someone left a normal flag in the attic too long, and the rats have taken to sleeping and pooping and doing god knows what else all over it. But it’s got a kinda/sorta antique charm about it. I guess. If you go for that sort of thing.
Next up are the monochromatic flags. Not much to see here.
Monochromatic, with Red base
Monochromatic, with Blue base
Maybe I’m just partial to blue, but it looks to me like blue wins again, in a minimalist/if-Apple-designed-flags sort of way. Although, to my untrained man eyes (that can’t see as many shades of colors as a woman’s eyes can because of, like, Science and stuff) the shade of red for the stars section of the Red flag looks a little blueish to me. But it’s not. I triple checked my Photoshoppery. It’s ust one of those optical illusion things, I keep hearing about, I think. Either that, or Sesame Street completely failed me as a child and I never did learn my colors. Let’s move on…
We’re almost done, and we’re starting to approach something halfway decent with the Triadic schemes.
Triadic, with Red base
Triadic, with Blue base
I think the Red wins this round. Finally. Although, now that I’m staring at them again, I’m not so sure. Both have the same element of stored-in-the-attic-too-long/rat-poop thing going on like we saw with Blue’s Split Complementary colors, but they’re both still pretty hideous. Let’s just put them down, go wash our hands, and move on to our last two flags.
The Complimentary colors!
GO HOME, RED! YOU’RE DRUNK.
Ewww. Seriously, that’s just plain stupid looking. I can’t even make a lame joke about it, because it’s just that awful. Hopefully, Blue can make up for the visual crime that Red has just committed here. Let’s see…
‘MURICA!
Much to my surprise, when using a Complimentary color scheme with official AMERICAN BLUE as the color base, you actually get something that’s basically just a slightly muted version of the regular flag we all know and love. It’s so close, in fact, that I think I actually prefer this version over the louder, brighter red. Because, seriously, if we’re being totally honest with ourselves, Independence Day is pretty much the tackiest of all the holidays. Muting the colors a little bit would go a long way to making your poor kids look less obnoxious when you obnoxiously dress them up in obnoxious red, white, and blue for obnoxious July 4th pictures that are obnoxious. Just sayin’.
So there you have it, America! Have a safe and happy July 4th, and let’s get on this calmer, smoother flag ASAP. Somebody get me the President on the line. We need to have a conversation.
Meanwhile, calm the frak down, America. I mean, enough with all the bunting already.
It’s that time again. My Inbox is filling up, and the only way I know how to get rid of Spam is to reply to it. And then post it all for you to enjoy. Or groan at because my jokes are stupid. Whichever. I hate you, shut up.
I’m starting out with just four choice little emails today, but I’ll add more in the coming days until I hit another even ten. Then, I’ll start the whole thing over again with Part Three. Assuming I haven’t snapped by that point. I’m also including screen captures of the spam, because last time I copied and pasted text and edited out full names and email addresses to protect the senders’ privacy and, well, ain’t nobody got time for that. Sorry, annoying spammy people.
Anyway, I thought it would be nice to sort of tie Part Two back to Part One, because I always plan these sorts of things out and they don’t happen at all by coincidence or anything. For reals. It’s not like Spammers are deeply stupid people or anything, and they certainly wouldn’t try to start a whole new email chain with me a month after I got done stringing them along, right? Yeah, well…not so much. You might remember Gabbee from Happy Fun Spam Times, Part The First. Well, she’s back. And it’s like she doesn’t even remember me at all, which is just downright hurtful, if you ask me. How many traveling concert flügelhornists does she know, anyway? More than one, I guess. Oh well, let’s just go ahead and kick things off with…
Oh, Gabbee! It’s SO good to hear from you again. I’ve been having just a devil of a time lately, and I never have been able to make it in for that test drive. But a lot has been going on.
It actually all started when I was heading your way. As you might recall, I first needed to drop off an application with the city before coming over to your place for the test drive. Well, you’ll never guess what happened! THEY HIRED ME ON THE SPOT!
That’s right, I’ve been working as an official Nuisance Officer for over a month now, and it’s become my obsession. I haven’t even had time to practice my flügelhorning in weeks, I’ve been so busy. But it’s really rewarding work, and it’s done a lot to keep me from slipping back into my old habits.
By keeping me grounded with a regular, 9 to 5 gig, I’m not out on the road anymore, living the sex and drugs party lifestyle of the professional flügelhornist circuit. I’ve even sold most of my ferrets, but I kept Lulu and Poovey because I’m just too attached to them, and it’s important to remember where you came from, right?
But anyway, I’m back on track now and I’ve even managed to save up enough money for a down payment, I think. My credit is kinda awful (which is totally not my fault, by the way…I got behind on all my payments after I went to prison for six months because of my stupid ex), but I’m working on rebuilding it. I have about $1000 saved up right now, so I think I’m pretty much almost there.
Can we reschedule that test drive now? I’d really love to get behind the wheel of a Mercedes and find out what responsibility feels like!
Thanks,
-Kristian
***********
OMG! I’m, like, totally stoked about this AWESOME opportunity!!! Seriously, like, I’m mega good at being totally sneaky, but not, like, in a sketchy kinda way or anything. Totally legit. For real real.
Anyway, I hope you guys will get back with me soon. I can’t wait to get started!
Please firts register for the 0pen_p0s1t10n with my p3r$oNaL info!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1. FuIIN4ME : kri$7IaN 8l@ND
2. FullAdress : 221B CULInaRi@n @V3nu3
3. Stte | Cty : B3@um0n7, 7eXas
4. CodZ!p : 77707
5. Phones : 409.867.5309
6. O.c.c.u.p.a.t.i.o.n : elit3 secR3t $pY 5hopp3r aGent
Thanks,
-kri$7IaN
***********
Salutations,
I am representing an interested investor from Big Money Texas, interested in overseas investment involving big, fat stacks. Dolla dolla bills, y’all! HOLLA!
Anyway, I’d be happy to help your client invest large amounts of paper in my country under qualified whatever you said. I don’t even much care if it’s legal or not, I just wanna get paaaaid! WHAT WHAT!
Alright, so I’m hitting you back on the down low. I get that. We’re cool, baby. You just get back to me with the deets, and we’ll make this shit happen. Balls out style. SHIZ-NAM!
Let’s hook each other up and Imma get on this shit, ASAP. So, like, your prompt attention would be sweet, brah.
Thanks,
-Kristian
***********
Hi, Sara.
Yes, I’m still looking for a good piece of real estate in the area. I haven’t had much luck yet, however. I have certain requirements that any property I consider must meet, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything that quite lines up with my specialized needs. Maybe you could help me with that.
Currently, I work from home, but I’m looking for a second, more permanent location to really expand my market and separate my work life from my home life. My business is very demanding, and often involves individuals I’d rather keep separate from my family, who are very important to me. I have a disabled son, and my wife just had a surprise baby we hadn’t planned for. It can be a lot to handle at times, but I love them all dearly, and I feel like securing their futures is worth the headaches I have to deal with at work. I run a small manufacturing business specializing in the production of unique crystals for use in designer jewelry for independent boutiques called “Crystalline Solids by Schrödinger.” It’s a bit of a mouthful, but business has really taken off in the past few months, and I need to really push things forward if I want to maintain my momentum.
As such, I’m looking for one of two potential properties. The first would ideally be located in an industrial area. I wouldn’t mind (and would prefer, actually) sharing the building with another business. I am willing to assume all costs associated with the property, so that might help entice a local business already occupying a building to let me come in and share the space. I don’t need much room, but my work involves caustic chemicals and various processes that would be best suited to cohabitation with another business that is familiar with industrial waste and the proper handling of various chemical reagents. Something like an industrial laundry would be perfect.
Failing that, a simple home could work, provided the neighbors would be tolerant of my working from home. My business isn’t usually noisy or high traffic, and I wouldn’t have customers coming to the door or anything of that nature. However, due to the aforementioned chemical reactions involved in my manufacturing process, there would, at times, be a discernible odor exhausted from the property. I worry that such things have no business in a residential area, though. But if you can find a suitable neighborhood, I would be more than willing to give it all due consideration.
Lastly, I’m looking to diversify my portfolio and, while I’m not sure you’d be the right person to ask about this, I figured I’d give it a shot. Do you know of any local businesses in the area that are either struggling financially, or would just be willing to sell me their interests at a fair price? I would like additional revenue streams to fortify my investments, so something like a car wash or pest control company would be perfect. I know it’s a long shot, but it can’t hurt to ask!
Anyway, thank you very much for your help. I look forward to hearing back from you.
Thanks,
-Kristian
My stepson turned eight last week, and it’s all happening too fast. He was two when I met him, which was like, five minutes ago. But it is what it is, I guess. The fire of time consumes all things. Bleak. Depression. Blah.
BUT, he had a FANTASTIC party. Wrote a blog post about it. Wanna read it? Here it go!
Earlier this year, I happened to be cruising around the Internet (because surfing it is so ’90s) and stopped on Geek and Sundry’s TableTop channel. For those of you heathens out there who don’t know, TableTop is a fantastic web series where the always groovy Wil Wheaton hosts a few folks for a rousing game of Super Awesome Board/Dice/Whatever games. It’s a fun show. You should watch it. But not right now. Finish reading this first, because it’s pretty cool. I promise.
Now, on that fateful day, Wil was playing Munchkin with Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh and Steve Jackson (who also designed the game, along with approximately ALL THE GAMES EVER MADE. Roughly.). I was enjoying the episode when Trey walked in and asked me what I was doing. So I showed him. And it was love at first click.
We watched Wil and Friends play Munchkin. Then we watched him play Gloom and Once Upon a Time, and Zombie Dice and Tsuro and and and…well, you get the idea. Trey became obsessed with tabletop games after that. We went to our local comics and games shop the next day and bought Munchkin. We came home, I dug out some of my old miniatures I used to paint when I was a kid, and we used them as our game pieces, learned the rules, and had a fantastic time as a family. Once he got the hang of it, he was helping his Mama fight her monsters and backstabbing his poor Papa whenever he got the chance. And, more times than not, he won. Yes, I get beaten by a seven (now eight) year old. Consistently. Shut up.
Later, we picked up Zombie Dice and he loved it. Then, we ordered Dino Dice for one of his friend’s birthday presents. (Which she loved, naturally.) Later, we drove two hours away to the nearest comics and games shop that had Once Upon A Time and Gloom in stock. And we played those. We played everything. Which was super awesome for me, as a geek dad. He’s already expressed an interest in playing a proper Role Playing Game soon, which we’ll probably do as soon as he gets back from his dad’s summer visitation. And it will be EPIC.
But on to the party…
He decided early on that he wanted a TableTop-themed birthday party this year, and he wanted to pretend to, “Be Wil for a day.” So my wife and I set into action and found an excellent venue we could rent out (extremely affordably, I might add), and secured it months ahead of time. Then, since he has a summer birthday, Trey started working on invitation ideas with me before school let out so we could distribute them before everyone dispersed for the summer. He eventually settled on me (poorly) Photoshopping his head onto Wil’s body and making, “the perfect TableTop invitation.” After that, it was just slowly coming up with ideas and putting them into action, as time passed.
Trey wanted everyone to play tabletop games, so that was the easy part. We came up with a list of games (see below), and that was that. We had to have red tablecloths though, because that would, “make the tables like Wil’s.” Details. Very important. (But, of course, we didn’t buy enough, and ended up using blue for a couple of tables. I’m not perfect. Sue me.)
I thought it would be fun for the party favors to be dice bags, and Trey wanted to give everyone a trophy at the end of the party, “just like Wil does at the end of an episode.” So we went to the craft store, bought some inexpensive jewelry bags, then stuffed them with bulk polyhedral dice, along with a tiny pencil and notepad (for scorekeeping, obviously), some glass bead hit counters, a game token and a metal miniature. (All elements of the TableTop logo. Because, again, details. Trey is a stickler for details.)
We picked the trophies up at Party City, and it was off to the races. But then I started getting more ideas, because I’m not entirely stable when it comes to Trey. (I tend to go overboard. But this is party time, not confession time. So stop judging me.) Anyway, I thought it would be fun to create characters for all the kids to choose from, just like they were playing a real RPG. Of course, the stats and everything would be meaningless, but kids love to have goals, so I stuck a “Quest Log” on the bottom of each character sheet and came up with the idea to give them a stamp whenever they played a game. Get stamped ten times, complete their Quest Logs, and they’d get a big, red EPIC stamp across the bottom, and could claim their trophy and dice bag. (And, because I get obsessive and keep escalating everything, a d20 sugar cookie.)
Sidenote: Trey’s party was going to have a lot of little girls in attendance, and I never realized just how many positive, fictional role models for girls that there aren’t until I started trying to find some. I conceded to one princess for my five-year-old niece, but I made her “Princess” Kaylee from Firefly, so she wasn’t a pretty polly princess dialtone. More or less. (I did that with most of the characters: took someone cool from a story or video game or tv show, modified them, and stuck them on a sheet.) The most powerful character in the game (if the stats actually mattered), was female and could go toe-to-toe with the most powerful male character, if she had to. I thought that was important. Anyway, moving on…
My wife had to argue with the Great American Cookie Company (because Trey wanted a cookie this year, rather than a cake), trying to get them to recreate the TableTop logo, but they were having none of it. “It’s too complicated,” they said. Then, they offered to draw some playing cards on it with icing. She eventually beat them into submission with her word daggers until they reached a decent compromise. Dice, a notepad, and the word TableTop kinda/sorta written as a table, with the slogan, “Play more games!” at the bottom. It worked out well.
And that was the party. The End.
Hold on! I forgot about one thing. The night before the party, I had the bright idea to make a d20 piñata, because I couldn’t find one anywhere, either in stores or online. Unfortunately, my first effort proved somewhat ineffective:
My second attempt went a little bit better. I cut up an old Everquest 2 promotional display that I had lying around in my office for some reason, and turned it into something resembling a d20 shape. I then filled it with candy and duct-taped the hell out of it. Seriously, I went crazy on it. However, since I didn’t have a big enough piece of cardboard to make it large enough for a traditional piñata, I decided it would be a non-traditional piñata. And, because it was a d20 die, the kids would bust it open non-traditionally, too: by rolling it. Which they did. Mostly. Also, kicking, stomping, smacking, throwing, etc… The damn thing was a fighter. They eventually managed to bust one seam loose, and Trey shook the candy out that way. The die itself survived. Because duct tape is made out of adamantium.
It turned out to be one of the highlights of the party, which is always the way. That last-minute, throwaway idea becomes something memorable. Crazy how things work out.
And that was the party. The End, for real this time.
Oh wait, except for one more, even more important part. Remember when I said Wil Wheaton was a groovy dude? Well, that’s because he is. But he’s even groovier than you might expect, which he proved to me when he helped make Trey’s birthday EXTRA memorable. I won’t call him out by saying exactly what he did, because I’m sure he’d rather keep it private. But I will say that it was amazing and wonderful and Trey will never, ever forget it. (Thanks, Wil!)
And THAT was the party. Seriously, I promise. That’s the true end. Here, I’ll prove it. Check out 68 seconds of its Awesome Party Epic-ness:
And if you’re really interested, check out my Obsessively Huge Gallery Of ALL THE PICTURES. Because I’m THAT dad.
I get a lot of spam email. And when I say a lot, I mean, like, way more than should be legal. In the past, I’ve violently sent them to my Spam folder in a fit of impotent rage that never works, but recently I’ve taken a different tact. I’ve started replying…
Here’s a collection of some of my Happy Fun Spam Times emails. I’ll add to this post as I get more spam, so check back often. You know, if you’re in to that sort of thing.
(I killed the idea of making this into multiple posts, so I combined Part Two with this one. If you were redirected here from the other link, don’t panic. That was supposed to happen.)
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FROM: Gabbee B***** <m*****@pohankaofsalisbury.com> via dealersocket.com
TO: Kristian
Hi Lakeaska,
We hope by now you have taken the time to research to see just how the 2011 Mercedes-Benz M-Class is truly one of a kind. Here are a few helpful links to provide you with some additional information…
Let us know when your schedule sees fit for us to take you on a thorough demo drive in the M-Class . This way we can reassure you all of the safety and equipment this vehicle has to offer. This is a key element in the car shopping process!! Thank you!
Gabbee B*****
Mercedes-Benz of Salisbury
Internet Sales Manager
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Gabbee
Hi, Gabbee!
So good to hear from you! My name is only pronounced Lakeaska, though. It’s spelled K-r-i-s-t-i-a-n. Don’t sweat it, though. It’s a common mistake.
Anyway, I’ve clicked all of your links and thoroughly researched the 2011 Mercedes-Benz M-Class and concluded that it is truly one of a kind! I like how it has four tires, too. The last car I had only had 3 tires, since one was always flat. I tried to tell the dealership that I thought something was wrong, but they just looked at me like I was stupid. I’ll never go back to them again!
Which is why I was so excited to hear from you! I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I’ve decided to make the plunge! I want to buy the 2011 Mercedes-Benz M-Class from you, because it’s truly one of a kind. Just like me! I would like you to reassure me all of the safety though. I’m concerned that the equipment this vehicle has to offer might not fulfill my needs as a concert flügelhornist. I know the car is certainly roomy enough to contain my various flügelhorns, but I feature with live animals in my performances, which I have to transport from venue to venue. None of them are very large, and they’re all crate trained, but I do worry about storage space and ease of clean up. (Even with trained ferrets, accidents happen!) Can you tell me how many mid-sized dog kennels can fit in the car, along with a minimum of three flügelhorn cases? (It fills up faster than you think!)
Thanks so much for your reply, and I look forward to hearing from you soon!
-Kristian
*******
FROM: Gabbee B***** <m*****@pohankaofsalisbury.com> via dealersocket.com
TO: Kristian
I do not know the size of the Kennels you have or the flügelhorn case sizes however, I can offer you the rear cargo dimensions which is 40.7 cubic feet and with the rear seats folded down you have 72.4 cubic feet of cargo space.
Let me know if this will work for you.
Gabbee B*****
Mercedes-Benz of Salisbury
Internet Sales Manager
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: GABBEE
Hrmmm, that might work, but do you have the dimensions in metric, by any chance? I only ask, because I’ve got a lot of performances booked on the west coast for the summer, and I’ve heard they use the metric system there. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble.
That said, I think that with the seats folded down, I’d have more than enough space. 72.4 cubic feet sounds pretty big, so it’s probably like 150 cubic centimeters or something in metric, which should be fine. One more question, though. Do you have to fold down ALL the seats, or can you leave one up? I’m curious, because I was thinking about bringing my daughter along with me this year, because she’s only 8 and I’m not sure I’m comfortable leaving her alone for three months. She’s very mature for her age, but a parent worries, ya know? I don’t think it’s legal for me to just let her sit on the floor of the car, and I’m really just more comfortable with her in a car seat, if at all possible.
Anyway, I think everything sounds good. If you could just let me know what the storage dimensions are with one seat up (if I can leave one seat up), I think that will be all the information I need. How soon can we start the buying process? Can I come in for a test drive?
Thanks,
-Kristian
*******
FROM: Gabbee B***** <m*****@pohankaofsalisbury.com> via dealersocket.com
TO: Kristian
There are Split Folding rear seats. You can choose how much of the rear cargo space to utilize.40.7 cubic feet = 1.1525 cubic meters and 72.4 cubic feet = 2.0501 cubic meters
You are welcome to come in any day before Sunday to take a test drive and complete a deal. What day and time works best for you?
Gabbee B*****
Mercedes-Benz of Salisbury
Internet Sales Manager
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Gabbee
Wow. 2 meters doesn’t sound like very much. Can I just get it in the feet, instead? Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it in this week, because I’m playing at a Black Mass on Sunday that I have to spend all weekend preparing for, and a couple days after just recovering. How does next Thursday sound? I’m going to be in Salisbury anyway, because I have to drop off an application with the city. I’m applying to be a Nuisance Officer, which doesn’t pay much but it’d keep me outdoors and it only requires a GED, so I’m good there. Wish me luck!
I was planning on swinging by around 4:00pm, since I have a meeting at the Wicomico County Behavioral Health office over on East Main, which isn’t too far from you. Sometimes the meetings run long, depending on if I’ve relapsed at all (which will probably happen a little bit this weekend, if I’m honest with myself), so I might be running a little late. Is that ok?
Thanks,
-Kristian
*******
FROM: Gabbee B***** <m*****@pohankaofsalisbury.com> via dealersocket.com
TO: Kristian
Just call me when you are on your way.
Gabbee B*****
Mercedes-Benz of Salisbury
Internet Sales Manager
***************************************************
FROM: Jacqueline T***** <j*****@phoenix.edu>
TO: Kristian
Dear kaen,
I just wanted to make sure that I got in touch with you briefly to see if you still needed my assistance. I tried your contact number, but seemed to have missed you. Please send me a quick courtesy response to let me know of your current education goals or needs so that I can be sure I am assisting you appropriately. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Jacqueline T*****
Enrollment Advisor
University of Phoenix
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Jacqueline
You can stop trying to reach whoever Kaen is, because Kaen is obviously not bright enough to know that his email address is not my email address. And, while that alone might qualify him for acceptance into the hallowed halls of the esteemed University of Phoenix, I’ve “unsubscribed” from this spam three times already. PLEASE STOP.
I have never wanted to be a Phoenix.
I do not currently want to be a Phoenix.
I will never want to be a Phoenix.
Fly high, noble bird. Fly high and far, far away.
But like, seriously though. Buzz off.
Thanks,
-Kristian
*******
FROM: Jacqueline T***** <j*****@phoenix.edu>
TO: Kristian
Wow, that is a long email, I am just a person just like you Kristian and all you have to is pick up the phone and tell me this or send an email and I will take you off the list, trust me I want to help people that really want help!!!
Jacque T*****
Sr. Enrollment Advisor
University of Phoenix
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Jacque
Dearest Jacque,
I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve been meaning to write back and continue our correspondence, but I’ve been quite out of sorts lately. As you know, I’ve recently been adventuring in the Caribbean, which was mostly a jolly endeavor spent in the company of a merry band of plucky rogues and many a spirited lady. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a misadventure somewhere deep in the darkest ocean, and I found myself lost at sea for days. I had no crew or navigational instruments, and no provisions except a half-eaten corn dog. Luckily, I managed to come upon a charming pirate cove, and was subsequently able to secure passage aboard a small merchant vessel bound for the colonies, which eventually carried me back into the loving embrace of Lady Liberty. What a grand adventure it was!
But now, let us move on to less pleasant topics, as I address your previous letter. Sadly, dear, sweet Jacque, I am afraid that – unless you yourself are also a caustic, misanthropic bastard person – then you are not, if fact, a person just like me. Or maybe a little like me, in that you probably have thumbs. So there’s that.
However, rough genetic accidents of relation aside, I must regrettably ask that you please consider this official email my formal request to officially have my name formally removed from all future electronic communications from the University of Phoenix henceforth and forthwith, tootsweet and razor dazzle razzmatazz ramalamadingdong posthaste please and thank you goodbye.
We’ve had some good times, but it’s over now. Just go, baby. Don’t make it weird.
Thanks,
-Kristian
***************************************************
FROM: Rebacca <d**@dscvxzc3.myddns.net>
TO: Kristian
Dear sir or madam
Good day.
We get your information from the Internet, this is Rebacca, from Ximmen Kreyoly Office Supplies Co., Ltd. which is a specialized manufacuturer of DUPLICATOR and COPIER consumables.
We can supply with Copier Toner Cartridge and Copier Parts, it’s related to Xerox, Toshiba, Minolta, Canon, Sharp, Kyocera, Panasonic and other brand copiers.
Also as a solo agnet of SEIKI, currently we can offer customers whole serise duplicator ink&master,duplicator parts for Seiki, Riso,Duplo, Ricoh&Gestetner.
If you are interested in our products, please feel free to contact us for enquires.
Your early reply will be appreciated.
Best regards,
Rebacca
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Rebacca
A hearty Wyaaaaaa. Ruh ruh to you, Rebacca!
And a very good day to you, sir or madam. (Or Wookie, as the case may be.)
I’m glad you got my information from the Internet! People used to get my information from the ARPAnet, but it was always spreading vicious rumors about my sex life because of that incident with FidoNet. But what’s done is done. Let’s no dwell on the past.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re a specialized manufacturerer of DUPLICATOR and COPIER consumables, because I go through DUPLICATOR and COPIER consumables like a coked-up lab rat in a hamster wheel, if you know what I’m saying.
Since you’re a solo agent of SEIKI, I’m assuming you know Dr. Murderdeath? I was one of his henchmen, back before Kate Archer disbanded H.A.A.R.M., so we might’ve bumped into each other at an evil mixer. I was the one in plaid. With the eyepatch.
Anyway, please send me all the information you have on your DUPLICATOR consumables, as I’m quite close to completing my clone army. I’ve only recently had to slow production, due to a lack of consumables necessary for the DUPLICATION process. I don’t think I’ll need any COPIER consumable at this time, but you never know. Send me some information, and I’ll look it over.
Great to hear from you, and your early reply to my early reply will be appreciated.
Even Bestester regards, and in the native Shyriiwook of your people, Rhawk-Arrgh, rrrooaarrgghh!
-Kristian
Coquetting Tarradiddles
***************************************************
FROM: Susan R***** <s*****@textnow.me>
TO: Kristian
Hey I saw you on that dating site.. 21, Female here.. I thought we could talk more.. Shoot me a Text OK? My number is 402986**** – Hope you contact me soon. XOXO.
********
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Susan
Excellent! I was hoping someone would see my profile on that dating site and email me. I tell you, it’s hard out there for the single dude pushing 40. If not for that dating site, I don’t know how I’d ever meet anyone here in Texas, let alone a 21 Female all the way in Howells, Nebraska (according to your phone number).
I know long distance relationships can be tricky, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make this work. I don’t care if that means texting you my bank account details and my SSN, or just doing wire transfers whenever you need them. It’s my job as your boyfriend to take care of you, so I don’t mind.
It’s not like 975 miles is really all that far away, either. It’s only, like, a 15 hour drive. If I leave tonight right after work, I can be there by the time you wake up in the morning. What do you want for breakfast? I can pick something up on the way (Nebraska has Arby’s right?), or I can cook something when I get there. Just leave the door open for me, or maybe you could FedEx me a key tonight? I’ll text you the details.
I can’t wait to start our lives together. This is so exciting for me! Finally, I can have someone to share my passions with, because it’s not often I find another civil war enthusiast who believes in the same extraterrestrial influence on Grant’s Reconstructionist policies as I do. I can’t wait to have stimulating conversations long into the night about the role the Zeta Reticulian Greys played in carpetbagging, not to mention the impact the Reptilian/Nord conflict of 1863 had upon Louisiana’s 10% electorate plan! Oh, look at me, getting all worked up just thinking about it! I better stop now. Before I get too excited.
Anyway, I promise to always treat you right, and always be there for you. No one can stand between our love. Not even the reanimated corpse of Robert E. Lee they keep beneath the second Vatican in New Jersey. Oh yeah. THAT one. But don’t get me started.
Talk to you soon, sweetheart!
Hugs and kisses. Forever.
-Kristian
***************************************************
FROM: Taherah Habibi G******* <souldaughter1@*******.com>
TO: Kristian
Pls FWD to Bean if email is incorrect. Thanks.
P.s. Also, further down the road depending upon what relationship I’m permitted with our boys as well as budget, I may opt to discontinue the Netflix subscription as I rarely use it myself and have kept it primarily for their enjoyment. There will be a reasonable heads up should that come to be and the option to assume existing account as well.
Wayne’s World Party On!
Sent from my Windows Phone
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Taherah
Dear Taherah,
While I would love to forward this to Bean (as the email is woefully incorrect), I have no idea who Bean is. Unless it’s Mr. Bean, I guess. But then again, I don’t know Rowan Atkinson’s email address, either. Or maybe you mean this kid from that crappy Disney Channel show with the Shia LaButtNuggets kid or whatever his name was. Is. Whatever. But that character’s name was Beans, now that I think about it. With an s. So probably not.
Bean?
Well anyway, I hope Bean enjoys Wayne’s World, provided your email ever finds its way to the young child of indiscriminate gender food pronouns. It is a rollicking adventure filled with the whimsical exploits of two cable access hosts and a video game arcade, which should cause it to be considered historical fiction for anyone born after 1998. I do hope you are permitted a relationship with your boys and that your budget can withstand the massive hit of, what, the ten bucks a month that Netflix costs? It’s kind of outrageous, I know. That’s like, three Happy Meals a month out of your food budget. Or, worse, just over 2 Mighty Kids Meals, although why the ability to eat two more nuggets makes some kids mightier than others is a mystery that has always haunted me. But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s move on.
In short, you’ve got the wrong email address. There are no beans here, except for the ones in the back of my pantry that I keep in case I ever get a hankerin’ to tie all my worldly possessions into a handkerchief on a stick and hit the road to see how the hobo half lives o’er Big Rock Candy Mountain way. So I’m sorry, but I can’t really help you there.
Party Time! Excellent!
But what I can help you with is a tiny little piece of advice, leastways when it comes to dealing with kids in what sounds like a divorce and/or separation sort of situation, and that is simply this: Don’t Be A Dick.
Seriously, if you let your kids stream your Netflix, then let them stream your damn Netflix, regardless of what “relationship” you’re “permitted” to have with them. Tossing in a thinly veiled threat to withhold it if you don’t get whatever it is you want is a pretty shitty thing to do. Your kids aren’t fighting with your ex, you know. All Lil Bean wants to do is watch him some Wayne’s World, yo. Chill out.
Ever your pal,
-Kristian
*******
FROM: Taherah Habibi G******* <souldaughter1@*******.com>
TO: Kristian
Yeah, my memory served me incorrect as I forgot a few numerical characters. And while I enjoyed your courtesy reply, including to some extent the unsolicited advice.. Let me say, thank you from one unmet to another while I more kindly say that the situations of this particular stranger are far more complex than whatever assessment urged you to offer such advice. And although, I am not the “penis” per se, under the circumstance.. Your words have been duly noted.
::nod::
Thank you & Continue to inspire the giggles
T.
***************************************************
FROM: bruce*****@nz.pwc.com
TO: Kristian, t*****
Terry
Keith’s contact is 027 777 ****. He is currently in Sydney but should be able to call you.
Email Keith <kbland**@gmail.com>
Keith
FYI
Terrys details are
Terry L***** <t*****@qbe.co.nz>@INTL
phone 02168****
I hope you guys can catch up
Best wishes
Bruce
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: kbland**, bruce, terry
Hello, Bruce and Terry and Keith! It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Kristian, and I’m a Capricorn. I’m from Texas, which is quite a long way from New Zealand, or even Sydney. I live in southeast Texas, which is basically Louisiana, but with less swamp and more refineries. And actually, pretty much the same amount of swamp. In fact, the only thing we have more of than swamp around here are churches. And churches in swamps. Also, guns. There are lots of those here, too. It’s usually hot and miserable, with a 100% chance of mosquitoes, and our state motto is, “Hey, At Least We’re Not Florida.”
But enough about Texas. I want to know more about you guys. So what are you up to these days, Bruce? Do you enjoy managing markets? It sounds pretty exciting. I’ve never dealt with PricewaterhouseCoopers before, but it seems like an awfully long sort of name, and gives the impression of something with a monocle in it. And perhaps a top hat. Maybe a cane. At any rate, it’s a very fancy sounding place and I, for one, am impressed.
And Terry! How are you, old boy? I see from your email address that you’re in the insurance game with QBE. Good for you! We need more insurance in this world, especially over here in America, where we basically need health insurance insurance, which covers all the costs our health insurance doesn’t pay, which is usually all the costs. We’ve recently tried something called the Affordable Healthcare Act, but all that seems to have done is make a lot of angry white people even angrier and has generally been regarded as a bad idea. Still, it’s the best thing we’ve managed to come up with so far, which is a little sad seeing as how we spend so much money protecting Americans by dropping bombs on other countries, but protecting Americans from dying by way of disease isn’t quite as important. Oh well, I guess we’re just quirky that way.
Which brings me, finally, to Keith. How are you doing, you old rascal? I see you’re cleverly using a gmail address, which makes it difficult to pin you down, apart from knowing that you’re in Sydney right now. Watch out for the drop bears. I hear they’re a real problem. Apart from that, I don’t have much to say other than your email address seems to be kbland**@gmail.com whereas mine is kbland@gmail.com. I can’t help but feel that the ** in your email address is of a somewhat important nature and probably shouldn’t be omitted, at the risk of emailing a random Texan with too much time on his hands while he waits for his dinner to finish cooking.
Well gents, it’s been nice getting to know you. Do take care and write back soon! I feel like we’re all going to be great friends!
Have a good day, or a g’day as it were for you, Keith, along with whatever they say in New Zealand. Probably something to do with hobbits, I imagine. Frodo Lives!
Ever your loyal friend,
Kristian
*******
FROM: bruce*****@nz.pwc.com
TO: Kristian
K
Not sure how you got this, I assume the hobbits got hold of our email; system, that sort of stuff happens here in Middle Earth. Still at least the chances of getting shot at school or eaten alive by mossies is low down here, and, if you do by chance, then we know a good insurance bloke!!!!!
I only know one other chap for Texas and he cant string two words together so you must be a rarity.
Keep well and go the Cowboys!!!!
B
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Hey Krista,
How are things? Still on Rundberg?
I was just reviewing my home page on Realty Austin’s website and re-read the kind comments you said about me. Thank you so much again!
Are you still at the hotel?
Still with your gf?
Anywhoo, just wanted to say hello, hope all’s well!
Thanks,
Carrie
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
Oh, Carrie. It’s so good to hear from you! Things have just been dreadful for me lately, so it’s nice to hear from a friendly voice. I know it’s been months since we last spoke, but I want you to know how much your friendship means to me. The process of looking for a new home can be fun, but you saved my girl friend and I weeks of home searching, and you were just so easy to speak with. It was unbelievably comforting to know that you were actually there to help, and not just add to your quota.
Unfortunately, things haven’t turned out so well lately. I know you matched our personalities to our condo, but I never really felt like the shower ever understood me, or my struggles with latent hydrophobia. That’s not your fault, though. It is my dark secret, and I don’t exactly broadcast it. But for the most part, things were great. At least, at first. My girl friend and I would eat pancakes in the morning and then she’d go off to work, and just before she’d come home, I’d wrap myself in a towel and spritz some Febreeze in my hair so she’d think I’d just walked out of the shower. It was happy times, back then. We’d make love on the kitchen floor, with the dishwasher running while the cold stickiness of the hard tile pressed firmly against the supple curves of my back.
And in the afternoons, we’d have pie.
Krista’s kind Carrie comments
But it wasn’t meant to be, I guess. Eventually, she grew tired of my hydrophobic tendencies and left me for someone else who could better meet her hygienic needs. Or at least that’s what she told me, anyway. Personally, I think she just changed. People do that. One minute, they’re pressing you hard against stained linoleum, and the next they’re leaving you for someone who smells like Pert Plus 2-in-1 Shampoo+Conditioner. I guess I’ll just never understand people. Not really, anyway.
Other than that, things have been ok. I’m going by Kristian now, since I needed a fresh start and I always felt like Krista just sounded a little empty, somehow. And I’ve been getting along fine on my own, and the condo is still putting out great vibes. In fact, I was just in the kitchen the other day, blending up a kale smoothy when I thought of you. I’d love to get together again, chat about old times, maybe have a few drinks and see what happens…
Unless you’re busy, in which case I totally understand. No pressure.
Think about it, though.
Like, for real.
xoxoxo,
-Kristian
*******
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Wow, sounds like a lot has changed in your world!
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
TIME PASSES…
I continue receiving Carrie’s monthly newsletter in:
November 2014
December 2014
January 2015
February 2015
March 2015
April 2015
AND THEN…
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Hey Krista, good to hear from you. Unfortunately, that property went pending on 5/18. Let me know if you see anything else! Also, as I mentioned, if you lease from an apartment, just enter my name in the “How did you hear about us” box, and I’ll give you half of my commission.
Hope all’s well!
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
This went pending on 6/1. 🙁
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
Looks like Krista still hasn’t figured out that my email address is not her email address.
Please fix this.
Thanks,
Not Krista
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Sorry, I will update my records.
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Krista, Not sure which email address is yours. I can’t help you with a Craigslist ad unless the landlord will work with a Realtor. Sorry!
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
kbland@gmail is NOT whoever Krista is.
Sincerely,
Will Never Be Krista
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Hi Krista,
One or more new/updated listing(s) match your search criteria:
MLS#: 5542405
New
5504 Liberton Ln
List Price: $1,350 Status: Active
Beds: 3 Baths: 3
Hope to hear from you soon!
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
Oh, good lord.
Do I need to buy a house to finally be removed from these emails?
Eternally Yours (apparently),
Never Was And Never Will Be Krista
***************************************************
FROM: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
TO: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
Hi Krista,
One or more new/updated listing(s) match your search criteria:
MLS#: 5557639
Contingent
5612 Mesquite Grove Rd
List Price: $1,450 Status: Active Contingent
Beds: 4 Baths: 2
Hope to hear from you soon!
Carrie xxxxxxx, REALTOR®, GRI, MRP
Residential Sales | Real Estate Investing| HUD Buyer Specialist | Military Relocation Professional | Leasing
c: 512-289-xxxx | f: 512-220-xxxx | carriexxxxx@realtyaustin.com
***************************************************
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Carrie M***** <carrie*****@realtyaustin.com>
Just sayin’
http://www.coqdiddles.com/2014/05/29/happy-fun-spam-times/#7
Sincerely,
Is Not Now Nor Ever Has Been A Member Of The Kristaist Party
***************************************************
FROM: James Patterson n*****@newinsider.com
TO: Kristian
Keiona,
This site has been trying to reach you in order to discuss schools that may off you financial aid packages.
Important: Take the Next Step Now
You may be eligible for this financial aid.
Please visit our page on this to learn more
Sincerely,
James
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: James
James,
First off, I’m a HUGE fan of your work. That said, I’m still a little pissed that you cast Tyler Perry as Alex Cross in “Alex Cross, Starring Madea And Her Sassy Black Shotgun”. I’m not sure I’m ready to forgive you for that just yet though, so let’s not dwell on it.
I’d rather talk about this site that’s been trying to reach me in order to discuss schools that may off my financial aid packages. I find that a little hostile, even coming from an accomplished thriller writer such as yourself. I mean, I realize you have to spice up the plot, but I think having entire schools out to murder my financial aid options might be jumping the shark a little bit. Like, even more than that time you thought it’d be a good idea to have Mabel Simmons go running around Detroit with a shotgun in the film version of “Alex Cross, Diary Of A Mad Black Woman”. Still, I appreciate the offer. I’m just not sure it’s for me.
Thanks for thinking of me, though. I’d visit your page to learn more, but all I ever needed to know I learned from reading “Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings,” by James Patterson writing as Alex Cross writing as Tyler Perry writing as Madea. It was an eye opener for me.
Anyway, keep up the great work, and if my finances ever need any cross dressing justice, I’ll have you on speed dial.
But not really.
Sincerely,
-Kristian
***************************************************
FROM: j-banks1@cfl.*****.com
TO: Kristian
Kathleen Bland of 600 E E***** St, Taylorville Il,
Do you need to sell your property fast?
Home values have been risen in your location.
We’re looking for houses in your area and have buyers ready to pay top dollar.
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: j-banks1
Dear Mister or Misses Or Miss or Master or Gender Neutral Honorific J-Banks,
Thank you for your timely email, as I do, in fact, need to sell my property fast! As you know, home values have been risen (in His name) in my location, and I need to take advantage of the increased values as quickly as possible. I’m also glad that you pay top dollar, because you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll accept nothing less.
Since my home value has been risen (praise His glory), then it’s only a matter of time until I, too, am Raptured away from this world. I fear, however, that my second cousin (twice removed, on my mother’s side) is most definitely not destined for such a glorious fate. And even though he is a sinner and probably one of the gays, I still love him and would like to leave him some money to help him survive the Tribulation.
As you are no doubt aware, he will require the Mark of the Beast, which I suspect will be an Obamacare microchip he’ll have to pay for with estate taxes on any inheritance I leave him, so I’d like to get this deal done quickly and get him the money sooner, rather than later. Time is of the essence, Mr/Mrs/Miss/Mstr/Neuter J-Banks!
Please contact me at your earliest convenience, and let’s move forward with this before all that’s left of me is a pile of clothes on the kitchen floor. JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL! AMEN!
In His name (praise be),
-Kristian
***************************************************
FROM: Leanne L. G****** <L******@acdsinc.org>
TO: Kristian, kbland1
Hi –
I am working on your file and saw 2 deposits into your checking account that I need an explanation for:
One deposit is described as Johns Hopkins AP Trade Pay for $99.74 – What is Trade Pay?
Another deposit is described as US Treasury 312 XXCIV Serv – Is this additional income?
Also, is Latetia Bland (your daughter) on your statements for emergency reasons only?
Thanks!
Leanne G******
Senior Housing Financial Advisor
A****** Community Development Services, Inc
2*** R*** Rd., #210
Annapolis, MD 21401
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland <kbland@gmail.com>
TO: Leanne
Hi, Leanne!
Trade Pay is when me and Shauna from Accounting trade pay. It’s kinda like when you have lunch and your mom packed you a tuna sandwich, but you don’t really like tuna, so you trade it to your friend for their snausage roll. Except it’s with money. See, Shauna’s paycheck was for $99.74 and mine was only for, like, $27 bucks and some crappy ass change. We don’t really like each other much, but I traded her my Tootsie Rolls back in 7th grade and she never did give me the Blow Pop she promised, so her skank ass owed me. It was time to collect.
The other one is a little more complicated. That deposit was from the Treasury, which I assumed meant I’d won some treasure, probably on account of how I went as a sexy pirate for Halloween this year. I won first prize at Sue Ann Moseley’s costume party, but I didn’t get nothing but a silly ass little plastic trophy. Damn thing wasn’t even metal! It was just painted with, like, metal spray paint or something she done up in her stinky old garage. Super lame. So I just thought that was her making it right. Cuz she knows I don’t let things go when I been wronged! I don’t play that game.
Like with you and this email. First, you said you had a couple of quick questions, but then you go and ask three. A couple means two, honey. I know because more than two is, like, a threesome. My boyfriend keeps asking me for one, and I don’t know what he expects. We’re a couple, not a couple with a side of Vikki Sanders’ hooty hole from down the street! Damn straight.
Anyway, Latetia’s on my statements because she’s a broke ass kid, and she’s always needing money for something or other. So I just put her on my damn account so she can just go take out the money her own self and stop bothering me every time she needs to get her nails did. Or, I dunno, like eat or something. Kids, amirite?!
I hope that helps. Have a great day!
Sincerely,
-Kristian
***************************************************
FROM: Ashley
TO: Kristian
Hi Edwin,
Maybe you already spoke to Lisa and if so, I apologize for the duplication.
I just wanted to make sure you got all the information you needed.
Lisa was going to give you a call, is (816) 781-xxxx the best number to reach you during the day?
Thank you,
Ashley
Customer Relations Representative
Gary Crossley Ford
********
FROM: Kristian
TO: Ashley
You can call me any time. But do me a favor. When you give me a call, could you also let me know that my email address is not what I think my email address is, so that some innocent guy in Texas will stop getting a bunch of emails from a car dealership in Missouri? Thanks!
Sincerely,
Not Edwin
********
FROM: Ashley
TO: Kristian
Hi Edwin,
I just wanted to follow up and make sure Lisa got you all the information you needed; did Lisa contact you?
Thanks,
Ashley
Customer Relations Representative
Gary Crossley Ford
********
FROM: Kristian
TO: Ashley
Hello again, Ashley! So good to hear from you once more. I was worried that my reply to your last email, wherein I informed you that I am not, in fact, this Edwin person might have persuaded you not to contact me again. I’m very happy that it hasn’t.
So how are things? I’ve been doing pretty well not being Edwin, myself. Work is kind of a pain right now, but what can you do? Vaudeville performers just aren’t that in demand anymore, and I have 17 hungry ferrets to feed. But I can’t complain, really. The life of a traveling ferret minstrel isn’t for everyone. It’s more of a calling than a career, really.
Anyway, I hope you’re doing well. Please let me know if you need any additional information from me about the information I didn’t request about the car I don’t want from a dealership in a state I don’t live in because I’m not Edwin. I’m always eager to help.
Take care!
Sincerely,
Still Not Edwin
********
AT THIS POINT, LISA DECIDED TO GET IN TOUCH WITH ME…
********
FROM: Lisa
TO: Kristian
Edwin
Just wanted to drop a quick line and find out if there are any more questions I can answer for you concerning the 2014 Ford Explorer you inquired about?
Lisa
Sales Consultant
Gary Crossley Ford
8050 N Church Rd
http://www.garycrossleyford.com/
********
Hi, Lisa! I do have one quick question concerning the 2014 Explorer that you might be able to help me with. Is it possible that owning such a fine vehicle could change my life? I only ask, because everyone at your dealership is all over each other, emailing this Edwin person like he’s some kind of white whale, and you’re all desperate for him to speak to you about the 2014 Explorer. Unfortunately, I can only imagine what being so influential and admired must feel like, since I am not Edwin.
So I was just curious if traveling from Texas to Missouri to buy this Explorer from one of your many fine salespeople who won’t leave me alone about it could make me feel as special as whoever the hell Edwin is. If so – if buying this monstrosity of an automobile could gain me the respect and gravitas I’ve always wanted in my life – then, please. Tell me more about the 2014 Explorer and what all I can expect to change in my life after buying one.
If not, however, please stop emailing Edwin about it, because he might not be as amazing as all of you think he is, since he doesn’t even know that my email address is not his email address.
Sincerely,
I Will Never Be Edwin
********
LISA FAILED TO REPLY, BUT I DID GET PASSED TO AMANDA…
********
FROM: Amanda
TO: Kristian
Hi Edwin,
Amanda here on behalf of Gary Crossley Ford, just wanting to touch base with you and see if you were still interested in a new Explorer? We have some great options available for you! Please give me a call or feel free to send me an email as well! I hope to hear from you soon!
Amanda
CRC Agent
Gary Crossley Ford
8050 N Church Rd
http://www.garycrossleyford.com/
********
FROM: Kristian
TO: Amanda
Hi, Amanda! Unfortunately, I have lost all interest in a new Explorer, since I never had any interest in a new Explorer, since I’m not this Edwin person seemingly everyone at your dealership is desperate to talk to.
I did almost buy a Pinto once, but just before I sealed the deal, I had a falling out with the Ford motor company over a dispute involving failure to pay me for services rendered involving my juggling ferret act at one of their big corporate parties. (I juggle the ferrets. However, the ferrets do not, in fact, juggle. Because they’re ferrets.) Due to Lee Iacocca’s confusion over who or what was being juggled in my act, they refused payment for a performance I gave during one of their freaky masked balls back in the ’70s. It was really weird because I had to wear a blindfold and there was a lot of chanting and incense and I think Tom Cruise was there even though he wasn’t famous yet, and there was a bit with a dog and…well, I’d rather not talk about it.
Anyway, as I’ve repeatedly told several other other employees of Gary Crossley Ford, please allow me to reiterate that I am not Edwin. I am a traveling vaudevillian ferret juggling performance artist, and I have no interest in buying a car from a dealership in a state I’ll never go back to after the whole Moon Pie incident of ’63.
Sincerely,
Nope. Still Not Edwin.
********
FROM: Amanda
TO: Kristian
Ok great thank you for letting me know that you are not Edwin, and we will take you off our list!
********
FROM: Kristian
TO: Amanda
***************************************************
Oh, Gabbee! It’s SO good to hear from you again. I’ve been having just a devil of a time lately, and I never have been able to make it in for that test drive. But a lot has been going on.
It actually all started when I was heading your way. As you might recall, I first needed to drop off an application with the city before coming over to your place for the test drive. Well, you’ll never guess what happened! THEY HIRED ME ON THE SPOT!
That’s right, I’ve been working as an official Nuisance Officer for over a month now, and it’s become my obsession. I haven’t even had time to practice my flügelhorning in weeks, I’ve been so busy. But it’s really rewarding work, and it’s done a lot to keep me from slipping back into my old habits.
By keeping me grounded with a regular, 9 to 5 gig, I’m not out on the road anymore, living the sex and drugs party lifestyle of the professional flügelhornist circuit. I’ve even sold most of my ferrets, but I kept Lulu and Poovey because I’m just too attached to them, and it’s important to remember where you came from, right?
But anyway, I’m back on track now and I’ve even managed to save up enough money for a down payment, I think. My credit is kinda awful (which is totally not my fault, by the way…I got behind on all my payments after I went to prison for six months because of my stupid ex), but I’m working on rebuilding it. I have about $1000 saved up right now, so I think I’m pretty much almost there.
Can we reschedule that test drive now? I’d really love to get behind the wheel of a Mercedes and find out what responsibility feels like!
Thanks,
-Kristian
***********
***************************************************
OMG! I’m, like, totally stoked about this AWESOME opportunity!!! Seriously, like, I’m mega good at being totally sneaky, but not, like, in a sketchy kinda way or anything. Totally legit. For real real.
Anyway, I hope you guys will get back with me soon. I can’t wait to get started!
Please firts register for the 0pen_p0s1t10n with my p3r$oNaL info!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1. FuIIN4ME : kri$7IaN 8l@ND
2. FullAdress : 221B CULInaRi@n @V3nu3
3. Stte | Cty : B3@um0n7, 7eXas
4. CodZ!p : 77707
5. Phones : 409.867.5309
6. O.c.c.u.p.a.t.i.o.n : elit3 secR3t $pY 5hopp3r aGent
Thanks,
-kri$7IaN
***************************************************
I am representing an interested investor from Big Money Texas, interested in overseas investment involving big, fat stacks. Dolla dolla bills, y’all! HOLLA!
Anyway, I’d be happy to help your client invest large amounts of paper in my country under qualified whatever you said. I don’t even much care if it’s legal or not, I just wanna get paaaaid! WHAT WHAT!
Alright, so I’m hitting you back on the down low. I get that. We’re cool, baby. You just get back to me with the deets, and we’ll make this shit happen. Balls out style. SHIZ-NAM!
Let’s hook each other up and Imma get on this shit, ASAP. So, like, your prompt attention would be sweet, brah.
Thanks,
-Kristian
***************************************************
Hi, Sara.
Yes, I’m still looking for a good piece of real estate in the area. I haven’t had much luck yet, however. I have certain requirements that any property I consider must meet, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything that quite lines up with my specialized needs. Maybe you could help me with that.
Currently, I work from home, but I’m looking for a second, more permanent location to really expand my market and separate my work life from my home life. My business is very demanding, and often involves individuals I’d rather keep separate from my family, who are very important to me. I have a disabled son, and my wife just had a surprise baby we hadn’t planned for. It can be a lot to handle at times, but I love them all dearly, and I feel like securing their futures is worth the headaches I have to deal with at work. I run a small manufacturing business specializing in the production of unique crystals for use in designer jewelry for independent boutiques called “Crystalline Solids by Schrödinger.” It’s a bit of a mouthful, but business has really taken off in the past few months, and I need to really push things forward if I want to maintain my momentum.
As such, I’m looking for one of two potential properties. The first would ideally be located in an industrial area. I wouldn’t mind (and would prefer, actually) sharing the building with another business. I am willing to assume all costs associated with the property, so that might help entice a local business already occupying a building to let me come in and share the space. I don’t need much room, but my work involves caustic chemicals and various processes that would be best suited to cohabitation with another business that is familiar with industrial waste and the proper handling of various chemical reagents. Something like an industrial laundry would be perfect.
Failing that, a simple home could work, provided the neighbors would be tolerant of my working from home. My business isn’t usually noisy or high traffic, and I wouldn’t have customers coming to the door or anything of that nature. However, due to the aforementioned chemical reactions involved in my manufacturing process, there would, at times, be a discernible odor exhausted from the property. I worry that such things have no business in a residential area, though. But if you can find a suitable neighborhood, I would be more than willing to give it all due consideration.
Lastly, I’m looking to diversify my portfolio and, while I’m not sure you’d be the right person to ask about this, I figured I’d give it a shot. Do you know of any local businesses in the area that are either struggling financially, or would just be willing to sell me their interests at a fair price? I would like additional revenue streams to fortify my investments, so something like a car wash or pest control company would be perfect. I know it’s a long shot, but it can’t hurt to ask!
Anyway, thank you very much for your help. I look forward to hearing back from you.
Thanks,
-Kristian
***************************************************
FROM: Victoria B***
TO: Kristian Bland
Enjoy this wonderful brick home in popular Murray UT
6 bedrooms
4 1/2 bathrooms
Built in 1993
3402 Sq Ft (1760 upstairs, 1642 downstairs)
Central Air Cooling
Water Softener
New Heater
2 car garage
Double Garage
Front porch with table & chairs
Heated Pool (13 X 32)
A1 Shed ( 8 X 12)
Access to field (in back)
Handicap access
Vinyl fencing in back
RV Gate covered
Full walk in apartment (in basement) Full kitchen, family room, two bathrooms, 3 bedrooms.
Granite countertops,
Electric Fireplace (warms fast)
Bay windows in Master suite
$425,000
Thanks,
Victoria B***
801-240-4***
NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland
TO: Victoria B***
I’m very impressed that you think so highly of your spam as to include a SUPER OFFICIAL NOTICE that implies it’s basically my fault that you stuffed your unsolicited junk mail into my inbox, then demand that I DESTROY ALL COPIES of the message that I was somehow not authorized to view, despite it being sent to me.
Accordingly, please be advised that I have printed out two dozen copies of your email and, not only do I refuse to destroy them, but I have physically mailed each copy to a different recipient in 24 separate states. I have enclosed instructions that each copy must be used in one or more of the following ways:
A) As liner for a bird/hamster/ferret/etc… cage
B) As a tissue, for whatever one might use a tissue for. (Five of the copies were sent to teenage boys.)
C) As toilet paper after a heavy meal
Upon completion of one of more of these uses, the copy is then to be put neatly back into a new envelope and physically mailed to:
Church of Jesus Christ of LDS
c/o Victoria B***
8** N 1** E
Pleasant Grove, UT 84062-1744*
When you receive these parcels, please be aware that I hereby prohibit you to review, use, disclose or distribute them. Furthermore, I demand that you immediately destroy all copies under penalty of duck duck sausage fingers.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Thanks, and have a great day!
-Kristian
*not really
***************************************************
FROM: Jim Gong (jim.gong@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.org)
TO: Kristian Bland
Dear CEO,
(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent, Thanks)
We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Shanghai, China.
We received an application from Huayu Ltd on May 4, 2015. They want to register ” coqdiddles ” as their Internet Keyword and ” coqdiddles .cn “、” coqdiddles .com.cn ” 、” coqdiddles .net.cn “、” coqdiddles .org.cn ” domain names etc.., they are in China domain names. But after checking it, we find ” coqdiddles ” conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not?
Best Regards,
Jim
General Manager
Shanghai Office (Head Office)
3xxx, Jiulong Building, No. xxx Nandan Road,
Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China
Tel: +86 216xxx xxxx
Mobile: +86 1870xxx xxxx
Fax: +86 216xxx xxxx
Web: www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.org
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland
TO: Jim Gong
Thank you very much for contacting me!
I am very concerned that Huayu Ltd would attempt to infringe upon my trademark by registering coqdiddles in China. I believe this stems from a long-standing feud between the Bland and Huayu families that goes back to an incident in 1882, when three Huayus killed Ellison Bland in cold blood. My family visited righteous vengeance upon the cowardly Huayus in kind, which led to years of escalating conflict between our houses. I’d thought the feud had gone quiet in recent decades, but it has clearly not been forgotten by the unclean Huayu family.
I will not allow this travesty of justice to happen! I hereby forbid any and all registrations of my family’s sacred coqdiddles lineage to be usurped by anyone associated with Huayu Ltd. Please consider this direct authorization from the CEO of the entire coqdiddles empire to deny any and all attempts by Huayu Ltd to register any coqdiddles domains in China.
Go the cowboys!
Sincerely,
Kristian Bland
Chief Executive Officer of Coqdiddles Enterprises International
Lord Protector of the 9 Coqs and Keeper of the 72 Diddles
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland
TO: Jim Gong
Dear Mr. Gong,
I replied to your email 15 minutes ago, and have not yet received a response. Please contact me immediately, as this is urgent because you said this was urgent so please treat it with some urgency because it’s probably urgent because you said it was urgent!
I am very nervous that the highly valuable trademarks of the international recognized Coqdiddles brand are about to be compromised by a foreign entity. Please respond as quickly as possible, so that we may resolve this matter before any damage is done.
For great justice!
Sincerely,
Kristian Bland
Chief Executive Officer of Coqdiddles Enterprises International
Lord Protector of the 9 Coqs and Keeper of the 72 Diddles
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland
TO: Jim Gong
Mr. Gong,
It has now been a FULL THIRTY MINUTES since I replied to your URGENT EMAIL, and I have still not received a response. Please understand that any damages to my brand or additional costs accrued in defending it from the attacks of Huayu Ltd that result from YOUR INACTION will be dealt with accordingly.
I intend to hold A Network Service Company Which Is The Domain Name Registration Center In Shanghai, China DIRECTLY ACCOUNTABLE for your personal failure to respond to my reply in a timely manner. Furthermore, I will hold you personally responsible for any additional inaction on your part, and will pursue compensation TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LEGAL LAW STUFF.
I urge you to respond to me as soon as possible, so that any unpleasantness between us can be avoided. I would very much like to consider a partnership with A Network Service Company Which Is The Domain Name Registration Center In Shanghai, China to protect my interests in your country. However, failure will not be tolerated. What could be a mutually beneficial partnership can quickly devolve into a NEMESIS SITUATION that neither of us want. But that you probably do not want even less more than I don’t not more want it.
Slip and fall down carefully!
Sincerely,
Kristian Bland
Chief Executive Officer of Coqdiddles Enterprises International
Lord Protector of the 9 Coqs and Keeper of the 72 Diddles
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland
TO: Jim Gong
Dear Mr. Gong (if that is, in fact, your real name),
It is clear to me now that the Huayu family has already gotten to you, and that you have allied yourself with their filth. SO BE IT!
You and the entire A Network Service Company Which Is The Domain Name Registration Center In Shanghai, China are now dead to me. Please make no attempt to correct your shameful actions on this fateful day. Nothing is forgiven!
As is the custom of my people, I have printed out a copy of your original email and will bury it, forthwith, at the crossroads on the outskirts of town tonight at midnight, whereupon a wizened old hermit man will appear from the shadows and demand three sacrificial emu eggs in exchange for eternally cursing you, your entire family, and everyone employed by A Network Service Company Which Is The Domain Name Registration Center In Shanghai, China! Woe be unto you, sir! WOE!
All of this could have been avoided, had you only responded to my reply to your URGENT EMAIL in a timely manner, but we both know that was never your intent. You are clearly a mole sent by the Huayu family to win my trust before stabbing me in the back. But I’ve outsmarted you and the disgusting Huayus YET AGAIN.
I will not let this travesty of justice continue!
Do not bother replying. There can be no salvation for your damned soul.
Alea iacta est!
Sincerely,
Kristian Bland
Chief Executive Officer of Coqdiddles Enterprises International
Lord Protector of the 9 Coqs and Keeper of the 72 Diddles
*******
FROM: Jim Gong
TO: Kristian Bland
Please stop.
Best Regards,
Jim
General Manager
Shanghai Office (Head Office)
3xxx, Jiulong Building, No. xxx Nandan Road,
Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China
Tel: +86 216xxx xxxx
Mobile: +86 1870xxx xxxx
Fax: +86 216xxx xxxx
Web: www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.org
***************************************************
FROM: Quinton Hxxxxx
TO: Kashawn Bland
Greetings prospective student,
I would like to thank you for meeting with Southern University and A&M College this past school year. It was a true pleasure to speak with you on the many opportunities one would receive by furthering their education here at Southern University.
The great Southern University and A&M College is located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana overlooking the Mississippi River and has produced leaders in fields ranging from nursing, engineering, agriculture, business, etc. The mission of Southern University is to provide opportunities for a diverse student population to achieve a high-quality, global educational academic experience. It is important for YOU to continue striving for high grade point averages and test scores.
Seniors should go on-line to subr.edu and APPLY! The steps to the application process are quite simple.
1. Apply–online
2. Application fee ($20 money order)
3. Immunization shot record for measles, mumps and rubella
4. Immunization shot record for meningitis
5. Official ACT/SAT scores(s)
6. Transcript. A six semester transcript with a senior class schedule or a seven transcript that include your senior class schedule.
After the application has been completed on-line the supporting documents can be mailed or faxed to the admissions office. We invite you to our web-site, subr.edu to explore areas of academic affairs, student affairs and athletics.
If you have any questions please contact me, xxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxx.xxx or xxx-xxx-xxxx.
Again, I wanted to extend thanks for visiting with Southern University this past school year. We look forward to seeing you soon.
Quinton Hxxxx
Admissions Recruiter
Southern University and A&M College
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70813
(P) xxx-xxx-xxx
(F) xxx-xxx-xxx
*******
FROM: Kristian Bland
TO: Quinton Hxxxx
Greetings prospective admissions recruiter,
I would like to thank you for thanking me for meeting with Southern University and A&M College this past school year. It has been a wild ride, but senior year is finally over and graduation is here! I am very excite.
I would very much like to attend the great Southern University and A&M College located in beautiful Baton Rouge. I am particularly interested in a college career that would lead me to becoming a leader in such fields as etc. I’m not sure what that is, but it looks like an acronym. And if I’ve learned anything in my 18 years on this planet, it’s that initials in your job title means a huge salary and probably perks like yachts or something. I want that one!
With that in mind, I’m eager to get started on achieving my high-quality, global educational academic experience. I will go to your web-site and apply-online ASAP, as I can’t wait to strive for high grade point averages, especially in classes such as Sporadic Hyphenation 101.
Unfortunately, it looks like web-site administration isn’t a course offered at Southern University and A&M College, as the link to subr.edu provided in your email is broken because someone doesn’t understand how URL prefixes and redirects work. That’s ok though, because I’m kind of a hacker and figured out that I needed to add the www to it myself to make it work.
Quick question: Can that get me some computer course credits or something? That’d be sweet.
Anyway, I’m all set to apply-online at the web-site, but I was wondering about that $20 fee. Your email says it has to be a money order, but the problem is that Steve down at the Quick Stop doesn’t do money orders anymore since his old girlfriend Janice started coming in to use them to send money to her new boyfriend to use at the prison store after he was picked up on those assault charges on that bus with those cheerleaders I’m sure you read about.
Quite the scandal!
Anyway, can I just send you the $20 directly in cash? I have a $20 bill my grandma gave me for graduation. It’s kinda wadded up and I think somebody wrote some kinda porn note on it or something, but it should still be good. Where can I send that to?
I don’t have any immunization shot records though, because vaccines are how the autism gets inside you. My mom read a post about it on Pinterest or Facebook or something, so now we only do homeopathic remedies. But I’ve taken dilutions of every disease you listed, so my immune system should be immune to them now.
My official ACT/SAT scores aren’t that great, but the unofficial scores I got from this guy that was standing around outside the testing center are MUCH better. Can I just send you those instead? They look pretty official.
My transcript won’t be a problem at all. So don’t even worry about that.
I think that should just about cover it! Let me know what else I need to do, and where I should send that crumpled up $20 to. (I’ll use my mom’s iron on it first though before I mail it, so it should be nice and flat. Don’t sweat it.)
Oh, and don’t pay any attention to the fact that this reply will look like it’s coming from somebody named Kristian Bland. That’s probably just some doofus who doesn’t know that my email address isn’t his email address, so he just keeps going around, putting it on everything like some kind of idiot.
Thanks! And Geaux the Tigers!
Kristian Bland
Prospective Student
Probably at Southern University and A&M College but also maybe Harvard
Baton Rouge, Louisiana or Cambridge, Massachusetts
90210
Trey’s school has been doing a thing where parents come up and read short stories to the class. The student picks the story. The parent reads the story. Sounds pretty simple, right? Right. Unless your child is Trey and the parent is Me.
Instead of picking a story, my child decided that we should write a story. After many days of brainstorming, he finally comes up with, “A story about a grumpy, messy Troll that always eats too much food, and a kid that’s a Scientist who brings the Troll and a beautiful Fairy together so she can take care of him and they can be a family.”
So basically, it is The Story Of Us and, while I’m deeply impressed that’s he’s already speaking in metaphor at 7 years old, I’m also slightly hurt that some part of him sees me as a grumpy, messy troll with an eating disorder. But oh well, you can’t have everything.
He came up with the story idea, then plotted most of the individual elements. At the last minute, we added a change to the end (mostly for the sake of nuking a few “chapters” and keeping the length down, since I’ve got to read this out loud to his class within a 15-20 minute window), and he did the illustrations.
And that, as they say, is that. We just finished it up just now, so it’s probably riddled with spelling, grammar and typographical errors, so shut up.
Googalaga was a troll. He wasn’t a very good troll, because as a rule, to be a good troll meant you had to be bad. But Googalaga didn’t care about doing mean things like hiding under bridges and scaring humans, and he had no taste for eating the sheep that good trolls liked to steal from the nice shepherds in the village. Instead, he preferred to keep to himself in his hut, and was quite content to pass his days doing nothing more than eating ice cream, which was the only thing he ever really loved.
And he did love ice cream. Every flavor. He loved chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream, and even ice cream that had gone melty and dribbled onto the ground. He was a troll, after all, so he didn’t mind mixing a little dirt with his ice cream. In fact, one of his favorite flavor combinations was one scoop of vanilla, one scoop of strawberry, three scoops of chocolate and five tablespoons of dirt and rocks and sand. (Sometimes rabbit poop, if he was really lucky. But, like most sensible creatures, rabbits tended to stay away from trolls, fearing that they were very likely to be eaten if they got too close. And, with most trolls, this would be true – but not with Googalaga. He loved his forest friends, even if they kept their distance.)
There was, however, a terrible problem with a troll loving ice cream, and Googalaga was all too familiar with it. In fact, it was a problem that he was determined to solve, one day. Some day. Maybe. If he ever figured out how to read and managed to get a little smarter. (Trolls, by nature, aren’t very bright, which doesn’t usually matter when coupled with a bad temper because being angry and stupid never hurt a troll. But being nice and not too bright? That could be a problem.)
Not being a very bright troll himself, Googalaga never learned that trolls should not eat ice cream. They can’t digest it properly, since their natural diet consists mostly of rocks and sheep, and of anything nasty and squishy and squirmy that they can dig out of the ground with their big, fat fingers. But ice cream? Ice cream was tricky. The digestive tract of a troll was used to handling all things nasty, so any old troll could eat just about any old icky thing and continue on with its day like nothing ever happened. But when a troll ate something as sweet and as wonderful as ice cream…well, something different happened…
Googalaga was sitting at the table of his dirty hut, having just finished a very large meal with a double serving of chalk rock with obsidian sprinkles, along with a side of nightcrawler worms and scorpion soup. He still had desert to eat, and he was trying to decide which flavor of ice cream he’d eat tonight, since he always ate ice cream after every meal.
“Better go check the freezer,” he said as he pushed himself up from the table and knocking over the pile of dirty dishes sitting beside him that he meant to wash a few weeks ago, but just never got around to it. He shoved some old trash out of the way and kicked aside the empty ice cream buckets that littered the floor. Slowly, he carved a path from his chair to his freezer, where he kept his ice cream.
“Ah,” he said to himself, opening the lid a bit to peek inside. “What shall I have tonight?”
He dug around the freezer, pushing aside the frozen mudbug snack cakes and iced barnacle pops until he found the ice cream. He was running low.
“Looks like it’ll be chocolate stinkbug surprise,” he said, hauling the giant bucket out of the freezer. “And I’m down to my last ten scoops!”
Googalaga carried the bucket back to the table, where he sat down and pulled a large, dirty spoon from his back pocket. “Mmmmm,” he said as jabbed the spoon into the ice cream. “Extra stinkbugs!”
It didn’t take him long to finish the bucket, since there were only ten scoops left. But ten scoops was enough. He pushed himself back from the table, and gently patted his enormous stomach with his big, fat hand.
“That was delicious!” he exclaimed. He sat back in his chair, let out a long, satisfied sigh and smiled.
And then, he exploded.
*****
From down the hill and around the bend, up the stream and through the woods, a little boy in a long white coat heard a loud *POP* and immediately took cover under his chair. After a few minutes had passed and he realized he hadn’t been blown up into tiny bits, he stood back up and looked around.
“Hrmmmm,” he pondered. “Everything looks ok, I guess. Nothing exploded, anyway.”
He dusted himself off and pushed his chair underneath a long, black table. Different flasks and vials with long, swirly bits of glass were set along the table. Some were bubbling, others were smoking, and a few were making very peculiar gurgling noises.
“Well, that was a little scary, wasn’t it, Atlas?” asked the boy, to no one in particular.
“It sure was, Atlas,” he replied, again to no one in particular.
“Oh well, no harm done, I think. Now, where’d we put that TNT?”
Atlas was a very interesting little boy, no older than seven or eight, with short brown hair that shot out in all directions from the sides of his head, and big, blue eyes that darted back and forth just fast enough that they only made him look a little bit crazy.
He lived alone, here, in a little cottage that had once belonged to his parents. They had gone away to hunt for food in the forest one day, and had never come back. That was three years ago. He was used to being alone now. And he talked to himself a lot.
“Oh, never mind about the TNT, Atlas,” he said to himself. “Let’s finish the experiment tomorrow. I don’t think anything will explode tonight, anyway.”
“OK,” he said back to himself again. “See you in the morning, then!”
“Goodnight, Atlas.”
“Sleep tight, Atlas.”
He took off his long, white coat and tossed it over a hook by the stairs, which he then climbed up to make his way into a tiny crawl space that had no exit. He reached out his right hand and pushed hard against the solid stone wall, which began to grind and twist and spin open into a tiny room in his little cottage.
His father had been a scientist, and he’d built himself a secret laboratory underground in a little cave Atlas had discovered when he was only three years old. Atlas used it himself now that he was old enough and on his own. He spent almost every waking moment down in the lab, doing experiments and coming up with inventions to keep his mind busy so he didn’t ever spend too long thinking about how much he missed his family. It helped that he talked to himself the whole time, too. He enjoyed his company.
Stepping out of the crawl space and into his tiny room, he spun the wall back around and heard it click back into place. On this side of the wall was a bookcase, and the large red book that opened the secret passage slid back into its place on the shelf. If you didn’t know any better, it looked like an ordinary book on an ordinary shelf in an ordinary cottage.
“Time for bed,” he told himself, as he shuffled over to his little mattress on the floor. He’d outgrown his baby bed a long time ago, but sleeping in his parents’ bed didn’t feel right. So, one night, he took the mattress out of the bed he could no longer fit in, and set it on the floor. His feet dangled off the end of it, but that was ok by him. He didn’t sleep very much, anyway.
He yawned and stretched and closed his eyes, and had just begun to drift off to sleep when there was a very loud knock on his door. He sat straight up in bed, eyes wide and hair shooting off in all directions.
“Er, is you home, little scientist?” asked a voice on the other side of the door.
Atlas sat very still and very quiet on his tiny mattress on the floor.
There was another knock. “Aw, come on. I’s knows yer in der. I can smells your bits of bubbly things and such likes.”
Atlas pulled his tiny blanket up to his chest. “Wh-wha,” he stammered. “Wha-what do you want?”
“I’s needs your help,” said the voice.
“With what?” asked Atlas.
“Er, it’s personal. Let me in.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know you, and I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.”
“Eh, I’m no stranger, boy. I’s knewed yer Papa.”
Atlas’ eyes grew a little wider. “What?” he asked.
“Yeah, and yer’s Mama, too. We’s was good friends, all things considered.”
“What do you mean, ‘all things considered’?”
“Er, it’s complicated. Open the door and you’ll see.”
Atlas thought about it for a minute, then remembered one of his inventions and smiled. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “Could you just look up for a second, please?”
“What?” said the voice. “Why?”
Atlas stood up and began rummaging around a pile of papers by the door. “Just do it, please,” he said.
“Fine,” said the voice. “I’s looking up. Can you open the door now?”
“Just a moment,” said Atlas. He smiled as his fingers found the little metal contraption buried in the paper pile. “Got it!” he shouted.
“Gots what?” asked the voice.
“Nothing,” replied Atlas. “Now, hold still.” Atlas clicked something on the side of the little metal contraption and from under the door came a bright flash of light.
“OW! ME EYES!” shouted the voice.
“Oh,” said Atlas, “sorry about that.” A few seconds later, a little square piece of paper shot out from a little slot next to the door. On it, was a little picture of what was on the other side of the door. “Oh my,” he gasped. “You’re a troll!”
“What?” asked the voice. “How’d you’d knewed that?”
“Because of my Insta-Draw-O-Matic,” answered Atlas. “See, I have an electric eel in a tank above the door here, and when I push this button on my Insta-Light-Inator, it drops a little pebble against the side of the tank that scares the eel and makes him let out a shock, which then travels over to my Electro-Lumino-Interocitor and causes a bright flash that —“
“Yeah, yeah,” interrupted the troll. “You’s is yer father’s boy, alright. He was always makin’ up crazy contraptions. He made me a freezer once, you know.”
“A what?” asked Atlas.
“A freezer. You know, something what keeps things frozen.”
“I’ve never heard of a freezer before. It sounds fascinating.”
“Oh, it is,” said the troll. “But can you please let me in now?”
“Ah,” stammered Atlas. “Sorry about that. Promise you won’t eat me?” he asked.
“Of course I won’t eats you. I’s a nice troll. And besides, it’s eating what done made me need to come see yer Papa. If’n he was still around, that is. But yer’s the next best thing, I figure.”
Atlas thought about it for a minute, then cautiously opened the door. A giant, hairy beast of a troll grinned at him from the other side.
“Hull-oh,” it said, extending a massive arm out toward Atlas. “Name’s Googalaga. Nice to meet you!”
And with that, Atlas fainted.
When he came to, he and Googalaga had a nice long talk about his parents and the special friendship they shared with Googalaga. The troll had agreed to protect the cottage, while Atlas’ parents had agreed to not call the Town Watch on Googalaga. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and over the years, they became the best of friends. When Atlas’ parents went missing, Googalaga decided to stay and keep an eye on the boy, to make sure no harm ever came to him.
“So you see, that’s why’s I’s needs yer help, young master,” said Googalaga. “I’s has an eating disorder.”
“More like an exploding disorder,” Atlas retorted.
“Yeah. That, too,” said the troll. “But at least I always come back together again, what with being a troll and all. So does you thinks you’s can help me?”
Atlas sat back and thought about the problem. “Maybe,” he said. “Not with the exploding, really, but with the eating.”
“What you’s mean?”
“I mean, I can’t keep you from exploding after you eat ice cream, but I can keep you from wanting to eat ice cream.”
“But I’s loves ice cream!”
“Yes,” said Atlas. “But do you love exploding?”
“Well,” shrugged Googalaga, “not really.”
“It’s settled, then. Just wait here. Shouldn’t take but a minute.”
Atlas walked over to the perfectly ordinary bookcase, found the perfectly ordinary red book, and gave it a gentle tug. The wall spun around, and Atlas was back in his lab. Googalaga waited.
And waited.
And he waited some more.
*BANG*
*CLANK*
*WHOOSH*
*TINGLE* *TINKLE* *THWINK*
Atlas emerged from the other side of the bookcase, and closed the wall behind him. “Here you go,” he said. “This oughta do the trick!”
Googalaga opened his big, fat hand, and Atlas set a small, green pill into his palm. “What dis do?” he asked.
Atlas smiled. “I call it Ice-Cream-Craving-B-Gone-Icillin. All you need to do is swallow it, and you won’t want any more ice cream ever again.”
“Oh. Seems sad,” said the troll.
“Small price to pay for not exploding, my friend!”
Googalga smiled and thanked Atlas for his work, then tucked the small, green pill into his pocket, left the tiny cottage and headed back through the woods and down the stream, around the bend and up the hill.
And that’s when he started getting hungry…
*****
Googalaga was almost home, when his stomach began rumbling. He was hungry, and he wanted more ice cream. He thought about taking the Ice-Cream-Craving-B-Gone-Icillin, but he wasn’t ready to commit to a life without ice cream just yet. He’d just have to think of something else.
He was stomping through the forest, growing hungrier and grumpier the more he thought about how much food he wasn’t eating, when he heard a gentle singing on the breeze. It was faint, at first. Tiny and probably inaudible to humans, but he could hear it with his big troll ears. And it was beautiful.
He followed the sound as it grew louder and more beautiful the closer he got to it, until, eventually, it could get no louder or more beautiful. But all he found was a tree. It was a very large tree, sure, and pretty enough as far as trees go, but at the end of the day, it was still just a tree. And trees don’t sing.
Except this one was. It was singling loudly and beautifully, and all Googalaga wanted to do was listen to its song. But his stomach was grumbling louder and louder, and he knew it would eventually grumble and grow so loudly that he wouldn’t be able to hear the singing anymore. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the small, green pill that Atlas had given him, and stared at it.
“Well,” he said. “I guess I’s gotsta do it. Might as well get it overs with.”
Just as he was about to toss the pill into his mouth and swallow it, the singing stopped. A moment later, he heard the same beautiful voice again, but this time it was talking to him instead of singing at him.
“What are you doing, silly troll?” asked the voice.
“Wha? Who dat dere?”
“Look up,” said the voice.
Googalaga looked up. “Oooooh,” he said, quite by accident. He didn’t mean to say it, but out it came, anyway. “Ooooooh,” he said again.
Descending slowly from high above the forest floor was a brilliant golden light. As it grew closer to Googalaga, it started to take shape. First, there were wings. Then legs. Arms. A body and a head. And long, glowing golden hair. It was a fairy.
But not just any fairy. This was the most beautiful fairy Googalaga had ever seen, and he had seen a few in his time…usually just as they were flying away in terror of a troll having seen them, but still. He’d seen other fairies, and this one had them all beat. Her name was Sharlene, and she was the most beautiful creature Googalaga had ever seen.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Sharlene.”
“I’m Googalaga,” said Googalaga. “And you are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.
Sharlene blushed. “Oh, that’s very sweet of you to say. You’re very handsome yourself.”
Now Googalaga blushed, or at least what passed for blushing with trolls. Not many people went around complimenting them, so it was hard to tell. His stomach began to rumble again. “Um,” he stammered. “Excuse me a minute.”
Googalaga turned around and tossed the Ice-Cream-Craving-B-Gone-Icillin into his mouth and gulped it down. He didn’t want his stomach making embarrassing noises in front of a lady.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Now where were we?”
Sharlene fluttered over beside him. “We were right here, silly. Just where we are now.”
“Ah, yeah. I knowed that. I means, what was we talking about?”
“Oh, nothing in particular,” said Sharlene. “Just getting acquainted, I suppose.”
At that moment, a feeling rushed over Googalaga that he had never felt before, except in the presence of ice cream. What was in that pill, he wondered. I think I’m in love.
(And he was, it turned out, very much in love. Because inventing new pills and potions for fairytale creatures is not an exact science, Atlas had been forced to guess at the ingredients for his Ice-Cream-Craving-B-Gone-Icillin. And he hadn’t got it quite right. Had he known better, he would had realized his mistake after learning that his recipe actually called for two carrots, rather than one two carat diamond. But he hadn’t discovered homonyms yet, because he was only a kid and mistakes happen. And this mistake had created a Love Pill, because sometimes that’s what happens in stories.)
Googalaga didn’t know why he felt this way, but he knew that he wanted to spend more time with Sharlene. As much time as possible, really. All the times, if he could. But he should probably start with just a little time. Like, with a date. Start small, he told himself. See where it goes.
He looked at Sharlene and smiled. “Um,” he started, nervous and shaking. “Would you’s…uh…um…woulds yer…ah, well…um…”
Sharlene smiled back at him and finished his thought. “Like to go out on a date with you?”
Googalaga was stunned into silence. He just looked at her and nodded his big, giant head.
“Ok, then,” she said. “Sounds like fun.”
Googalaga just smiled and shook his head some more.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
More head shaking.
“Would you like to go to the tavern in the village?”
Googalaga stopped shaking his head. “NO!” he shouted. “Humans hate trolls. They’s would kills me!”
Sharlene flashed a sly smile, narrowed her eyes and said, “Oh, I don’t know about that…”
There was a brilliant flash of light, and for the second time in the same night, Googalaga was blinded. “OW! ME EYES!” he shouted.
“Oh,” said Sharlene. “Sorry about that. Should clear up in a second, though. Look down.”
“Huh?” asked Googalaga.
“At your hands, silly. Look down at your hands.”
Googalaga looked at his hands. They weren’t big. They weren’t fat. They weren’t hairy. They were just…hands. Human hands. Normal, human-sized hands. “Whaaaaaaaaaa?” was all he could manage to say.
“It’s just a little magic, so you’ll look like a human. It only works for a little while, though. So we best be off.”
With that, Sharlene smiled her little sly grin once more, and there was another, smaller flash of light, and she stopped glowing. And floating. Her wings were gone, and she looked like a perfectly ordinary, perfectly beautiful human lady.
And Googalaga was still in love.
*****
Dinner did not go well.
The humans were nice enough, as humans go, and none of them in the tavern realized they were dining alongside a fairy and a troll, but Googalaga still had to make conversation. And he wasn’t very good with words.
“Um, so, uh…” he stammered. “What’s yer favorite food?”
“Oh,” said Sharlene, “I’ve always been partial to ice cream, myself.”
Googalaga gulped.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Ice cream. Good. Yeah. Ice cream.”
“You’re a very silly troll, you know that?”
Googalaga smiled. “If you’s says so. I’s not too used to being around peoples.”
“I bet you’re smarter than you let on.”
“Ya think?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Sharlene. “Why, I bet you’ve got a heart of gold, too.”
“No,” he said. “Just normal troll heart. Mades of mud rocks, I thinks.”
Sharlene smiled again. “Hrmmmm, I’m not so sure about that.”
The food came, and it was good. At least by human standards, anyway. By troll standards, it was tiny and lacked the good crunch of hard rocks or the delicate texture of squishy grub worms. As for what fairies ate was anybody’s guess. For all Googalaga knew, Sharlene ate rainbows and dewdrops. But if she didn’t like the food, she didn’t complain. She ate and he ate, and she talked and he talked, and eventually, the meal was over. Except for dessert.
“Ice cream!” proclaimed Sharlene, when the waiter took her order. “I’ll have a big bowl of vanilla ice cream, and my friend here will have a big bowl of…” she trailed off and looked at Googalaga. “What’s your favorite flavor?”
“Um,” he sighed as his eyes darted around the room, “Vanilla. Good. Yeah.”
“Two bowls of vanilla then, please.” The waiter smiled, wrote down the order and walked away into the kitchen.
“Er, there’s somethin’ yer should knows abouts me and ice cream,” said Googalaga.
“What, that you love it more than anything else?”
“How’d you know?”
“Oh, I just have a knack for people, I guess.”
“Yeah, but really. You’s needs to knows that -“
The waiter was back, carrying two large bowls of vanilla ice cream on his tray. He set one down in front of Sharlene, and the other in front of Googalaga.
“That was fast,” said Googalaga.
“We aim for speed here at the Rusty Flagon, sir,” replied the waiter.
“I’ll say.”
Sharlene picked up her spoon and dipped it delicately into her ice cream. She lifted it to her mouth, closed her eyes, and said, “Mmmmmmmm.”
Googalaga couldn’t resist it any more. He didn’t know why the Ice-Cream-Craving-B-Gone-Icillin wasn’t working, but he didn’t care anymore. All he wanted was a little ice cream. So he grabbed his spoon, then threw it on the floor and grabbed his bowl with both hands. He lifted it to his mouth, tilted his head back, and gobbled up every scoop of the delicious ice cream in one giant gulp.
Sharlene giggled. “See? I told you that you were silly!”
Googalaga flashed a sheepish grin. “Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be silly, silly!”
But then, from deep within Googalaga’s belly, came a rumbling. Then, from his mouth, a tiny burp. Then a not so tiny burp. Then more rumbling. Then grumbling. Then growling.
“Uh-oh,” he said, and looked up at Sharlene. “I’s sorry, miss.”
And then, he exploded.
*****
The owner of the Rusty Flagon was none too pleased with having to clean exploded troll bits out of his tavern for the next several hours, but at least he thought they were human bits. So that probably helped a little. Or not.
Sharlene stayed the whole time, and helped with the clean up. She was careful to quietly slip the different exploded bits of Googalaga into her purse without anyone noticing, which was a very nice thing for her to do, considering he’d need all of his bits to come back together again later. That was the thing about trolls: they’re very hard to kill. Apart from getting caught out in the sunlight (which turns them to stone), there’s not much punishment they can’t take. To a troll, even exploding isn’t anything more than a messy inconvenience.
After the tavern had been cleaned up, Sharlene thanked the owner and the waiter, apologized for the mess, and left out the back door. She thought it best to slip out of the village as quickly as possible, in case the Town Watch started getting suspicious about exploding people and whatnot. It was probably a smart move.
Once she was safely away from the village, Sharlene opened up her purse and dumped all the messy, sticky Googalaga bits onto the ground. She turned around to let him have his privacy, and waited. A few minutes and several unpleasant sounds later, Googalaga was back.
“Um,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s ok,” said Sharlene. “I really didn’t mind.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Yes. I actually thought it was kind of funny.”
Googalaga slumped his shoulders. “Oh,” he said.
“Not the exploding part, of course,” said Sharlene. “I mean, just before, when you were trying to tell me about your problem.”
“Oh?” he said again, reminding himself of how good with words he wasn’t.
“Well, maybe not funny. But cute, I mean. You were cute.”
“Really?” asked Googalaga. “Yous think so?”
“Of course I do, silly. But, you do have a problem. And it needs taking care of right away.”
“I know,” he said.
“After all, I can’t have my boyfriend just exploding all over town every time we go out.”
Googalaga just stood there, stunned into silence. “B-b-buh…boyfriend?”
Sharlene bit her bottom lip and smiled. “Maybe. But first, your problem. Come with me. I know someone who might be able to help you.”
They walked through the forest for a while, not saying anything. Googalaga didn’t talk because he was scared of what stupid bit of stammering nonsense might come out of his mouth next, and Sharlene didn’t talk because Googalaga didn’t know why. Girls are just mysterious that way.
After a long time walking down hills and around bends, up streams and through the woods, they came to a little clearing where there stood a very small, very ordinary cottage…
*****
Despite it being very late when Sharlene and Googalaga came knocking on his door, Atlas wasn’t asleep. He didn’t sleep much to begin with, but after discovering that his parents had once made friends with a troll who was now his friend, there was no way he would be sleeping tonight. He recognized Googalaga’s deep, gravelly voice at once, and threw open the door the instant he heard it.
“Googalaga!” he shouted. “How’d that Ice-Cream-Craving-B-Gone-Icillin work for you? No more nasty exploding?”
Googalaga sighed. “A little bit.”
“What? But that’s not possible! I’m quite sure I followed the recipe exactly.”
“It’s ok, though,” said Googalaga. “I made a new friend.”
Atlas looked past Googalaga for the first time, and saw Sharlene. She was the most beautiful lady he had ever seen.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Sharlene.”
“Hi,” replied Atlas. “I’m Atlas. And you are the most beautiful lady I have ever seen.”
Sharlene blushed. “Aww, you’re sweet. Now, about Googie’s little problem.”
Atlas and Googalaga looked at each other, then both said, “Googie?” at the same time.
“I think it’s cute,” said Sharlene.
Googalaga shrugged. “Me too,” he said.
Atlas blinked a few times and shook his head. “Oh…kay….then. So how can I help you?”
“Actually,” said Sharlene, “I think we can help each other.” Then, she looked Atlas right in the eye, and in the sweetest voice he’d ever heard, she said, “But maybe you should sit down first.” She glanced over at Googalaga. “You too, Googie.”
“Yes, ma’m,” they both replied, in unison.
Sharlene stood before them, stretched out one arm to each of them and said, “Now, take my hand. This could get a little rough.”
No one outside of the little cottage knows exactly what happened next that night, or if anything actually happened at all. For all anyone else knew, a happy family had just always lived in the small cottage in the little clearing deep in the woods.
But inside the cottage, this happened:
“Now take my hand,” said Sharlene. “This could get a little rough.”
Light began to pour out of Sharlene’s body. It spilled down her arms and over her hands, slowly flowing over Atlas and Googalaga, before filling the whole room. It burst through the tiny windows of the cottage, exploded out of the door and shot up into the heavens from the chimney. Dishes rattled in the sink, books shook on their shelves. The floorboards began to vibrate and hum and shake. Things fell off of shelves and off walls, and went crashing to the ground. And then, much more suddenly than it had started, everything stopped.
The light receded and the room went dark, except for the light from a few candles and the fireplace. The dishes stopped rattling in the sink, the books stayed put on their shelves, and the floor stopped moving, too. Everything was still. Even the three people in the middle of the room.
“Woah,” said Atlas.
“Woah,” said Googie.
“I know,” said Sharlene.
“That was your bestest spell yet, Mama! Papa was a fat old troll!”
“I’m not fat,” interrupted Googie.
“And you were a fairy, and I had a secret lab and everything! Let’s do it again!” shouted Atlas.
“Not tonight, young man. You need your rest. And just look what you’ve done to your bed!”
Atlas giggled, “But you made me eight years old and I didn’t fit in it anymore! I was too big!”
Googie laughed. “Yeah, well you fit in it now, mister. And it’s off to bed with you.”
Atlas smiled and stood up, then walked over to Sharlene. “Goonight, Mama,” he said, as best he could.
Googie held out his arms, and Atlas gave him a hug. “Goonight, Papa,” he said, again struggling with the words.
“Goodnight, baby,” said Mama and Papa. “Now you go straight to sleep. We have a big day tomorrow.”
“I know!” shouted Atlas, who was now five years old and happy again. He blew kisses to his Mama and his Papa, and crawled into bed.
Googie looked at Sharlene, and smiled. “That,” he said, “was one of the best games we’ve ever played.”
Sharlene grinned back at Googie. “Do you think so? I didn’t like that whole bit where Atlas was all alone. Maybe next time, I won’t make us disappear in the woods.”
“And maybe not make me fat.”
“Ok, dear.”
“Or a troll.”
“Yes, dear. I just hope Atlas enjoyed it.”
“I’m sure he did,” said Googie. And if he didn’t, then there’s always tomorrow.”
“Or the day after that,” said Sharlene.
“Or the day after that,” said Googie.
“Or the day after that…”
The villagers from down the hill and around the bend, up the stream and through the woods couldn’t remember a time when a family hadn’t lived in that small cottage in the little clearing deep in the forest. And they certainly didn’t remember anything having to do with magical fairies and exploding trolls or scientist children. But they did remember that they couldn’t remember, which is a very odd feeling to have. Something was different about that house, and that family, but no one could ever figure out exactly what it was. There was just always a mother, always a father, and always a little boy. And they had always just been there. Forever.
THE END
And just in case that wasn’t enough for you, here’s me, reading the story to his class at school because, tragically, Neil Gaiman wasn’t available. LOOK UPON MY MUMBLING NARRATION, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!
Facebook, always the great facilitator of respectful dialog between dissenting parties (in much the same way that Alexander dealt with the Gordian Knot, in that it usually devolves into trying to verbally slice each other into tiny pieces with word swords), has recently been abuzz with news about a transgender substitute teacher in my area being suspended from Lumberton ISD because of reasons involving her having a pee-pee where her hoo-hoo should be. (This is how people talk in the South. Except hoo-hoo is the polite way of saying cooter, which is a more common, if more vulgar, way of describing the lady garden of a woman’s love tunnel. Or something. The South is a silly place. Just roll with it.)
As these things tend to go, there has been a lot of moral outrage about this from people who cling to things like morals. From other people, who deal with life through reason and logic, it was no big deal. Until people started talking about it on Facebook, of course, at which point everything becomes a divisive issue where People Take A Stand.
For what it’s worth, I have no use for morality, and consider it nothing more than a malignant tumor upon the freedom of man. Morality, to my way of thinking, is tricky because it is typically handed down by supernatural authority, and what laws you follow for whichever deity you obey depends mostly upon where and when you were born. The problem with basing law on morality is that it’s such a mercurial thing, shifting wildly from one culture to the next, depending on the teachings of their respective religious convictions. Come squishing out of a vagina in the middle of Afghanistan, and you’re probably going to be a Muslim. Get cut out of an American uterus in the middle of a Nebraskan hospital during a Pitocin-induced C-Section, and you’re probably going to be a Christian. Either way, I don’t want the crazy chocolate of your religious morality mixing with my delicious ethical peanut butter, no matter how tasty it might sound. Because it always goes badly.
Laura Jane Klug, Transgender Teacher
It’s why we have separation of Church and State in America. Secular laws based off of pragmatic reality are what guarantee the freedoms we all enjoy: freedom to worship whatever God we choose, in whatever way we want, freedom to not worship, freedom to piss people off and freedom to win people over. Freedom is messy and dangerous and offensive. But it’s important.
Being tolerant of people you disagree with is extremely important in a free society, as long as they’re not hurting anyone, because the very nature of freedom means people will disagree with you, they will say and do things you find objectionable, and they might even be in positions of authority to enact legislation that you find morally repugnant. But without tolerating their right to exist and to be as vocal or authoritative as people with whom you agree, then you cease to live in a free society and are heading in a direction where lay burqas and all the religious intolerance you want. It might not be your particular brand of religious intolerance, but it’s the other side of the coin. And I’ll have no part of it.
Ethics, on the other hand, are derived from the practical application of pragmatic reality, and so tend to be more tolerant and accepting of differences, because they neither value nor condemn one’s own personal morality. They’re secular because secularism in law is what allows the concept of freedom to exist, and freedom is something America places quite a lot of value on. Or at least it pretends to. Especially around the 4th of July. Fireworks are involved and everything. It’s a whole deal.
Anyway, with all this in mind, I tend to shun morality and form my basis for judgment on how to live from simple ethics: Live free, and don’t be a dick. (Ok, so I borrowed that last bit from the Church Of Wheaton. It’s non-denominational and the sacrificial altar is covered with 20-sided dice though, so everything’s cool. Don’t worry about it.) This approach can also be defined as Ethical Hedonism, which is probably the best basis for a free society, in that it encourages individuals to pursue their own happiness, but only while observing certain standards of conduct when their own freedom might encroach upon someone else’s.
Here’s what video game designer, collector, private astronaut and all around groovy dude Richard Garriott had to say on the subject, way back in the Year of the Rabbit, Nineteen Hundred And Ninety Nine (reprinted with permission):
Hedonism:
Life is to be lived to the fullest. Who does not hope that at their own end, they can smile knowing that they have enjoyed the journey. To each, enjoyed will be different. Some will want to have achieved greatness. Others will want to have left this world better than when they arrived. Some will just want to sit back and enjoy what life brings them.If one lived alone on an otherwise lifeless deserted planet, one would feel free to do whatever one wished to pursue one’s own happiness. If you wanted to poison all the waters or chop off your own arm, whatever made you happy should be okay. A life of unbridled Hedonism would be yours. It would be a lonely Hedonistic life, but it would be yours to do with as you and only you choose to make it.
Ethics:
Most people choose to live in the company of other people. We gather together in communities for many reasons. A community of people has many social, survival and economic advantages. If we want these advantages, we must restrict our Hedonism and avoid doing things that would otherwise make others push us out of their community. We must not interfere with others’ basic rights to pursue their own Hedonism.Thus while living alone, we could have poisoned the worlds waters, living among the masses that we do, we must refrain from this type of activity. I will call these restraints Ethics. I will define Ethics to be logically derived restrictions on Hedonism. I will avoid the term Morals as it is often used to describe rules of conduct derived in other ways, for example because a deity has said so.
Richard’s the one wearing the crown. Duh.
The short version (of that already short version of another, longer piece that Richard wrote independent of its inclusion in Ultima IX) is that ethical hedonism is what thinking people should aspire to. It’s a worldview based on logic and reason, rather than outmoded religious dogma handed down for thousands of years until we just start ignoring most of it, anyway. (Unless a lot of unreported stonings are still going on in America. Outside of Oklahoma, I mean. That place is whack.)
So that’s where I stand, which naturally puts me on the side of the teacher in this particular social media Crusade. As you can imagine, this also puts me in the minority of my local friends, who all tend to be infected with Southern Southernness, which is a valid medical condition recognized mostly by Northern doctors.
Where my friends and I will never agree is on there being some universal concept of right and wrong, of the inherent value of things, of objective truth in all things. I disagree with the ever popular C. S. Lewis in this regard, as one’s perception of reality is entirely subjective. Charles Addams wrote, “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” – He was right.
Let’s jump to the apocalypse for a minute, since it’s always an exciting topic for people on both sides of the religion fence. There’s one family, and they’re out of food. Then there’s the “evil” family that has been pillaging the neighborhood and is hoarding supplies. Family A’s kid will die if he doesn’t eat soon, but Family B’s not giving up their Vienna Sausages any time soon. So where’s the objective value now? Who is right, and who is wrong? The family that has scraped together enough food to see them through the winter, or the family that will starve if they don’t raid the other family’s camp and steal their Spam?
Or, less dramatically, where’s the objective truth in beauty? Sure, a culture as a whole can determine an objective standard of beauty, but the fact that those standards vary widely from culture to culture and through time says that the concept of beauty is entirely subjective, and any objective determinations we make depend entirely on having grown up in our specific environments.
Pink used to be a boy’s color, now it’s a girl’s. Pants used to be for men, now women can wear them, too. Voluptuous bodies used to be beautiful, now they have a weight problem. Tattoos are taboo, except in cultures where they’re essential to one’s identity. Alcohol is the devil’s drink, except that Jesus drank wine. Eating shellfish used to be how the devil got inside you, now we have Red Lobster. Things change. There is no objective truth in the universe outside of what you impose on upon it. End of story.
Hardline religious folks like to say that Humanism leads to “survival of the fittest”, and often point to eugenics and Nazi Germany because of course they do. They cite the relativism of morality as the chief reason that the world is crappy, but Humanists don’t adopt relativism in a laissez-faire attitude toward what’s right and wrong. Rather, they simply acknowledge the relativism inherent in morality itself, and choose to eschew it. Humanists believe mankind itself is the best Lawgiver, and so they have no need of stone tablets and Charlton Heston. They don’t use circular logic to say that something is right or wrong simply because, “The Bible says so, and what it says in the Bible is true because it’s in the Bible.” Religious people feel that humanity is incapable of being good and decent and kind, without the imposition of morality by a higher power.
Which, of course, is just bunk. I tried to think of a nicer way to phrase that, but that’s the best I could come up with. It’s just nonsense. In reality, Humanists are often kinder, more decent and basically gooder (that’s a word; don’t bother looking it up) than a lot of their more religious counterparts. Humanists don’t believe in a grand reward or terrible punishment in an afterlife, or if they do believe in it, they often just don’t care. They believe that all that matters is what we do here and now, not what comes afterwards.
There’s a great quote from Angel (a television series from secular humanist Joss Whedon) that I like to trot out from time to time whenever this subject comes up, so I’ll end this little tarradiddle with it (because it shows that secular humanists do good for the purpose of making the world a better place in the here and now, not out of fear of divine retribution if they don’t, or out of hope for life everlasting if they do, but simply because they do good for goodness’ sake): “If there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters…, then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today.”
Word.
I got involved in one of the wackiest, most bizarre Facebook comment wars I’ve ever seen, so I thought I’d share it. You know, for posterity. (Note: One of the crazies blocked me early on, so the very beginning might be a little scatterbrained with half of the conversation missing, but keep going. Your patience will be rewarded.)
As you read this bit of insanity regarding poor people, food stamps and bigotry (Oh, my!), keep in mind that without the continued support of The Lone Star State, all the nation’s crazy would have to be siphoned off by Oklahoma and Florida, and I’m afraid they just couldn’t contain it all. This is why you need Texas…otherwise, you might find your state suddenly filled with bitter, loathsome people like these miserable old coots. They have to go somewhere, you know.
Anyway…enjoy! (No, I didn’t black out any names to protect the not innocent. You can see by the little globe for the privacy settings that this was a public post, and people were commenting on it publicly. If anyone gets butthurt about his or her name being here, then next time think twice before publicly commenting on something in public. Also, if you don’t want people to find out you say horrible things, then try not saying horrible things.)
*In a minor tragedy, it seems I overlooked the fact that one of my last comments, which was pretty much my favorite, was truncated by Facebook’s “See More…” link, which I forgot to click before capturing the thread. When you get to that part, just assume that I said something brilliant.
**Never mind. The poster put the thread back up for a minute, so I could grab the full thing. But you can still assume that what I said was brilliant, if you want.
I’ve been seeing a lot of Valentine’s Day lists like, “Candy Hearts Written By Men” and “Candy Hearts For Married Couples” and…well, basically anything to do with those candy hearts that taste like they were formulated with equal parts chalk and desperation. Does anyone even eat those things? They’re basically the Valentine’s Day version of getting orange marshmallow Circus Peanuts at Halloween.
Anyway, I decided to come up with my own Valentine’s Day cards. And so, I present to you…
(*I suck at titles.)
Better out than in
The dangers of spooning
Sometimes, I man’s just gotta eat
Yes. Yes, it does.
Business time
This is a real thing that really happens, single people.
April 15, 2014
Date night!
Let’s talk about how much we miss the kids
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
Go buy Broken Age. It is your civic duty as a citizen of whatever noble country you’re from, and a fundamental obligation of all human beings living on this planet. Or maybe it’s not. Sometimes I’m prone to hyperbole. But the world definitely needs more of Tim Schafer and Double Fine. Or maybe just the gaming world, which is like the real world, only better.
Hear me out, though. And when I’m done, maybe you’ll feel inclined to go purchase a copy of the game for reasons. So without further verbal ado, I present to you…
Double Fine kicked down Kickstarter’s door with a spiky black death metal boot, and paved the way for many great games that would never have received funding through pre-Kickstarter means. So if you’ve played any game from a Kickstarter campaign post-Broken Age, then you owe Tim and the Double Fine gang. Go now and tithe at the Altar Of Imparting, so that they may eat of the fruit of their labors.
Art. Say what you will about any Double Fine game, but the one thing you have to admit is that all of them have distinctive art styles. Whether it’s the fever dream Saturday morning cartoons on acid style of Psychonauts, or the cute, cell-shaded whimsy of Costume Quest or the zoetrope charm of Stacking, the one thing Double Fine doesn’t do is photorealistic, bump-mapped, high poly real world boring. They do arty things with, like, lines and colors and stuff. We need more color and style in games. Photorealism has its place, but so does a flying two-headed baby monster.
Tim Schafer is made of magic.
Two words: Grim Fandango. We’ll never be able to repay Tim for that one. Not only is it one of the best, most loved adventure games of all time, but playing it actually makes you a better person. Probably. If something feels like it’s missing in your life, like somewhere deep in the dark recesses of your soul there’s a little hidey hole filled with all the nothing you’ve never managed to put into it, then it’s probably because you’ve never played Grim Fandango. Go track down a copy and save yourself. Then, after you’ve become whole again as a person, go buy Broken Age.
Broken Age needs to outsell expectations. I have no doubts that Double Fine will make a decent profit from the game, but it needs to do more. It needs to sell beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, simply because the gaming industry needs to see that there’s not only a market for point and click adventure games, but for all kinds of games that don’t fit the shootporn/sportsball/team arena/MMO/GTA mold. How much more money and how many more man hours were needed to create Grand Theft Auto 5 than it took to make Psychonauts? The answer is, a helluva lot more than it took to make Psychonauts. And Grim Fandango and Day Of The Tentacle and Full Throttle, and even the entire Monkey Island series combined. Probably several times over. But does that make GTA5 the best game of the lot? Nope. GTA might offer a different kind of fun than Psychonauts, but that doesn’t mean it’s more fun than Psychonauts. If anything, both games have the same amount of funs. It’s just that GTA’s funs go in a different direction, usually involving whichever direction requires driving on the sidewalk and mowing down pedestrians.
The classic Lucasfilm/LucasArts lineup. Maybe you’re old enough to remember the LucasArts days. Maybe you’re not. Either way, how cool would it be if Double Fine had enough capital on hand from Broken Age sales to buy the rights to the classic LucasArts franchises that Disney’s newest victim is never going to do anything with? Sure, it’s not likely to ever happen, but imagine what it would be like if Ron Gilbert finally told us the secret of Monkey Island. Maybe Bernard and Dr. Edison would get into one more wacky adventure. Heck, even Pipe Dreams could get a sequel! Well, I mean other than its cameo in Bioshock.Still not convinced? Go read my Broken Age NottaReview to find out more about the game itself, why it’s good, and why you should buy it. I mean, with totally different reasons in addition to the 10 reasons I listed here. That’s like, at least 50% more reasons right there! It’s unreasonable to expect that you could reasonably avoid all these reasons I’m throwing at you. So just stop trying. Close your browser, launch Steam and GO BUY BROKEN AGE.
“You ever wish you were born earlier, when the adventures were real?“
“Like, the 90s?”
“No. Earlier. Like…the early 90s.“
(If you read this earlier and are looking for the second half of this NottaReview, then click here to jump straight to the update.)
Broken Age is a beautiful, funny and surprisingly touching game. But in a good way. No bad touching. As a parent, it reaches one hand through your eye holes and the other through your ear tunnels and they meet in the middle of your chest, where your feelings live. And then they squeeze.
I’ve only played through Shay’s (the boy) part of the story so far, but as a stepdad to the most awesome 7-year-old that has ever trod upon this earthen rock, I can say without hesitation that, somewhere between playing with the squeaky toy control panel and visiting the Hall Of Heroes for the first time, the game hits you right in the feels. Hard.
Turns out, it’s a game about letting go as much as it’s about growing up, which is something I didn’t expect. You see, Shay was put onto a spaceship when he was very young, as a sort of lifeboat to keep him safe when something horrible (I assume) happened to his parents’ homeworld. Don’t expect any superpowers though; this isn’t that kind of baby-in-a-basket story. It’s about a boy who had parents who loved him and wanted him to have everything he could ever want or need, but who didn’t count on him ever actually growing up. So the “Mom” of the spaceship is overprotective and over-proud and everything a doting mother could be, while supplying Shay with all of the fun and excitement a boy could ever want. As long as he never hits puberty and all he ever wants is train rides, yarn friends and ice cream avalanches, that is. The father is there, too…but not in the same way. He’s not exactly distant, but he’s not exactly present, either. I expect we’ll hear more from him in Part Two. Oh, and there’s also a wolf that isn’t a wolf, a navigational crochetier that makes scarves to traverse the galaxy with, and…well, it’s Tim Schafer. It’s crazy, but in all the best ways. Trust me on this.
I’m just starting Vella’s (the girl) story, so I can’t comment much on it, yet. I’ll update this post after I finish her half of Part One, but I wanted to get my thoughts down about the game so far, while they were still fresh in my mind. As a review, this isn’t much of a review. But as an endorsement, consider this one to be of the ringing variety. So far, it’s everything I’d hoped the game would be when I backed it on Kickstarter, and perhaps a little more.
As an adventure game, it’s on the easy side, which is not at all a bad thing. Nobody plays adventure games for the inventory puzzles, or at least I never have. Not the best games, anyway. I’ve always played them for the stories and the characters and, in the case of a Tim Schafer (or Ron Gilbert) game, I play them for the writing. Double Fine wisely chose to eschew the goofy puzzle logic that plagues the point and click genre, instead opting for simple puzzles that might make you think for a minute or two, but aren’t likely to send anyone running off to the Internet for a walkthrough. You won’t get stuck playing Broken Age, at least not for very long. Instead, you’ll get to progress smoothly through the story while still getting to interact with it on just the right level. Nothing is ever tedious or overplayed. It’s just…smooth.
I confess, I had to warm up to the art style. Well, not the style so much as the animation. I’m not normally a big fan of the jointed-paper-doll approach to animation (which I’m sure has some sort of actual artsy sounding name, probably French), but the animations are impressively detailed and yet somehow still minimalist at the same time. It’s a sort of magic, I guess. And it works.
The voice cast is great, obviously. The always talented Khris Brown turns in another stellar performance as the game’s voice director (and, folks, if you don’t think a game’s voice director is giving a performance when he or she guides the voice talent, then you’re just not paying attention), and her direction of Elijah Wood as Shay is spot on. For his part, Elijah (we’re on a first name basis, apparently) gives a solid performance, with just enough pitch in his voice to sound younger than he is without it coming off as trying too hard. Every line is delivered in the way in should be delivered in the context of the situation, which is something that eludes most voice talent in adventure games. But Khris (also with the first name, apparently) has a long track record of showing that she fully understands the medium, and manages to get perfect performances out of her cast every time. Jennifer Hale does a marvelous job as the computer Mom on the spaceship, never coming across as being too nagging, even when the character is clearly nagging too much. It’s just…great. Like everything else.
If I had one complaint, it would be that it’s taken this damn long for Tim (hey, first names again, whaddyaknow?) to get off his butt and jump back into the point and click ocean. It’s been almost 20 years since Full Throttle, Tim. (And yes, Grim Fandango is sublime, but it isn’t point and click, so it doesn’t 
count. Except that it does, I guess. Because it’s Grim Freakin’ Fandango.) But however long it’s been, it’s been too long. Psychonauts was great, Brütal Legend was epic, Costume Quest and Stacking and The Cave and Everything Else have all been terrific games, but YOU (and Ron. Hey, Ron!) are the point and click adventure. You define it. It needs you. It’s needed you for 20 years. We’ve needed you for 20 years. So thanks for coming back, but damn you if you think you’re going to make us wait another 20 years for the next one. So don’t get any ideas.
UPDATE: I’ve now finished Vella’s part of the story, and therefore the entirety of Part One. Vella’s half of the game makes up slightly more than half of the game, and feels a lot more fleshed out than Shay’s bit. That’s not to discount Shay’s contribution, but Vella just has more characters to interact with, a greater variety of locations to explore, more puzzles, that sort of thing. It feels more like an old school adventure game too, with a couple of oddball puzzle solutions, but nothing too crazy.
Vella’s story is as less about growing up and more about empowering yourself and taking charge of your situation, even when (almost) everyone else is telling you what a 
bad idea that is. (Which is a message I deeply support, and about which I’ve babbled before.) It also contains 100% more Wil Wheaton and Jack Black, with the former playing the role of a hipster lumberjack and the latter delivering an uncharacteristically subtle performance. Wheaton is great, as expected with all of his previous experience , and there’s even a hint of self-parody in some of his lines. Black, on the other hand, reins in his Jack Blackness ever so slightly, giving an understated performance that is still somehow every bit as filled with his usual bravado, but it’s not in your face. You can still tell it’s there, of course, lurking just beneath the surface. Probably leering, too. With a smile on its face, a twinkle in its eye…and a knife behind its back. But hey, he’s playing a cult leader who sits in a nest and poops out the sort of thing that would make Veruca Salt very happy around Easter. So it works.
Story-wise, I don’t want to give too much away with Vella, other than to say that maidens in villages across the land enjoy being selected for The Maiden’s Feast, which involves dressing up in ridiculous costumes and vying for the attention of the great Mog Chothra. And by attention, I mean “being chosen as food by an antediluvian elder god from the deep”. Yet, Vella is somehow alone in thinking this is a Bad Idea, so she sets off to do something about it. And that’s all you’re getting out of me.
The two stories come together quite nicely, in the end, and make a perfect joint for the second act. You might see it coming, and you might not. Or, more likely, you’ll mostly 
see it coming, but get thrown off a bit just before everything comes together. However it goes down for you, it’ll be satisfying. Vella is a sharp girl, perfectly voiced by Masasa Moyo. Every now and then, I could’ve sworn she was played by Jane Jacobs (who performed the role of Laverne in 1993’s Day of the Tentacle), but alas, it wasn’t her. Still, she delivers a strong, confident performance with just a nuanced underpinning of self-doubt that fits the character well.
TL;DR: Go buy Broken Age! It’ll make you smile, make you laugh, and touch your heart in the same way that Pixar enjoys ripping it out in the Toy Story movies. It’s a game about children growing up and parents letting go. It’s sweet and it’s sad, and it’s everything that a game should be. It could be longer. There could be more puzzles. There could be more dialog and interactions and animations and…ok, there could just be more. Always more, because no matter how much there is…when something is this good, there’s just never enough of it.
I’ll be back later with an update for Valla’s side of the story. Probably. If I don’t end up crying in the shower and biting a washcloth to muffle the sound of my tears.
Texas: Where walking through the mall with a switchblade in your pocket is illegal, but strapping an AR15 on your back is a God-given right.
I tweeted that the other day, in response to this. In short, this guy Derek Poe owned (past tense) a store in the local shopping mall called Golden Triangle Tactical and decided to drum up some publicity, stir up some controversy, come up with a way to break his lease, exercise his 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms by strapping an AR15 on his back and strolling into the mall’s GameStop. Depending on who you ask, Texas is or isn’t an open carry state for “long arms,” aka rifles. The law is ambiguous by not ever actually mentioning long arms, but it’s generally accepted that Texas allows you to openly carry a rifle in certain situations. Like when you’re hunting, or driving to go hunt and have a gun rack mounted on the back of your pick ’em up truck, and that sort of thing. Patrolling for varmints and such. But it’s also generally accepted that this freedom does not translate well to urban environments, and certainly not to the environment of a shopping mall. Except that it’s not so generally accepted, at least by people who refuse to accept it.
So anyway, this guy strolls around the mall and wanders into a GameStop, then eventually the police get wind of it and charge him with disorderly conduct, which is what’s used in cases like this. Later, the cops refuse to return his rifle, citing it as evidence in an ongoing investigation. So naturally, we have an open carry rally coming up next week at the nearest Gander Mountain. Because that’ll make everything better.
First, my thoughts on gun control. They’re pretty simple. We need to be able to track firearm sales. We need to enforce existing laws that are rigged to be unenforceable (and therefore remain a safe chant for the NRA to constantly cite), and we need to use some common sense. A shopping mall is no place to carry a rifle slung on your back. Not in today’s world, with mass shootings happening only slightly less frequently than political sex scandals. I’ll tell you this: it’s a good thing no do-gooder, concealed carry gun advocate saw this guy before the police caught up with him. It doesn’t take a big leap to imagine how quickly that situation could have gone downhill.
Do we have a right to keep and bear arms? Of course we do. Is Obama coming for our guns? Of course he isn’t. He didn’t come for them in 2008, back when everyone started screaming it. He didn’t come for them in 2009. Or 2010. Or 2011. Or 2012. And he’s not coming for them now. Stop being crazy.
But while we’re on the subject of crazy, please stop thinking that you could realistically challenge the federal government if it ever decided to become openly hostile to American citizens. Your handguns and shotguns and scary, look-at-how-badass-I-am “assault” rifles ain’t gonna do much against a targeted attack from a drone you never even see before it kills you. Think we’re going to have another American Revolution? Good luck with that, unless you have a Navy I don’t know about. (And don’t count on France coming to our rescue this time, not after that whole Freedom Fries incident.) Or, you know, an Air Force. Or artillery. Or any of the countless technological and armament superiority currently enjoyed by the largest and most heavily funded military force the world has ever known. Stop watching so many movies. They lie to you. Pick up some books on military tactics and war strategy, and you’ll quickly understand that you can’t secure and hold a coastal area without a navy. You can’t secure and hold an inland area without air support and artillery. You can’t secure and hold anything with your pea shooters when the “enemy” has smart bombs and remote-controlled aerial drones and fleets of warships and tactical nuclear weapons. Stop being crazy. And stop being stupid.
You wanted this military. You wanted to fund it at insane levels. You wanted it to be strong. You wanted the biggest gun in the world, and you got it. So don’t act all butthurt when you finally stop to consider that it could ever be swiveled around and aimed at you. You paid for it. You bought it. Congratulations.
So anyway, enough with the armed revolt nonsense. It’s just not gonna happen, pilgrim. And if it did, it’ll be shut down so quickly and decisively that it’ll likely help secure the tyrannical rule of whoever’s in power at the time, because nobody else will be dumb enough to try taking on the world’s meanest military force a second time, not after what happened to those poor people who tried it first. They’re still picking bits of them out of the Appalachians.
But back to gun control. No, I don’t want the government to take our guns. Yes, I believe we all have a right to own them. No, I don’t think they make you any safer. Yes, I believe they exist in large part to make people feel safer (not to mention, more badass) than they do to actually provide additional security, but I’ll concede that knowledge and expertise with firearms could conceivably save your life in certain situations. No, I don’t think those situations are nearly as common as other people seem to think they are. You’re still about a billion times more likely to die in a car accident than to ever be in a situation where shooting someone else in the face would be helpful, but I understand the need to feel safe. Yes, we need regulations and enforcement. No, it’s not the wild west.
Now let’s get back to this yahoo with the AR15. What he did does nothing for gun advocacy groups. It hurts the pro-gun cause. Anyone with any common sense at all knows that you shouldn’t go strutting around a shopping mall with a rifle strapped to your back, and the idea that he was somehow wronged by being cited and having his gun temporarily taken away is just insane. He knew what he was doing, even if he didn’t expect that there would actually be consequences for being an asshole.
However, instead of seeing what this guy did for the cause-damaging publicity stunt it was, tons of people are set to rally around him and protest on behalf of his rights. But I ask you, where are my rights as a sword-owning American? I can’t carry a Roman gladius through the mall, so why does this jerk get to carry an AR15? Heck, I can’t even carry a knife that’s over 5.5″, or that is spring-loaded, or under 5.5″ if it’s a butterfly knife, etc… Why is having it be illegal to carry a much less lethal weapon than a semi-automatic rifle not an issue for these people? I just want to keep and bear my brand of arms, so where’s my 2nd amendment right to open carry a katana on my hip?
Oh, that’s right. There’s no National Melee Association shoving millions down the pants of politicians and media pundits.
Look, I know this is Texas. And southeast Texas is more Texas than a lot of Texas in the whole gun/red state/God-fearing/Constitution/Tea Partying regard, but let’s at least try to have a little perspective on this. Remember, if you get your rights, then everyone else gets their rights. That’s why they’re called rights. Now, just sit back and ponder that, you largely Angry Doughy White Dude demographic. Imagine a group of heavily armed black men walking near you in the mall. You can’t just casually roll up your windows and lock your doors in that situation, can you? It’s not like southeast Texas has some of the most inflammatory, backwater racial tensions in the country that would be incalculably worsened by adding open carry firearms to the mix or anything, right? Oh, wait…
Imagine rival gang members, both within their legal rights to openly carry assault rifles in public places. What could possibly go wrong? Imagine Longhorns fans and Aggies passing by each other in the aisles of Academy, fresh from buying new boxes of ammunition on game day. Or just imagine a world where everyone walking around with rifles is no big deal. Then imagine hundreds of Charles Whitmans causally strolling into thousands of bell towers across the nation. Imagine Lee Harvey Oswald and the book depository. Imagine Columbine. Sandy Hook. Virginia Tech. The Washington Navy Yard. Aurora, Colorado. The list, sadly, goes on and on and on…
Now imagine more of those, except now imagine them with a bunch of other armed people. Particularly, imagine the shooting at the Batman movie in Aurora, and try to guess how many more people would’ve been injured or killed by a theater filled with would-be heroes all shooting their guns at random targets in the dark. You are not as good of a shot as you think you are. You are not trained to point your gun and not shoot. You are not a police officer. (Unless you are; in which case, I’m not talking about you.)
And stop crying about your freedoms. We don’t live in a free society. Never have. I can’t go all Katniss and carry a bow and arrow with me when I’m browsing the grocery store aisles for snack cakes, so why should you get to carry a gun? Besides, we live in a country that actively tells people what they can and can’t do to their own bodies, which is the one thing that should be wholly yours to do with as you see fit. You know, if you’re actually free. But nope. Get sick? Go to the doctor if you want medicine. You can’t be trusted to diagnose and treat yourself. Depressed? Here, have some healthy alcohol, but stay away from drugs. Enjoy soda? Ok, but not too much. You can’t be trusted to make your own decisions about the Extra Super Giant Big Gulp. Raped and want an abortion? Oooooooh, let’s not even open that can of worms.
The point is, you don’t care about freedom. Not really. You care about this one issue, and how it affects your fragile sense of empowerment. You think owning a firearm is essential to protect yourself from a phantom menace that only you can see. (Well, you and Alex Jones. Maybe David Icke.) You think owning a gun is the key to freedom. It isn’t. It’s a weapon. It shoots small bits of metal at things. Its only purpose is to hurt and kill. At least I can use a sword to help trim the back forty, if I needed to. If I had a back forty, that is. Or even knew what the hell the proverbial back forty is that everyone is always plowing, but that’s neither here nor there.
TL; DR: Yes, you have a right to keep and bear arms. No, you don’t need to be a douche about it.
I am old. This should come as no surprise to anyone, since I’m always angry about something. This is a trait common to us elderly. And by elderly, I mean those in our late 30s, which is pretty much knocking on death’s door where twenty-somethings are concerned. And that’s probably how it should be.
Still, the annoying thing about youth is it always thinks it’s doing something new and that it got there first. But it didn’t. It’s just making newer versions of older mistakes and thinking itself clever in the process. And it hates old people, because they just don’t get it. Which is also probably how it should be.
But it still annoys me. Heck, twenty-somethings bothered me when I was a twenty-something. I’m just wired for annoyance. It’s in my blood. Or possibly my spleen. Maybe the pancreas. I don’t know; I’m not a doctor. I just know people piss me off, and I can’t ever keep my mouth shut about it. And that’s just how it is.
The latest bee in my bonnet, if I wore bonnets and had a habit of letting bees infest my headwear, is this little number calling me out personally, over on Cat 5, the local paper’s local blog of the local paper’s local free paper about local culture. And by culture, I mean bars, nightclubs, and food trucks. With some “fashion” thrown in, for good measure. It’s the Hearst Corporation’s Beaumont version of the Los Angeles FREEP or New York’s Village Voice, only with less (read: any at all) news of interest or items of importance, and more OMG! TOATS HASHTAG THOSE SHOES, BECKY!
But it’s not really trying to be an edgy underground paper, with alternative news and information to engage a young adult readership. It’s a corporate glad rag, where every bartender is a shiny, happy person. Every food truck offers unique local flavors, usually with the word “fusion” thrown in somewhere for reasons. Every local band should be headlining at the hottest venues across the country if only someone would recognize their talent. That sort of thing. Fluff. It’s a free handout paper along the lines of the Thrifty Nickel, if the Nickel was less concerned with helping people sell sofas and more obsessed with whatever hip hipster fad is fashionable at the moment. Craft beers, the aforementioned food trucks, local art, etc…
And all of that is fine. Nothing wrong with it. It helps local businesses and lends some semblance of an air of culture to Southeast Texas that is very much welcome. I have no problem with Cat 5. (The name comes from…well, they’ll tell you it comes from cleverly evoking a Category 5 hurricane. However, it’s actually just the result of copying Houston. Specifically, another Hearst paper, The Houston Chronicle. Because Beaumont desperately wants to be Houston, even if it’ll never talk to it at parties.) The Chron has (or had; I can’t keep up with the rise and fall of blogs) a similar blog called, 29-95, which the Powers That Be in Corporate Cleverness Land devised after whatever the last big hurricane was, being as Houston lies at 29° North / 95° West, which was apparently on the news a lot back when people did weird things with maps and tracking charts and pencils. They thought it was catchy.
But anyway, that’s the point. Beaumont hates Houston. Always has, always will. But it desperately wants to be Houston. It hates Houston in the same way that you hate that one girl in middle school you really wish would go out with you. But she won’t, so you make fun of her. Same sort of thing here, really.
Beaumont wants to be a big metropolis like Houston, filled with commerce and art and culture and industry, instead of what it actually is and always will be: a mid-sized city based on the petrochemical industry. That means lots of refineries, air that smells (and feels, thanks to the humidity) like wet fart, and a lot of old money in the hands of a few powerful families. It’s kind of like what the mafia would be if they were less concerned with whacking people and running drugs, and more worried about things like the Neches River Festival and Cotillion.
So that’s Beaumont. And the youth of Beaumont have always hated that they live in Beaumont, which is why every generation has always tried its best to make it better. But they always try in the wrong ways, only worrying about things that matter to them. Namely, that they’re bored. There’s very little to do in Southeast Texas, so they come up with things to do. And they always think they’re the first ones who have been clever enough to do so. They think they’re doing something new. It’s cute, really.
But the thing is, bars aren’t new. Art isn’t new. Nightclubs aren’t new. Food trucks are kind of new, but only in the sense that they’re called Food Trucks now and not Creepy Dude Selling Wieners Out Of His Trailer, which is what we used to call them. They’re trendy. Beaumont loves trendy. But trends don’t last. The craft beer craze will die down, and people will go back to drinking whatever fermented crap they were drinking before the fad exploded. Food trucks are trendy, and they’ll go back to being non-existent as soon as the new wears off and the trend winds have changed course. That’s just how things go.
No, Beaumont has real problems that need real solutions. There’s a reason it’s next to impossible to sell a home in this city, and it has nothing at all to do with how many thrift stores and art shows we have. The biggest issue killing the city right now, for example, is the corruption of the local school district. Thanks to the efforts of a bunch of old boring old people who are old (like me) who have been working on this problem for years now, it looks like it might finally be about to improve. From Texas Education Agency investigations to FBI seizures, things are finally coming to a head. With a little luck and a bit more time, the boil will be lanced and fully drained, and we can start healing the wound left by the BISD corruption. But twenty-somethings don’t think about things like schools and mortgage rates and tax appraisals. They think about getting drunk and getting laid, and pretending to understand things they don’t really know much about. Because that’s what youth does. It’s inexperienced because it lacks the experience of not having experienced very much.
But even all of that doesn’t matter. I don’t fault young people for not thinking far enough ahead to understand that the cosmetic bandages they’re slapping on to festering wounds won’t do anything to actually improve this city, and that all of their efforts are destined for failure, like all the efforts of all the young people that have come before them. That’s just how the world works.
What I do have a problem with, however, is something like the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau coming up with a painfully forced bit of social media manipulating nonsense, and then attacking anyone who sees it for what it really is: a justification of their own paychecks. They want us to think that this #Beaulivers hashtag business just sprang up out of the great well of pride young people have for our city, but really it was just something stupid concocted by someone who gets paid to come up with stupid ideas for a living. And they want you to think it’s actually working. It’s not.
The blog post I linked to earlier mentions tagboard.com, but fails to provide a link (probably in the hope that nobody will actually check the site). From the post:
Tagboard.com/Beaulievers, which assembles hashtags posted across every social media platform, is filled with Beaulievers proudly showing off their food photos, sunset shots, their pictures from concerts and crawfish boils and Neches River outings.
Well, sure. That sounds dandy! Except that “filled with Beaulivers” seems to mean a small handful of people, most of whom are either directly involved with the CVB or Cat 5, or who have some connection to it. The same few people incessantly tweeting a hashtag does not a trend make. And even then, there have only been about 15 or so tweets collected in past week. I’m not sure “filled” means what local journalist Beth Rankin thinks it means. But don’t take my word for it. Here, go check it out for yourself. I’ll actually give you the link (just as I actually linked to Beth’s blog post after mentioning it. It’s just common web courtesy any hip new media journalist should know about.)
Oh, and then there’s this, which follows mention of my initial comment about the silliness of the #Beaulievers hashtag on Twitter:
When I tried to explain that the hashtag — and the corresponding creative Renaissance that’s currently sweeping Beaumont — is indeed happening, the whole exchange devolved into the kind of social media fight we all promise ourselves we’ll never get into (and then instigate anyway).
Except that she didn’t try to explain anything, and the entire “social media fight” was all of two @replies on Twitter. Hardly the stuff of apocalyptic legend, but hey. I get it. She’s got an audience to pander to. So do I. Of course we’re both going to frame things how we think they should hang. But, just in case you’re wondering, here’s the actual exchange in its entirety:
Look, I’m a dad. I worry about dad things now, like the quality of my kid’s education and the long term sustainability of the area. I worry about property values and attracting new businesses, and I fret about tax rates and unemployment levels and the minimum wage. I care about politics and local governance and accountability. That’s what old people do. Young people have the luxury (and, I think, the right, really) to not have to worry about this stuff while they’re young. Let them worry about where they’re going to go and what or who they’re going to do on a Friday night. The horrible shackles of boring responsibility will hit them soon enough, so I say enjoy youth while you’re young. You don’t get to go back and try again.
But leave the stupid hashtags out of it. And if you’re going to try to paint me as a reality teevee loving, fast food fattie who is obviously too stupid and brainwashed by the all the whatever food poisons I’m eating or mind-numbing propaganda I’m absorbing through the warm glow of the glass teat from which I so voraciously suckle, then you’re just not paying attention. That’s what I think you are, hipster scum.
I’m just a bitter old curmudgeon who has forgotten more than you’ve learned so far in your wild about town life. I already did all the things you think you’re just discovering now, and I’ve earned the right to point at you and make fun. And you have the right to call me a cranky old bastard. I guess.
Just don’t try and convince me that a tired play on a particular bit of Justin Bieber foolishness is anything more than what it is: Just Plain Sad.
Today’s essay is a little different from what I’ve been writing as of late, and I hope that my faith in my readers is not misplaced when I tell you that I think you can handle this. It’s nothing new or revolutionary, or even unique. It’s just a few of my personal reflections on Christmas and religion, and a few things in-between. It’s a little long and a little messy, but it’s what came out when I sat down to start writing. Still, I know that many of you will take immediate offense as soon you start reading anything that may contradict your own beliefs, and I apologize in advance for making any of you uncomfortable. For those among you that are so easily offended, I ask only that you hear me out. It gets better after it gets worse, and I think it all comes together in the end. Then again, I’ve been known to completely adore myself, so I might be a bit biased when I assure you that I do, in fact, have a point – a point I suspect you may not disagree with quite so much as you might think. So, read on adventurer. Your quest awaits!
As any reader of this blog already knows, I am no great fan of religion or of the blind adherence to the ancient and debatable doctrines from which all structured belief systems originate. That said, I’ve no qualms with personal beliefs gained through the inquiries and insights of each individual person. In fact, all I’ve ever demanded of anyone is that they think for themselves. If you wish to read up on all of the world’s many religions and decide to follow one over all others (or none at all), that is your educated choice to make. If, however, you’ve simply been indoctrinated into one belief system since childhood without ever pausing to contemplate either its credibility or applicability towards your own life, then it is with you that I do take umbrage.
I don’t begrudge or discourage informed opinions based on hard-earned knowledge wrested from endless hours of research and contemplation, regardless of what those opinions may be. I am certainly not obligated to agree with those conclusions, but I fully recognize and support your right to have and to share them. The only problem – the only problem – I have with religion in general is that, for as much as any given church claims to encourage its members to independently study its teachings, there is most often very little latitude granted towards any such lofty endeavors. Instead, most study is guided either by the groupthink of the congregation (Bible study groups) or by the bias of the church leaders (goatee sportin’ Youth Pastors) rather than by simply allowing the student’s ideas and beliefs to grow organically from his or her own studies of the church’s sacred texts. No, the common order of the day is merely dogmatic and unyielding reverence for the church’s existing outlook towards theology, and for the sacred and unquestionable doctrines to which it so passionately cleaves. Therefore, it should come as no great surprise that I, being more a Humanist than anything else, have grown to reflect upon the structured institutions of religious thought and have come to the regrettable and odious conclusion that they are, all of them, complete bullshit.
I know that sounds inflammatory, probably because I intended it to. I want nothing more than to inflame, ignite and destroy slavish devotion wherever I find it – and it’s hard to not find it everywhere at this time of year. For example, good little Christians celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25 through pageantry and festivals expressly forbidden in the Bible, but glossed over and accepted by their church leaders. On the one hand, you have the sacred text itself specifically banning the practice of cutting down and decorating a tree from the forest (Jeremiah 10: 1-4) while, on the opposite hand, you have Christian churches erecting massive Christmas trees in church sanctuaries from sea to shining sea. It’s the modus operandi of any belief system that encourages obedience rather than introspection to simply say, ‘This is the way it is done, this is the way is has always been done, and this is the way it will always be, for we have told ye this and ye shall believeth it, or ye shall goeth straight to Hellith.’ Or something like that, anyway. You get the idea.
Christmas, as so many other things in Christianity, is a grossly misunderstood observance of an even more greatly misunderstood event. Jesus, the man from whom Christianity sprang, was not born on December 25th. The date was chosen after much fighting and bickering and debating amongst the Powers That Be, before finally settling on the familiar date we all know and love. Strangely, the knowledge that Christ’s birth is celebrated on an arbitrary day is not a little-known fact – yet the knowledge does almost nothing to impact Christian observations of the holiday. People may not know the specifics about why December 25th was chosen, and many certainly know little or nothing about Saturnalia or the feast of Sol Invictus, but it would hardly matter if they did. What people know is that the church chooses to observe the date, and so it must be Holy. They may know that it’s not in the Bible, and they may understand that the date was chosen to coincide with popular Pagan holidays, but all that matters is that the church tells them to honor it, and so they do. Fastidiously. Obediently. Blindly. But this was not always the case…
In fact, in the more extreme views of Christian theology held by the Puritans (from which nearly all Protestant churches in America originate), holidays such as Christmas and Easter were entirely forbidden because such non-biblical holidays lacked a scriptural foundation and could be easily likened to the idolatry and nature-worship of Paganism. As if that weren’t enough, let’s not forget that one of the stronger contentions against Catholicism by the Protestant Reformation was the observation of Mass. And, given that Christmas is a compounding of the words Christ and Mass, it shouldn’t take a great leap in understanding to see that earlier Protestants held rather a different view of the holiday. In fact, Charles Spurgeon – the so-called “Prince of Preachers” himself – once said, during a sermon on Christmas Eve, “We have no superstitious regard for times and seasons. Certainly we do not believe in the present ecclesiastical arrangement called Christmas: first, because we do not believe in the mass at all, but abhor it, whether it be said or sung in Latin or English; and secondly, because we find no scriptural warrant whatever for observing any day as the birthday of the Savior; and, consequently, its observance is a superstition, because not of divine authority.”
The questioning believer might see the contradiction and decide whether to be a part of observing Christmas, or to adopt a more hardline Reformist view of the Bible by abstaining and thereby saving his mortal soul, should his beliefs steer him in that direction. Then again, even rigid Calvinists often fail to note that John Calvin observed the holiday, or that Martin Luther himself is attributed to popularizing the Christmas tree. Of course, when the rule of law in any religion is to blindly accept and believe only that which you are told, it isn’t surprising that even someone like Martin Luther would eventually have his teaching distorted and reinterpreted to the point of obscenity, were he to witness their degradation today. After all, it was his aversion to the belief that Saint Nicholas distributed presents in December (but not on Christmas) that led him to popularize the notion of the Christkindl (Christ Child) in an effort to put the focus back on the birth of Christ, where he felt it belonged. However, after the tradition was transplanted to the New World and observed by English settlers, Christkindl became Kris Kringle, who became synonymous with Santa Claus, who had himself replaced Saint Nicholas as the mythical force du jour of the holiday season. A little research, a bit of reading, and all of this is clear to anyone who wishes to look – but far too many people would rather just accept doctrine rather than think and decide for themselves.
Curiously, Protestants seem completely oblivious to irony around this time of year. Each Christmas season brings with it the inevitable battle cry from the Religious Right claiming that the holiday is being stolen from the people. Ineffective protests demanding boycotts of stores that insist on wishing patrons a Happy Holiday rather than a Merry Christmas commence and dissipate with a whimper, often going ignored even by the people posturing themselves as supporters of the initiative. (It’s tough to be righteous when faced with the overwhelming temptation of Always Low Prices, after all. Not that the hand-wringing left wingers are any better, mind you. Not with their bleeding heart mentality motivating them to legislate everything good in this world out of existence through a policy of offending no one by equally offending everyone. Happy Christmakwanzukkah, everybody!) Yet, these very same right wing, evangelical zealots fail to recognize that they themselves stole the holiday from the Catholics. In fact, Protestants have done more to insult the sanctity of the religious observance by entirely removing Mass from the Christ Mass – yet they have no hesitations when it comes to complaining about seculars removing the Christ part by shortening the holiday to the simple and brief ‘X-mas’ (nevermind that the abbreviation doesn’t ‘remove Christ from Christmas’, but the X actually puts Christ right in there, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of history knows). No, instead today’s Protestants blissfully ignore (or fail to ever learn) the fact that the original Puritanical settlers of this country steadfastly opposed celebrating anything to do with the birth of Jesus, and that the original doctrines of what eventually blossomed into the varied American denominations we have today are growing ever more distant from their source material. Heck, even the comparatively open denomination in which I was raised (Presbyterian) didn’t formally observe Christmas until the late 1940s, and today my church observes Advent, has multiple worship services, and even sings Christmas Carols by candlelight on Christmas Eve.
Now, all that said – I personally enjoy Christmas. I know that all of my preceding bibblebabble seems to contradict the idea that I’d love the holiday, but I promise it’s true. I love exchanging gifts with friends and loved ones, I enjoy spending time with friends old and new, and I encourage the spirit of charity that permeates the air. Even if it’s mostly in the form of lip-service and one-time donations, a lot of charities receive the bulk of their yearly donations at Christmas, and it’s hard to argue against being charitable (but in a few sentences, I’ll try). I do, however, deeply resent the forced jubilance and faux merry-making that comes with the Christmas season.
I don’t enjoy being unwillingly recruited into participating in the reindeer games of people I neither like nor respect, simply because it is Christmas and certain obligations are expected. I dislike being completely inundated with the ‘Christmas spirit’ by every last retail outlet on the planet trying to separate me from my cash. I hate things like restrictive and often embarrassing work parties, or socially required obligations such as enduring the insidious pain that comes from having to pretend to genuinely enjoy the suspicious tasting concoction some associate brings to a pot luck Christmas dinner. I dislike the social and professional demands requests to donate to Cause X, contribute to Cause Y, and to supply toys for one organization or another that has the word Tots in. But mostly – mostly – I despise having to endure the inescapable annoyance that comes from being constantly assaulted by offensively happy people incessantly ringing handbells located at the entrances and exits of every public building in the 48 contiguous states from Lubeck, Maine to Ozette, Washington. They are omnipresent forces during the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and I hate being made to feel guilty about not tossing change into a bright red pot each and every time I make an emergency run to the store for ice packs and Band-Aids. (Or chocolate, depending on the emotional state of my wife and whatever I may or may not have done or not done at any given moment.)
For me, Christmas is not about what the church tells me I should be doing, or what friends and family choose to believe. It’s not about trees and presents and retail Hell. And, while growing up I always insisted upon decorating a sugar cookie with the words, ‘Happy Birthday, Jesus!’, Christmas isn’t just about His birthday. In truth, what Christmas means to me is an entirely personal thing (as is everything else in my life), and I refuse to allow outside interests to pervade my thoughts and dictate my behavior at this time of year…although my refusal is rendered moot by my proclivity towards tradition, a tenacious force against which even I am powerless. The traditions I enjoyed in my childhood translate to wistful nostalgia today that I always seek to recapture each and every time the holidays come around. I have no will against it, and therefore seek out all of the Christmas joy that I can possibly find.
I want the Christmas tree, even though I know it is a silly and potentially hideous thing that starts out beautiful but that eventually transforms into an inappropriately festive dead thing that tends to linger in my living long after I’ve abandoned my New Year’s resolutions. I want to go to church on Christmas Eve and listen to the sermon, watch the children badly act in a badly directed play, and cap the whole thing off by singing carols by candlelight while either sweating or shivering outside on the church lawn in the notoriously uncooperative southeast Texas weather. I want to hang stockings and eat cookies, to rip apart the beautiful paper on packages meticulously wrapped by loving family members, and then to watch in fiendish delight as they try to penetrate the ball of ineptly wadded paper and invincible tape that I’ve handed them in exchange. I want to stay up late on Christmas Eve, pretending to be Santa Claus and stomping around on the roof. I want to drive around and look at Christmas lights, eat turkey and unidentifiable casseroles at family gatherings, then sit together in silence with my wife beside me, staring at the twinkling lights of our tree while Christmas music drifts softly across the room.
Strangely, though I want all of these things from Christmas this year just as I’ve always wanted them, I find myself wanting one thing more than any other, although I’ve yet to mention it. This year, I want something that I already have. Something I hope to always have. Something that makes each miserable morning tolerable through the hope and promise it brings with it in the evening. Something that makes the bad days less bad, and the good days worth remembering. Something that means the same thing whether it’s spelled kazoku, rodzina, familia – or just plain Family. What I want for Christmas this year is simple: I want my family. Always, my family.
I encourage everyone to believe exactly what it is in this life that they need to believe, no more and no less. I simply want everyone to do their own thinking, come to their own conclusions, and form that mysterious ‘personal relationship with God’ that eludes so many of the Faithful. For my part, I will reveal that I refuse to believe in a Creator who plays the role of a disciplinarian father busily overseeing children he never wants to grow up. This is the typical view of God in Christianity, the stern and loving father who watches over his children and, in exchange, demands their devotion, their loyalty, and their unwavering love at the threat of punishment, should they believe the Wrong Things. Instead, I take the atypical view and elect to believe in God as an image of my own interpretation, as a father who loves his children, but who does not want them to stay in a perpetual state of childhood. As any parent, He wants his children to grow up, to become independent, strong, and wise. He is a father who wants his children to find their own way, to make their own decisions and make something better out of what He has given them in this world, rather than simply accept that life is a temporary misery to fret over whilst awaiting an afterlife filled with shiny, happy things and lots and lots of singing. (And harps. Always harps.) More than anything though, He wants his children to simply love Him out of love itself, rather than idly worshiping Him out of the intrinsic fear of consequence that angering Him would bring. So, whether Jesus was born on December 25th or April 17th, it doesn’t really matter to me. In fact, none of it truly matters, not really. In the end, religious thought is only what those in power want it to be, what the people of the world need it to be, and what each of us ultimately chooses to believe it actually is. All of us, together and apart as individuals, whole and complete and thinking. Above all, thinking.
Then again, if Jesus really was born on December 25th and I on January 18th, then we’re both Capricorns and I have something in common with the Son of God Himself. Awesome!
*Originally published on December 8, 2009.
Look. Babies are more or less bald and, unless you’re a parent, they’re kinda goofy looking. That’s just how it is. Why can’t we, as a nation, accept this simple fact? And by nation, I mean STOP IT, MOMS. Your baby is a baby. Let it be a baby. Stop making it a fashion accessory upon which to project your own hideous tastes for all the world to see. Because the rest of us are tired of looking at that thing on your child’s head. Seriously. Just stop it.
I’m speaking, of course, about ridiculous baby headbands – and let me say up front that when I say, “ridiculous baby headbands,” I mean ALL baby headbands. I don’t care if it’s just a simple Flashdance headband because your baby is dancing for her life, or if it’s one of those monstrous flower bands that look like little nightmarish floral explosions bursting out of your child’s skull. They’re all horrible.
Cute headband or terrifying exit wound? You decide.
Aside from how horrible they look, you’re probably squishing your child’s brain. Think about that. It’s got to be some level of child abuse, except scientists haven’t bothered to do any science that proves the physical damage caused by headband abuse. I won’t lie; it really bothers me that one derpy “scientist” can publish false information that leads to a nationwide, Jenny McCarthy-fueled vaccination panic, but not a single one of them can be bothered to publish a paper on the dangers of ridiculous baby headbands. It’s like science isn’t even trying to be beneficial to mankind anymore.
It’s bigger than her head. Bigger. Than. Her. Entire. Head.
I know you want your kid to be pretty and, let’s face it, boy babies aren’t really subjected to the headband horror. It’s almost exclusively reserved for girls, because gosh darnit, the most important thing for a vagina-bearer is to be pretty first, and anything else second. So I guess we need to start conditioning them as early as possible. You know, before they even understand what the hell is going on. Sure, your daughter might not understand or care why her mother insists upon strapping a bit of elastic itch torture to the top of her braincase, but there’s bound to be a good reason for it. Mom knows best, right?
Don’t set her down inside a Cracker Barrel, lest someone mistake your precious wonder for a piece of Official Country Store Merchandise.
Wrong. If you do this to your child, all you’re doing is casting a spotlight on your own insecurities (that you’ll probably pass on along to your special snowflake, by the way). Babies, while a little goofy looking, are all adorable in their own way. No one outside of a few scramble-brained creepballs is ever going to look at a baby and think that the situation could be greatly improved with the addition of some elastic, hot glue and a criminal overuse of tulle.
The fistful of pearls in the mouth are a nice touch, because everyone knows that babies are really into the 1920s flapper look of OMG, SOMEBODY CALL 9-1-1! SHE’S CHOKING!
If people think your baby girl is a boy, then so what? Babies are pretty gender-neutral, or at least they should be. However, if you’re terrified of mistaken gender reassignment, then by all means, dress your little darling up in pink puffy princess petticoats to let the world know that it doesn’t have a penis. But nobody really cares. Except you, maybe. Either way, she doesn’t need the headband.
What is this I don’t even?
To the rest of us, if we bother to comment on your baby, it’s almost certainly going to be intended as a compliment. If we mistake a boy for a girl or a girl for a boy while we’re telling you how adorable your baby is, then just take the compliment, say thanks or whatever, and don’t quietly seethe inside while your curse yourself for forgetting to apply the skull-strap wedgie to your child’s cranium before you left the house this morning.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Her headband says she’s fun and flirty. But her eyes say she’s plotting her revenge.
Well, except for one more thing. While boys tend to escape the ridiculous headband nonsense, they’re often victims of the Parental Mohawk. It’s the same thing as the headbands, really, just less brain-squishy and more temporarily permanent while you wait for the hair to grow back. No child should be forced to have a mohawk if they’re under the age of being able to say things like, “I really hate looking like a tiny douchebag, Daddy.”
Now, if your kid is old enough to articulate his desire to look like someone just shot the tires off of his home, then by all means, go ahead and let him have the mohawk. It’ll make him look hip and cool and edgy…a veritable prepubescent Billy Bad Ass, I’m sure. Yeah, it’ll still say more about the parent than the child, but isn’t that pretty much the goal, anyway?
‘MURICA!
This post isn’t going to win me any friends, and will likely create more than a few new enemies. I should probably know better than to write this, but I’m me. And I never did learn.
If you’re familiar with my ongoing coverage of the tragedy that is the Beaumont Independent School District, then chances are you know what I’m about to write, and what you’re about to read. But you’re wrong. I promise.
With that out of the way, let’s begin…
***************
The great problem with unity is that you’re lumped together with people you have no more in common with than a like-minded goal of Accomplishing Something bigger than yourselves, which sounds great in theory, but in practice it amounts to nothing more than lingering too long in close quarters with a guy who smells like feet just because you share a similar interest in politics but have totally opposing views on personal hygiene.
Such may be the nature of most any cause that unites people to come together in opposition to a common foe, but one has to draw the line somewhere. Just how willing are you to stand shoulder to shoulder with people who are not who they present themselves to be, who practice the same dictatorial thought policing of your enemy and who, despite all claims to the contrary, are very likely no different from the very people you’re fighting against?
We see this all the time with revolutions: a charismatic leader emerges to unite the people and overthrow an evil dictator, only to install himself in the throne he just spilled the blood of the people to empty. The problem, says Sir Terry Pratchett, with revolutions is that they always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. And he’s right. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss. Until another new one comes along…
I do want to note here that I am not referring to any of the specific opponents trying to replace sitting board members. I don’t know any of them personally, and have encountered them only on the most cursory of levels. Instead, I’m talking about their supporters. Or some of them, at least. A lot of them.
The thing is – and this is the first bit that isn’t going to win me any friends – BISD is right. They always have been, at least to a point. This all started with race, and it continues to play a strong role in the unending drama. You see, the group now known as Beaumont Board Watch came from a citizen’s group called B.E.T.T.E.R. which stood for…something I can’t remember because I hate acronyms. (In response, BISD supporters formed a group called B.E.S.T. which also stood for something I can’t be bothered to remember.) Anyway, the B.E.T.T.E.R. group grew out of the whole South Park fiasco (read my take on that here), and deep down at the chewy center of that particular gobstopper lies the bitter nougat of racism. (And this is the first bit that will make new enemies.)
I’m not saying everyone involved in opposing the destruction of South Park did so directly out of racist intent, but race is in there, mixed up in the swampy soup of disdain some area residents have for the current school board. It’s a very old wound that goes back to forced desegregation and the state forcing the two area districts (the wealthier South Park district and the less wealthy Beaumont ISD) to combine. And while that alone might not motivate someone out of racist hatred, the element of race cannot be overlooked. People are still butthurt over desegregation. The BISD board is still getting back at the white folks from so long ago. Race is a big part of all of this – on both sides – and to dismiss it is to shy away from a contradiction that might hurt your argument.
Which brings me to my second friend-losing bit. Many of the people on BBW are not who they present themselves to be. This isn’t surprising, as people generally aren’t who they want the world to think they are, but this goes beyond the superficial. I had an exchange with a BBW member tonight on a totally unrelated topic to BISD, which ended in this person deleting any presence of information that contradicted his point. He didn’t counter any of the points; he didn’t make an argument against the veracity of the contradictory comments. Instead, he simply deleted them and pretended they never existed. This avoidance of fact and an evasiveness to address even the simplest of contradictions is exactly the behavior I’ve come to expect from the BISD school board, not one of the more prominent BBW members who routinely cries out for justice and transparency. It was shocking to see this sort of thing from this particular person, who is normally very cordial and level-headed…as long as you’re agreeing with him, I guess.
My third and final bit involves politics and how I hate them. I hate national politics, I hate state politics, I hate local and city and group politics. I will not like them on a train, I will not like them on a plane. I will not like them here or there. I will not like them anywhere. And BBW is nothing but politics.
The group is filled with the sort of staunch “I don’t know why I’m a Conservative but I just am, dammit and guns and Jesus!” type of right-wing fanatic that’s typical of this area, so it’s no great shock to find them gathered together en masse. Because this is Texas. Any time you get five Texans together, chances are six of them will be radical conservatives and at least one will be bad at math. What is shocking, although that’s probably not the best word for it, is the amazing disregard many members have for anyone who doesn’t align perfectly with their world view. And they post their world view constantly, eagerly soaking up the Like clicks from an army of symbiotic sycophants who all go around Liking each other’s paranoid tirades in a giant circle jerk of electronic validation.
They hate Obama, and they post about him regularly. They hate liberals, and they post about them regularly. They hate Muslims, and they post about them regularly. They hate the federal government, and they post about it regularly. They hate so many things, it’s a wonder they can squeeze in enough time between Obamacare Raging and TEA Party Fellating to even remember that they’re supposed to be fighting the corruption of a local school board rather than taking on all the ills of the nation from the confines of a small, 1,600 person Facebook group.
What happened with BBW is that its cause attracted people not motivated by race or seizing power, but out of a desire to put an end to corruption and heal a dysfunctional school district to improve the lives of all the children it’s failing to educate. These people then got stirred up in the big pot of goopy stew and every single member now has bits of everyone else floating around them. The group actively drives out people with differing world views on certain topics and encourages a hive-minded groupthink in place of reasonable discourse. If you want to be accepted by the group, you say the things they want you to say, not just about BISD but about everything else. Ever. On the planet.
If you know me, or even if you just read this blog from time to time, you know that I don’t give a crap about political affiliations. I’m a Libertarian at my core, but I lean left on some topics and right on others. I believe in the power and responsibility of the individual, but I also believe in…well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is, I don’t fit their mold. Neither do many others, most of whom eventually choose to leave the group altogether rather than associate with people who routinely insult and belittle anyone who isn’t a hardline, ultra right-wing neocon TEA party whatever.
The only way this whole BISD situation is ever going to get any better is if the Texas Education Agency comes in, dissolves the board and appoints a conservator for the district. Clean house, get things back in shape, then hold city-wide elections for new trustees. If the three potential board members had won their court case today to win their seats, I was ready to make the request that their first act be to resign and ask the TEA to come in and take over. But I don’t think that would happen, because I don’t think power ever surrenders power. Even when it’s the only way to achieve the goals everyone claims they’re fighting for.
So anyway, what you have now is a group with a whole bunch of really great people who joined it to try and make Beaumont a better place mixed in together with people who want to seize power, who can’t even see their own racism, who won’t even acknowledge contradictory facts when they emerge and/or who are just there for attention and ego-stroking. It’s just a mess. And I’m walking away from it.
I’ll probably continue covering BISD here, and I’ll probably still go to the meetings and live blog them, for whatever dwindling audience might still care. After this post, I don’t expect to have many friends left on either side of the fence, but I told you before. I never did learn.
As I write this, it’s September 12, 2013 and I’m in Texas, smack in the middle of the Bible Belt where you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who thinks the current situation in Syria was foretold in the Bible and we’re entering the End Times.
But, considering that someone, somewhere has been preaching that all the signs of the end of days prophecies are being fulfilled for as long as we’ve had end of days prophecies, I think we’re probably safe.
UPDATE: Now it’s April, 2014 and people are freaking out over the BLOOD MOON tetrad. For some reason. Apparently, whenever this happens, it always (except not always) signifies something “traumatic and world changing” happening to Jews. Funny how there was one in 1948 to “signify” the modern state of Israel being born, though, because that event doesn’t seem particularly traumatic. Now, if it had happened a few years earlier, that might be more convincing, what with that whole Holocaust thing that was going on. Blah. Stop being stupid, people.
Still, a stopped clock is bound to be right eventually, so who knows? But I’ll take my chances.
Don’t believe me about all the failed prophecies? Fine. Please stand still while I smite thee with the Hammer Of History.
AD 30 Jesus. According to Matthew 16:28, Jesus himself predicted his second coming and the end of the world within the lifetime of his contemporaries.
AD 156 A man named Montanus declared himself to be the “Spirit of Truth,” the personification of the Holy Spirit, mentioned in the Gospel of John, who was to reveal all truth. Montanus quickly gathered followers, including a pair of far-seeing “prophetesses”, who claimed to have visions and ecstatic experiences supposedly from God. They began to spread what they called “The Third Testament, a series of revelatory messages which foretold of the soon-coming Kingdom of God and “The New Jerusalem,” which was about to descend from heaven to land in Montanus’ city of Pepuza, in Phrygia (modern-day Turkey), where it would be home for all “true” believers. The word was spread, and all were urged to come to Phrygia to await the Second Coming. The movement divided Christians into two camps, even after the New Jerusalem didn’t appear. Whole communities were fragmented, and continuous discord resulted. Finally, in AD 431, the Council of Ephesus condemned Chiliasm, or belief in the Millennium, as a dangerous superstition, and Montanus was declared to be a heretic. Despite the failure of the prediction, the cult survived several centuries until it was ordered exterminated by Pope Leo I. –SSA pg 54
AD 247, Christian prophets declare that the persecutions by the Romans are a sign of the impending return of Jesus.
AD 300 Lactantius Firmianus (AD c260 – AD c340), called the “Christian Cicero”, from his Divinae Institutiones: “The fall and ruin of the world will soon take place, but it seems that nothing of the kind is to be feared as the city of Rome stands intact.” Rome would fall in AD 410. –TEOTW pg 27
AD 365, Hilary of Poitiers predicted the world would end in 365.
AD 380, The Donatists, a North African Christian sect, predicted the world would end in 380.
AD 387 St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, identified the Goths with Ezekial’s Gog. The Goths had just destroyed the Imperial army at Adrianople, prompting Ambrose to say, “…the end of the world is coming upon us.” –TEOTW pg 27
AD 300 St. Martin, Bishop of Tours: “Non est dubium, quin antichristus…There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power.” –TEOTW pg 27
AD 410 When Rome was sacked, some proclaimed, (as reported by St. Augustine of Hippo) “Behold, from Adam all the years have passed, and behold, the 6,000 years are completed.” This alludes to the Great Week theory, held by many millennialists, that the God-alloted time of man on earth was 6,000 years, to be followed by a thousand years of peace under the earthly reign of Christ. –TIME pg 30
AD 500 At the mid-fifth century, Vandal invasions recalled calculations that the world would end in the year 500, 6000 years after Creation, and spurred new calculations to show that the name of the Vandal king Genseric represented 666: the number of the Beast. –Apoc pg 34
AD 500 Hippolytus of Rome, a third-century theologian supported the oft-accepted (for the day) view of the end of the world occuring sometime around the year AD 500. He used a mass of scriptural evidence, including the dimensions of the ark of the covenant. –TIME pg 31
AD 500 Roman theologian Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 160-240) predicted the second coming of Jesus in the year 500.
AD 500 The theologian Irenaeus predicted the second coming of Jesus in the year 500.
AD 590 Bishop Gregory of Tours, who died in AD 594, calculated the Time of the End for sometime between 799 and 806. –Apoc pg 48
AD 793 Elipand, bishop of Toledo, accused Beatus, abbot of Liebana, of having prophesied the end of the world. Beatus made the prediction on Easter Eve, predicting the end of the world that very night, spraking a riot. –Apoc 49-50
AD 800 Sextus Julius Africanus predicted the second coming of Jesus in the year 800.
AD 800 Beatus of Liébana, not having learned anything from the riot he started in 793, wrote in his Commentary on the Apocalypse that the world would end in the year 800 at the latest.
AD 806 Bishop Gregory of Tours predicted the world would end between 799 and 806.
Ad 848 The Christian prophetess Thiota predicted the world would end in 848.
AD 900 Adso of Montier-en-lDer, a celbrated 10th-century apocalyptic writer, a Frankish emperor of Rome who was ‘the last and greates of rulers’ would, after governing his empire, go to Jerusalem and put off his sceptre and crown at the Mount of Olives; this would be the end and consummation of the Christian empire and the beginning of the reign of Antichrist. –TIME pg 53
AD 970 Lotharingian computists foresaw the End on Friday, March 25, 970, when the Annunciation and Good Friday fell on the same day. They believed that it was on this day that Adam was created, Isaac was sacrificed, the Red Sea was parted, Jesus was conceived, and Jesus was crucified.
AD 992 A rumour that the end would come when the feast of the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday. This happened in 992, when Easter fell on March 22, and eager calculators established that the world would end before three years had passed. –Apoc pg 50-51
AD 1000 Christian authority all over the known world predicted the second coming in the year 1000.
AD 1033 When the world did not end in 1000, the same Christian authorities claimed they had forgotten to add in the length of Jesus’ life and revised the prediction to 1033. The writings of the Burgundian monk Radulfus Glaber described a rash of mass hysterias during the period from 1000-1033.
AD 1033 The roads to Jerusalem fill up with an unprecedented number of pilgrims. Asked why this is happening, the ‘more truthful of that time…cautiously responded that it presaged nothing else but the coming of the Lost One, the Antichrist, who, according to divine authority, stands ready to come at the end of the age.” –TIME pg 47
AD 1100 Guibert of Nagent (1064-1125) informed would-be crusaders that they should seize Jerusalem as a necessary prelude to its eventual capture by Antichrist. “The end of the world is already near!,” he explained. –TIME pg 61-62
AD 1184 Various Christian prophets predicted the end of the world in the year 1184. Nobody seems to remember just why.
AD 1186 Certain prophecies, during the time of the Third Crusade, began circulating in 1184, telling of a “new world order.” These were believed to have been written by astrologers in Spain, and one of them, the “Letter of Toledo,” appearing in 1186, urged everyone to flee to caves and other remote places, because the world was soon to be devastated by terrible storms, famine, earthquakes, and more. Only a few true belivers would be spared. –SSA pg 55
AD 1260 The year, according to Joachim of Flores'(c1145-1202) prophecies, when the world was supposed to pass throught the reign of Antichrist and enter the Age of the Holy Spirit. Joachim was an Italian mystic theologian who wrote, in his Expositio in Apocalypsia, that history was to be divided into three ages: The Age of the Law (the Father), The Age of the Gospel (the Son), and the final Age of the Spirit. He had indicated at the end of the 12th Century that the Antichrist was already born in Rome. –DOOM pg 87, TEOTW pg 125
AD 1260 A Dominican monk named Brother Arnold gained a following when he wrote that the end was about to take place. According to his scenario, he would call upon Christ, in the name of the poor, to judge the Church leaders, including the Pope. Christ would then appear in judgement, revealing the Pope to be the heralded Antichrist. –SSA pg 56
AD 1297 Writing in 1297, the friar Petrus Olivi predicted Antichrist’s coming between 1300 and 1340, after which the world would enter the Age of the Holy Spirit, which itself would end around the year 2000 with Gog and the Last Judgement. –Apoc pg 54
AD 1284 Pope Innocent III predicted the end of the world in the year 1284, 666 years after the founding of Islam.
Ad 1290 When Joachim of Fiore’s predicted end of the world had not happened by 1260, members of his order (the Joachites) simply re-scheduled the end another 30 years later to 1290.
AD 1300 A Frenchman, Jean de Roquetaillade, published a guide to the tribulation. Imprisoned for most of his adult life, he predicted Antichrist in 1366, to be followed in 1369 or 1370 by a millennial Sabbath. Jerusalem, under a Jewish king, would become the center of the world. –Apoc pg 55
AD 1300 Many Germans were living in fearful expectation of the return of the Emperor Frederick II, who had been considered a century earlier as the Antichrist, the terrible ruler who was to chastise the Church before the return of Christ.
AD 1306 Gerard of Poehlde, believing that Christ’s Millennium actually began when the emperor Constantine came to power,
predicts the end of the world 1000 years after the start of Constantine’s reign, in 1306.
AD 1307 fra Dolcino founds a society, the Apostolic Bretheren, in 1260. He preached that authority had passed from the Roman Church to themselves. The Pope and clergy would soon be exterminated by the forces of the Last Empoeror in a tremendous battle leading to the age of the spirit. Dolcino and his followers perished in a battle at Monte Rebello in 1307. –TIME pg 68
AD 1335 The Joachites again re-scheduled the end of the world, this time to the year 1335.
AD 1348 Agnolo di Tura, called “the Fat,” writing during the time of the Black Death: “And I…buried my five children with my own hands, and so did many others likewise…And nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death… People said and believed, ‘This is the end of the world.'” –TEOTW pg 115
AD 1349 The group known as the Flagellants claimed that their movement must last thirty-three and a half years, culminating in the Second Coming. They persuaded many people that their assertions were true. One chronicle states: “Many persons, and even young children, were soon bidding farewell to the world, some with prayers, others with praises on their lips.” –TEOTW 125-129
AD 1366 Jean de Roquetaillade, a French ascetic, predicted the Antichrist was to come in 1366, with the end of the world a few years after that.
AD 1367 Czech archdeacon Militz of Kromeriz claimed the Antichrist was alive and well and would show up no later than 1367, bringing the end of the world with him.
AD 1378 The Joachites again re-scheduled the end of the world, this time to the year 1378.
AD 1420 Martinek Hauska, near Prague, led a following of priests to announce the soon Second Coming of Christ. They warned everyone to flee to the mountains because between February 1 and February 14, 1420, god was to destroy every town with Holy Fire, thus beginning the Millennium. Hauska’s band then went on a rampage to “purify the earth”, ridding the world of, in their eyes, false clergymen in the Church. They occupied an abandoned fortress which was named Tabor, and defied the religious powers of the day, ultimately succumbing to the Bohemians in 1452 –SSA pg 56, TIME pg 75-77
AD 1476 Hans Bohm was burnt at the stake for heresy, after proclaiming the village of Nikleshausen the center of imminent world salvation. –Apoc pg 151
AD 1490 Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican visionary, attracted large crowds with his prophecies of Antichrist. He began preaching that his city of Florence would soon be “The reformation of all Italy…” and that its people would take on the mantle of God’s elect, saved from destruction to play a glorious new role. This would only be accomplished, however, if Florence submitted peacefully to the invading Charles VIII of France. They did so, and for a short time became what has been called a ‘proto-Messianic republic.’ But when the corrupt Pope Alexander VI regained Florence, Savanarola was publicly executed in May, 1498. –TIME pg 79-81
AD 1496 Several 15th Century prophets predict the end of the world for the year 1496.
AD 1499 A mathemetician in Tubingen, Germany, had foretold of a coming alignment of the planets in 1524, which would bring a disastrous world-wide flood. This was generally rejected because such would violate God’s covenant with Noah. the uneasiness, though, did not pass, and in 1523, printing presses in Germany churned out 51 pamphlets which added fuel to the speculative fire.
AD 1500 Martin Luther, Protestant reformer, stated: “I persuade myself verily, that the day of judgement will not be absent full three hundred years. God will not, cannot, suffer this world much longer… the great day is drawing near in which the kingdom of abominations shall be overthrown.”
AD 1500 The Italian artist Botticelli captioned his painting, “The Mystical Nativity” with a message warning that the end of the world would occur within three years, based on the predictions of Girolamo Savonarola.
AD 1526 Anabaptists in St. Gallen, Switzerland, excited by various leaders and events, began running through the streets and shouting that the Last Day would arrive in exactly one week. Many were baptized, stopped work, abandoned their homes and set off into the hills, singing and praying in expectant furvor. After a week had passed with no sign of their returning Lord, they returned to their homes. –TEOTW pg 145-153
AD 1520 Nicholas Storch was a former weaver who was a self-proclaimed expert on the Bible. He began warning groups of workers that all of Christendom was about to be annihilated by the Turks. Not only did he quote from the Scriptures, but insisted that God spoke to him directly through dreams and visions. Ultimately rejected by reformer Martin Luther, Storch vanishes from history at the end of 1522. –TEOTW pg 155
AD 1520 Thomas Muntzer, another self-appointed prophet in Germany, who made bold predictions based upon the book of Daniel, and called for the overthrow by the peasantry of those in power. “The time of the harvest is at hand,” he declared. “…I have sharpened my sickle.” Muntzer proclaimed that is was the Last Days, and whoever resisted his preaching would be, “..slain by the Turks when they come next year.” He was executed in 1525, after leading a peasant army in rebellion. TEOTW pg 153-158
AD 1520 Melchior Hoffman (c1498-1543/4) was one of the most influential of the self-appointed prophets. A Swabian furrier by trade, Hoffman had converted to Lutheranism in 1522 and became a wandering preacher. In 1526 Hoffman published a detailed pamphlet on the twelfth chapter of Daniel which proclaimed that the world would end in seven years, at Easter fo 1533. The seven year period was to be divided into two parts. The first part would see the appearance of Elijah and Enoch, who would overthrow the Pope. They would, however, be martyred and all the saints would then be persecuted. After forty-two months of tribulation, Christ would appear. Hoffman referred to himself as Elijah, and embarked on the fulfillment of his vision. He was imprisoned for his views, however, in Strasburg, later dying in the 1540s. –TEOTW pg 160-162
AD 1524 Prophets in England predicted a flood on February 1, 1524 (Julian) to strike at London. 20,000 people abandoned their homes in fear. Yet another prophet, citing an alignment of planets in the constellation Pisces, set the date for the flood for February 20th. Both days turned out to be sunny with not even a drop of rain.
AD 1525 Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer, thinking that he was living at the “end of all ages,” in 1525, incited a spectacularly unsuccessful revolt of the peasantry.
AD 1527 A German bookbinder named Hans Nut said that he was a prophet of God sent by Christ to herald the Second Coming. This would occur exactly three and a half years after the start of the Peasant’s War, in 1527. The Lord’s arrival would be followed, according to Nut, by a thousand years of free food, love, and free sex. He amassed some followers, but was killed during an attempted prison escape in 1527. –SSA pg 56
AD 1528 Hans Romer insisted that Christ was coming within the year, so he organized his own rebellion to attack the city of Erfurt on New Year’s Day of 1528. He was betrayed, however, and arrested. –TEOTW 159
AD 1528 Prophets in England, having failed in their February 20th, 1524 prediction for a massive flood, reschedule the prediction to 1528.
AD 1528 Reformer Hans Hut predicted the end would occur on Pentecost (May 27, Julian calendar) 1528.
AD 1532 Bishop Frederick Nausea (yes, that is his name), predicted that the world would end in 1532 after hearing a single report of bloody crosses appearing in the sky alongside a comet.
AD 1533 Anabaptist prophet Melchior Hoffman predicted the end of the world in 1533. he also predicted that Jesus would reappear in Strasbourg, to save 144,000 people from the world’s end.
AD 1533 Mathematician Michael Stifel, a devout Christian, calculated that the Day of Judgement would begin at exactly 8:00am on October 19, 1533.
AD 1534 A message out of the besieged city of Munster, where fanatic Anabaptists, originally led by one Jan Matthys, self-proclaimed Enoch, second witness (after Hoffman’s Elijah) to the coming end of all things, read: “God has made known to us that all should get ready to go to the New Jerusalem (Munster), the city of saints, because he is going to punish the world…flee out of Babylon, and deliver every man his soul…for this is the time of the Lord’s vengeance.” Matthys had also fancied himself a second Gideon, leading 30 followers out in an attack on the city’s besiegers. He and his band of thirty were annhilated. The movement’s new leader, Jan Beukels, or Bockholdt, known to history as John of Leyden, had declared himself King of the World, a position he would hold until Christ’s return. Berhardt Rothmann published two pamphlets proclaiming the triumph of the saints at Munster, but the Catholic bishop whose town was held, eventually retook it, executing most of the rebels. –SSA pg 57, TEOTW pg 163-175
AD 1532 Michael Stiefel, mathematician and follower of Luther, published Apocalypse on the Apocalypse: A Little Book of Arithmetic about the Antichristwhich computed the Day of Judgement for 8AM on October 9, 1533. when nothing happened on that day, the local peasants siezed the minister and tookhim to nearby Wittenburg, where some sued him for damages. Stiefel survived this misadventure and, twenty years later, published a “recalculation.” –Apoc pg 91-92
AD 1537 French astrologer Pierre Turrel, a devout Christian, wanting to avoid the Jaochites’ embarrassment, hedges his bets and predicts the end of the world in 1537, 1544, 1801 or 1814.
AD 1555 French theologian Pierre d’Ailly predicted the end of the world in 1555. Christopher Columbus’ own apocolyptic views were based on this prediction.
AD 1556 Rumors of the end of the world swept through the churches of Switzerland on Magdalene’s Day in 1556, source unknown.
AD 1583 Several astrologers and clergy cite a conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn as a sign that the second coming of Jesus will occur in London at noon on Apr 28, 1583.
AD 1584 Above prophecy is revised one year later.
AD 1588 Philip Melanchthon, ally of Martin Luther, claimed that a divine numerical cycle, chiefly utilizing the numbers 7 and 10, would culminate in 1588, which was 10×7, years from Luther’s 1518 defiance of the Pope. It was then that the seventh seal would be opened, Antichrist be would be overthrown, and the Last Judgement would occur. –The Armada pg 175
AD 1588 The sage Johann Müller (aka Regiomontanus) predicts the second comiong of Christ in 1588.
AD 1594 John Napier, mathemetician extraordinaire, published A Plaine Discoverie of the Whole Revelation of St. John, in which he predicted the Last Judgement either for 1688, according to Revelation, or 1700, according to Daniel. –Apoc pg 92
AD 1600 The Fifth Monarchy Men, an extreme Puritan sect in England, believed that the time of the monarchy which would succeed the Biblical Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies was at hand. During this time Christ would appear to reign on earth with his saints for 1000 years. After the fall of the Commonwealth, the sect first supported Oliver Cromwell, but later were at odds with the Lord Protector. Their extreme violence led to the arrest of their leaders. Despite attempted uprisings, the movement eventually died out. –Brit 1957, vol 9, pg 227
AD 1600 Martin Luther predicted that the world would end no later than the year 1600.
AD 1603 Dominican monk Tomasso Campanella wrote that the sun would collide with the Earth in 1603.
AD 1623 Eustachius Poyssel used numerology to pinpoint 1623 as the year of the end of the world.
AD 1624 The same astrologers who failed in predicting a great flood in 1524, finally moved their predictions safely beyond their own deaths, to 1624.
AD 1648 Sabbatai Zevi, a rabbi from Smyrna, Turkey, predicted that the Messiah would come in 1648. When 1648 arrived, Zevi announced thet he was the Messiah.
AD 1651 The date selected for the end of the world by fifteenth century “prophet” Johann Hilten. –TIME pg 89
AD 1654 In 1578, physician Helisaeus Roeslin of Alsace, basing his prediction on a nova that occurred in 1572, predicted the world ending in 1654 in a blaze of fire.
AD 1656 The date the world would end, according to predictions put forth by Christopher Columbus in his “Book of Prophecies”. Columbus held that his explorations were fulfillment of prophecy. he was to have led a Christian army in a great final crusade that would eventually convert the entire world to Christendom. The date weas chosen because supposedly 1656 years passed between the time of the creation and Noah’s flood. –99R pg 13
AD 1657 The Fifth Monarchy Men, a group of radical Christians intending to force the British Parliament to base all laws on the Bible (much like Christians are trying to do to the United States) predicted the world would end in 1657.
AD 1660 Joseph Mede, whose writings influenced James Ussher and Isaac Newton, claimed that the Antichrist appeared way back in 456, and the end of the world would come in 1660.
AD 1666 During a period of strife, English clergy announce that the year 1666 will bring the end of the world, a prediction thought to be coming true when a great fire strikes London.
AD 1666 Few believe Rabi Sabbatai Zevi is the Messiah, so he changes his prediction for the appearence of the Messiah to 1666. He is arrested for disturbing the peace with his prophecies, and when given the choice between execution and conversion to Islam, eagerly converts.
AD 1673 Deacon William Aspinwall, a leader of the Fifth Monarchy movement, predicts the end of the world for 1673.
AD 1680 The supposed founder of Rosicrucianism, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, told in his Proper Exposition of the Aspects of the Book of Revelation of the fall of the idolatrous Roman church and the establishement of Christ’s Millennium in 1860. –Apoc pg 122
AD 1686 Frenchman Pierre Jurieu published his work L’Accomplissement des propheties, in which he predicted the end of the persecution of the Protestant Huguenots, and the fall of Babylon (the Roman Catholic Church, according to Jurieu) for 1689.
AD 1688 John Napier, the mathematician who discovered logarithms, applies his new mathematics to the Book of Revelations and predicts the end of the world for 1688.
AD 1689 Pierre Jurieu, a Camisard prophet, predicted that Judgement Day would occur in 1689. The Camisards were Huguenots of the Languedoc region of southern France.
AD 1694 Anglican rector John Mason and German theologian Johann Alsted both predict the end of the world for 1694. Another German prophet Johann Jacob Zimmerman, predicted that Jesus would reappear in America and organized an expedition of Christians to sail across the Atlantic and welcome their savior when he reappeared. Although Zimmerman himself died on the day of departure, his followers completed the journey and remained encamped in the wilderness of North America until it became obvious that Jesus had stood them up.
AD 1697 Anglican rector Thomas Beverly predicts the end of the world for 1697.
AD 1697 Notorious witch chaser Cotton Mather predicts the end of the world for 1697.
AD 1697 Napier tries again, predicts the end of the world for 1697.
AD 1697 Henry Archer, a Fifth Monarchy Manpredicts the end of the world for 1697.
AD 1700 The Camisards were a radical movement of French peasantry that engaged in organised military resistance to the renunciation of the Edict of Nantes. They were supposedly accompanied by miracles, such as lights in the sky which guided them, and resistance to wounding. They also purportedly spoke in tongues and prophesied in ecstatic trances, foretelling the soon destruction of the Roman Catholic Church, the supposed Satan and Babylon. Due to pressures they fled to England where they became known as the “French Prophets,” forcasting doom and a new world ahead. They gained large numbers of followers, and much attention. Their prophecies failed to materialize, however, and their numbers soon dwindled. Their movement influenced many later groups, though, including the Shakers. –SSA pg 57
AD 1701 The prophetic writer Mory Cary, writing in 1647, expected the conversion of theJews in 1656 and the Millennium in 1701, and thought that there would be a prophetic outpouring before then. “Not only men, but women shall prophesy…Not only superiors but inferiors; not only those that have university learning but those that have it not, even servants and handmaids.” –TIME pg 90
AD 1700 Immanuel Swedenborg, though never claiming the desire to found a sect, said that dreams, visions, and direct communications from God had led him to believe he had been given a new, divine, interpretation of Scripture. Swedenborg claimed to have witnessed the Second Advent, which was manifested in the inauguration of his “New Church.” –HOD pg 236-238, Brit 1957, vol 21
AD 1755 A sea captain witnessing the disaster of the Lisbon quake wrote: “…if one went through the broad places of squares, nothing to be met with but people wringing their hands, and crying ‘the world is at an end.'” –TEOTW pg 179-189
AD 1700 Jonathan Edwards, premier evangelist, was fascinated by the Apocalypse, noted all signs of the times, and calculated and recalculated its coming. He concluded that Antichrist’s rule would end when the papacy ended in 1866, and that old serpent, the Devil, would finally be vanquished in the year 2000, when the Millennium would begin. –Apoc pg 171
AD 1700 Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist, was himself not immune to misprophecy. He developed a carefully constructed grand scenario which predicted that the Jews would return to reclaim Jerusalem in 1899, and that the second coming of Christ would occur precisely forty-nine years later.
AD 1785 Jean-Baptiste Ruere, a professed descendant of King David, claimed that heavenly sources assured him he was destined to rule as king in Jerusalem, and likewise foretold of revolution, kingdoms overthrown, the Jews returning to the Holy Land, and Jesus returning to launch the Third Age. –Apoc pg 107
AD 1789 The forecast year for the end of the world, or at least of Christendom, by Cardinal Pierre d-Ailly, Canon Roussart, Dijon Academy rector Pierre Turel, and the Londoner Peter Pearson. –Apoc pg 109
AD 1799 Esther Thrale Piozzi recorded how many found the First Consul of France, Napoleon Buonaparte to be “the Devil Incarnate,” the Appolyon mentioned in Scripture. The name of Antichrist had become clear, and it was (in the Corsican dialect) N’Apollione, the Destroyer “coming forwards followed by a cloud of locusts from ye bottomless Pit.” –Apoc pg 114-115
AD 1800 Mother Ann Lee, leader of the “Shaker” movement, claimed that in her the female principle of Christ was manifested, and the promise of the Second Coming fulfilled. Christ’s kingdom on earth, according to Lee, began with the establishment of the Shaker Church.
AD 1800 The Rev Edward Bishop Elliot, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, provided a massive work in four volumes, wherein he stated that the French Revolution had been the “pouring out of the 1st vial (of Revelation)” There was to be a short time, he warned, before the end of all things. –TSOR pg 11
AD 1820 In England, Edward Irving preached on the imminent appearance of Christ as witnessed by the apparent revival of “apostolic gifts”, and Irving’s own intense study of prophetical books, especially Revelation.
AD 1832 Mormon founder Joseph Smith prophesied under “divine revelation” the gathering of the saints and the coming of the New Jerusalem, the temple of which would be built in Missouri and “reared in this generation.” Smith added “Pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquake will sweep the wicked of this generation from off the face of the land, to open and prepare the way for the return of the lost tribes of Israel from the north country….there are those now living upon the earth whose eyes shall not be closed in death until they see all these things which I have spoken, fulfilled.” –99R pg 120
AD 1840 Dr. John Cumming, eloquent preacher of apocalypse, drew audiences of many thousands to his lectures. Cumming, while preparing for the publications of these lectures, warned that the seventh and final vial of God’s wrath was now being poured out. “We are about to enter on the Last Woe…and to hear the nearly-spent reverberations of the Last Trumpet.” –TSOR pg 84
AD 1843 People stared in wonder and unneasiness at the parahelia, a great halo that circled the sun. They also looked with fear at the night sky where a giant comet with a fiery tail rushed through the darkness. Some said that the comet was racing toward mankind, bringing “the end of the world.” –Thief pg 1
AD 1844 William Miller, a Massachussetts farmer, after a years-long study of the Bible, chiefly Revelation and Daniel, concurred that the Second Coming of Christ would take place between 21 March, 1843, and 21 March, 1844. When this time passed, Miller and his followers set up new dates, again with failure. Eventually the movement collapsed, but gave birth to Seventh Day Adventism, while also influencing the formation of several others, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses. –SSA pg 58, TSOR pg 16, Doom pg 92-111
AD 1847 Joseph Wolff, a converted Jew living in Palestine, predicted the Advent for 1847. –Thief pg 1
AD 1850 Chinese schoolteacher Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, failing a government job examination for the thrid time, suffered an emotional collapse during which he professed to have had visions of an old man in a golden beard, as well as a younger man. These two told Hung that the world was overrun by demons and that he, Hung, was to be the intrument in their eradication. Later, after returning to his home village, Hung reread a Chines Christian missionary’s book and discovered the meaning for the vision which he had experienced. The old man had been God, and the younger man, Jesus. Hung further understood that he was the second Son of God, sent to save China. Eventually his charisma and teachings began to gather a following and he became the leader of a group known as the Pai Shang-ti Hui (God Worshipper’s Society). By 1850 the movement had grown into open rebellion. In 1851 Hung proclaimed the new dynasty the T’ai-p’ing T’ien-kun (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), and assumed the title of Heavenly King. His ragtag group of thousands grew into a disciplined army of over a million. Full scale war erupted across the Chinese countryside. Chinese imperial troups were defeated in pitched battle on more than one occassion. Hung captured the city of Nanking, making it his capital. Eventually he fell ill, and committed suicide in 1864. Chinese forces lay seige to Nanking, and in taking it inflicted a terrible slaughter of over 100,000 people. The rebellion gradually faded across China. As many as 20,000,000 people died as a result of this, the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion, and Hung Hsiu-ch’uan’s misprophetic delusions. –Brit 1977, vol 8
AD 1858 The Rev Richard Shimeall of New York identified Napolean III as the Beast of the Apocalypse. –TSOR pg 78
AD 1870 Cyrus Read Teed, a former corporal in the Union medical corps, said that he was the “seventh messenger of God”, and adopted “Koresh” as his new surname. Teed claimed that an angel had visited him, giving him new spiritual awareness. He was now the reincarnated Messiah, and it was his job to gather the 144,000 faithful to await the Last Judgement. Teed’s legacy would bear bitter fruit in the 1990s, with the rise of another Koresh, David, who would lead his followers into an apocalyptic death near Waco, Texas.
AD 1874 Charles Taze Russell, founder of what would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses, first announced that the Last Days had definitely begun in 1874, then that the end would come in 1914. Succeeding Witnesses placed the date in 1925, 1936, 1953, 1973… –99R pg 20
AD 1881 A prophecy in rhyme by Mother Shipton: “The world to an end shall come,/in Eighteen hundred and eighty one.” Purportedly written by a 15th century witch, it was actually penned by Charles Hindley of Brighton, who profitted greatly from the double false prediction. –TSOR pg 99
AD 1890 A native American known as Kicking Bear claimed to have received a certain divine revelation. Christ had returned to earth, given his followers a new spiritual magic, the “Ghost Dance”, which they were to engage in until Christ came again to “take them up into the air,” eventually to be set down among the ghosts of their ancestors on the new earth, where only Indians would live. The movement spread quickly among the various tribes on and off the reservations, especially among the Sioux. –Bury pg 431-435
AD 1897 Brazil — Antonio Conselheiro (The Counsellor), a sixty-year old, half crazy ascetic, became spiritual leader of Canudos, a “New Jerusalem” of tumbledown shacks in the remote state of Bahia. The residents were largely peasants who fled the decline of the northeast coffee and sugar economies. They practiced a mixture of Catholicism, Indian rites, and witchcraft. conselheiro had seen the overthrow of the Emperor Pedro II as an act of disobedience to God, and a shattering of the patriarchal order so wicked that it must foreshadow the apocalypse. After several violent encounters with local police and government soldiers, in which the Canudos zealots inflicted severe defeats on their foes, an army of 10,000 men surrounded Canudos, and on October 5, 1897 took by force the last smoking huts. The defenders had died by enemy bullets and by fire, the latter set by their own hands.
AD 1900 Paris priest Pierre Lacheze published several apocalyptic works, and predicted the restoration of the Jerusalem temple for 1892 and Doomsday in 1900. –Apoc pg 136
AD 1900 Philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, eminent Russian theologian, foretold in his work, War, Progress, and the End of History, of a war with the Japanese in which the Japanese would win, conquering much of the world, but eventually being driven back by the Europeans. Then there would arise a brilliant writer and thinker who would unite the world and decree everlasting peace, ultimately summoning all religious leaders of the world, promising them everything they wanted if they would bow down and accept his sovereignty. The Jews would accept him as the Messiah, until they learn that he is not a Jew. Then would begin the revolt that would lead to the final battle north of Jerusalem, as well as the eruption of a volcano from the bottom of the Dead Sea. Said Solovyev: “The approaching end of the world strikes me like some obvious but quite subtle scent — just as a traveller nearing the sea feels the sea breeze before he sees the sea.” –TEOTW pg 221-227
AD 1901 In 1889, the Rev. Michael Baxter, editor of the London Christian Herald, announced in a book called The End of This Age about the End of This Century that 1896 would witness the Rapture of 144,000 devout Christians, and that the world would end in 1901. –TIME pg 120-121
AD 1901 Sergei Nilus, Russian magistrate, in a book titled The Great in the Small, prophesied “the coming of the Antichrist and the rule of Satan on earth.” He later stated in 1905, “The king born of the blood of Zion — the Antichrist is near to the throne of universal power.” –TEOTW pg 234-237
AD 1906 H.G.Wells shows that apocalyptic fever was prevalent in his day: “Like most people of my generation…I was launched into life with Millennial expectations…it might be in my lifetime or a little after it, there would be trumpets and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of Armageddon and the judgement.” –TSOR pg 177
AD 1908 When a terrible explosion rocked Siberia, a newspaper correspondent present reported…”All the inhabitants of the village ran out into the streets in panic. The old women wept. Everyone thought the end of the world was approaching.” –TEOTW pg 274
AD 1910 In Pittsburgh, a clergyman announced that the arrival of Haley’s Comet would herald Armageddon and the Second Coming.
AD 1918 Clarence Larkin, in his book Dispensational Truth, writes, “…at no time in the history of the Christian Church have the conditions neccessary to the Lord’s return been so completely fulfilled as at the present time, therefore his coming is imminent, and will not probably be long delayed…If the Millennium is to be ushered in in AD 2000, then the “Rapture” must take place at least 7 years before that…It may have been 4075 years, instead of 4004 (as generally given) from Adam to Christ. In that case we are living in the year 5993 from the creation of Adam, or on the eve of the Rapture.” –Disp
AD 1940 William Marrion Branham, a pentecostal faith healer declared himself to be God’s end-time prophet, and urged all Christians to come out of their corrupt denominations before the Lord’s return. –99R pg 115-116
AD 1945 A Protestant minister in Hiroshima upon the dropping of the first atomic bomb: “The feeling I had was that everyone was dead. The whole city was destroyed…I thought all of my family must be dead — it doesnt matter if I die…I thought that this was the end of Hiroshima, of Japan, of humankind…This was God’s judgement on man.” –TEOTW pg 337
AD 1973 The “Children of God” cult claimed that its leader, David Berg, was “God’s end-time prophet to the world.” They fled America in 1973 due to Berg’s prediction that Comet Kohoutek would destroy the country. –99R pg 117
AD 1976 Prophecy teacher Doug Clark announced that President Jimmy Carter would be “the president who will meet Mr. 666 (the Antichrist) SOON!” A flier announcing Clark’s new book that year claimed, “The Death of the United States and the Birth of One World Government under President Carter.” –SSA pg 24 (Personal note: I was working at a TV station in Orange County California whose manager believed the Clark prediction, and transformed the station’s output into 24 hour a day warnings of the end of the Earth, even to the point of abandoning the commercials rotation. The Earth did not end but the TV station went out of business. )
AD 1980 North Carolina prophecy teacher Colin Deal has set dates for the return of Christ for 1982 or 1983, 1988, 1989, and in a March 17, 1989 radio broadcast, “about eleven years away.” If at first you don’t succeed… –SSA pg 38
AD 1980 Prophecy promoter Charles Taylor predicted a 1988 rapture: “This new book (Watch 1988 – The Year of Climax) is being written with the expectation that it will be the last book I will ever write …with the millennial reign of Christ due to begin in 1995, the rapture must surely occcur in 1988 to coordinate with many other prophecies!” Not surprisingly, Taylor also made similar predictions for 1975, 1976, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, and, of course, 1989. –SSA pg 134-142
AD 1981 May 25. About fifty members of a group called the Assembly of Yahweh gathered at Coney Island, NY, in white robes, awaiting their “Rapture” from a world about to be destroyed between 3PM and sundown. A small crowd of onlookers watched and waited for something to happen. The members chanted prayers to the beat of bongo drums until sunset. The end did not come.
AD 1982 Full-page advertisements in many major newspapers for the weekend of April 24-25, 1982, announced: “The Christ is Now Here!” and predicted that he was to make himself known “within the next two months.” That date passed, but the Tara Centers that placed the ad said that the dalay was only because the “consciousness of the human race was not quite right…” –99R pg 154-155
AD 1980 Psychic Jeanne Dixon predicted a world holocaust for the 1980s, and the rise of a powerful world leader, born in the Middle-East in 1962. –99R pg 120-122
AD 1988 Edgar C. Whisenant, in his book 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, gave a three day period in September for the saints to be “caught up with the Lord.” When this failed, he issued another book claiming that he was a year off, and urging everyone to be ready in 1989. –SSA pg 28-33, DOOM pg 134
AD 1991 Reginald Dunlop, end-times author, stated that “The Antichrist would be revealed” around the year 1989 or 1990, perhaps sooner.” The Rapture he predicted for 1991. Says dunlop, God verified this “through many prayers…I am MORE than positive that this is THE YEAR that the Rapture will occur.” –SSA pg 36
AD 1990 Southwest Radio Church’s David Webber and Hoah Hutching’s book, “Prophecy in Stone” contained a chart which set dates for the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in 1974-1978, and the Great Tribulation for sometime between 1981 and 1992. A later book, “New Light on the Great Pyramid,” had another chart which revised these figures, tentatively setting dates of 1988, 1992, and 1996, for the Tribulation, the abomination of desolation, and Christ’s return, respectively. –SSA pg 37
AD 1990 Elizabeth Clare Prophet predicted the end of the world by nuclear war in 1990. Her church has since seen a decline in membership.
AD 1992 “Rapture, October 28, 1992, Jesus is coming in the Air.” Full page add in the October 20, 1991, issue of USA Today, placed by followers of the Hyoo-go (Rapture) movement, a loose collection of Korean “end-times” sects. When the prophesied events failed to pass, much turmoil broke out among the sects. Some believers were distraught, while others tried to attack their doomsday preachers with knives. The founder of one church was later charged with swindling four million dollars from his parishoners. –99R pg 11, 168-169
AD 1993 David Koresh, self-proclaimed little lamb of Isaiah 16, and the Second Coming of Christ, dies in a fiery conflagration with some 80 of his followers. These members of the Branch Dividians, an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists had faced a botched ATF raid on their compound near Waco, Texas, and a subsequent 51-day siege by the FBI. A devastating fire broke out when the FBI attempted to fire gas into the group’s buildings. –99R pg 122-124
AD 1994 Arab Christian prophet Om Saleem claimed that the antichrist was born November 23, 1933, that his unveiling would come in 1993 and the rapture in 1994. –99R pg 149
AD 1994 Harold Camping, a radio evangelist, wrote a book entitled “1994?” In it, Camping says, “if this study is accurate, and I believe with all my heart that it is, there will be no extensions of time. There will be no time for second guessing. When September 6, 1994, arrives, no one else can be saved, the end has come.” Thousands believed Camping’s distorted biblical teachings, but again, the end did not come as Camping had wished. –99R pg 12, 48-50
AD 1997 Mary Stewart Relfe wrote in 1983 that she had been praying to ” know the year” of the Lord’s coming, and that subsequently she receied detailed “divine revelations” from God. She relaeased a chart showing World War III beginning in 1989, the Great Tribulation starting in 1990, and that Jesus Christ will come back in 1997, just after Armaggeddon.” –SSA pg 35
AD 1998 Larry Wilson, a former Seventh-day Adventist pastor, predicted four massive global earthquakes beginning around 1994 and ending in 1998 with the Second Coming. –99R pg 77
Thief = Thief in the Night by William Sears, George Ronald press, 1977
99R = 99 Reasons Why No One Knows When Christ Will Return by B.J. Oropeza, InterVarsity Press, 1994
SSA = Soothsayers of the Second Advent by William M. Alnor, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1989
Doom = Doomsday Delusions by C. Marvin Pate and Calvin B Haines, Jr., InterVarsity Press, 1995
TEOT = The End of Time by Damian Thompson, University Press of New England, 1996
Armada = The Armada by Garrett Mattingly, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959
DISP = Dispensational Truth by Clarence Larkin, Rev. Clarence Larkin Est – publisher, 1918
Apoc = Apocalypses by Eugen Weber, Harvard University Press, 1999
Bury = Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970
TSOR = The Sleep of Reason by Derek Jarrett, Harper and Row, 1989
TEOTW = The End of the World by Otto Friedrich, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982
Hand = Handbook of Denominations in the United States – New Eighth Edition by Frank S. Mead, Abingdon Press, 1985
Brit = Encyclopaedia Brittanica
So, next time you’re thinking about making or believing or forwarding or in any way acting upon someone’s (or your own) End Of Days prophecy, just take a moment. Hold your breath. Count to 10, and…
The closing of LucasArts this week has affected me far more than it should have. After all, it’s just a game studio…and one that hasn’t produced anything of note in years. Still, the impact that Lucasfilm Games (later to become LucasArts) had on me in my formative years is not something I can easily dismiss. In fact, it even touched my grown-up years, when Monkey Island became something of a shared bond between my wife and I. Heck, I even used it to propose to my wife.
But let’s back up from my geek proposal and wind the clock back to 1987. Or hop in a Chron-O-John. Whichever you prefer.
I was in seventh grade, a geek in ’80s neon and Coca-Cola shirts with a Swatch on my wrist and Converse on my feet. And in my bedroom, I had an Apple ][. Well, technically I had a Franklin Ace 1000, which was one of the approximately ten gigazillion Apple clones floating around at the time. I spent my free time alternating between playing games and hopping on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with my fancy 300 baud modem. For you kids not around in the ’80s, BBSs were kind of like localized versions of the Internet and a 300 baud modem was a dude on a pony that rode your bits of data from one town to the next. It was really slow. And really awesome.
Lucasfilm Games had been around for a few years at that point, but the only game I’d ever played that was remotely connected to them was The Empire Strikes Back on my Atari 2600. The entire game consisted of taking down chunky AT-AT shaped rectangles with minus signs fired from your block Snowspeeder. It was fun, but not exactly enthralling. But in 1987, Lucasfilm released a game that would change everything.
Pew! Pew! Pew!
Of course, I had to wait until Christmas of the next year before I finally got an 8088 IBM clone with an EGA monitor and a 1200 baud modem. (Think stagecoaches instead of ponies.) And that’s when I discovered Maniac Mansion. Created by Ron Gilbert – the man who I credit as having built LucasArts – it was one of the first graphic adventures I’d ever played. Sure, I’d toyed around with a couple of King’s Quest games on the Apple ][, and I’d spent many, many hours questing around Brittania (well, Sosaria and Earth in different time periods, but eventually Britannia) in the Ultima series, but I’d never experienced anything like Maniac Mansion. It was point-and-click. You chose from multiple characters to play through the story with three of them. And everyone always picked Bernard. (Because nerds stick together.)
After that, I was hooked. It didn’t hurt that I basically idolized George Lucas at the time, either. I played everything from Lucasfilm in those early years. And I do mean everything. I considered it my duty to support the studio, because it was a way to support Lucas himself – as if he needed the steady influx of my chores allowance. I tangled with alien mindbenders in Zak McKracken. I fought Nazi pilots in Battlehawks 1942, and later in Their Finest Hour and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. I built action figures in Night Shift, and I became an expert hacker years before Bioshock by playing Pipe Dream. I even played the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade action game…and it was pretty awful. I even watched the brief run of the Maniac Mansion television series, which was its own kind of awful. But in a good way. Sort of.
Hamster + Microwave. That’s all you need to know.
The history of Lucasfilm Games is the history of my adolescence. I saved all my money to buy a Sound Blaster specifically for The Secret Of Monkey Island, and later I saved again to buy a VGA monitor for Monkey Island 2. I annoyed the crap out of my local WaldenSoftware with endless phone calls when they still didn’t have the talkie version of Day Of The Tentacle, even though I knew it was out. And when I finally got it (in the triangle box, which I kept for years, but eventually lost in Hurricane Rita), I was enraged that they didn’t bother to buffer the sound effects for my single-speed CD-ROM drive. Each time purple tentacle hopped, the game stuttered as the pathetic drive I’d spent all my money on struggled to keep up. So I saved up again and bought a double-speed drive, and all was right with the world.
And that’s how it went, for years. It’s safe to say I was a dedicated fan. I remember being sad when Ron Gilbert left to start Humongous Entertainment. I was crushed when Tim Schafer left after Grim Fandango. And my heart broke when I read the news that Disney had shut down LucasArts altogether.
If you’ve never played this game, shut up and go do it. Now.
So it’s with equal parts nostalgia and melancholy that I write this now. So many memories are flooding back, that I doubt I can cram them all in, but one that sticks out the most was from the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade graphic adventure (not the action game…this is an important point). I have a very distinct memory of sitting in my room at my computer and loading the game. The Lucasfilm logo came up and did a little sparkly thing as the Indiana Jones theme began to play. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and I decided right then that I would work for Lucasfilm one day, either on games or on movies. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to be part of that world and work with the people in it.
But I never did.
Look at you, hacker…
I did eventually write an impassioned letter to LucasArts at one point, letting them know that I was coming to work for them as soon as I got out of high school. I’m not sure what I said exactly, but I’m fairly certain it was awful. And pretentious. And probably unintentionally hilarious.
To my surprise, I actually got a reply. And it wasn’t a form letter, either. It was, basically, the nicest brush-off letter anyone has even written. I don’t remember what it said, but I do remember that it was kind and reassuring and supportive. And I remember who wrote it, and I still follow her to this day. Her name was Khris Brown, and she went on to become a fantastic voice director, but who was in Product Support at the time. (I think. Correct me if I’m wrong, Khris.) I remember her letter not only because it was so kind, but because she spelled her name as oddly as I spell mine. (Kristian for me, Kris for short.) It was another connection to this world I so desperately wanted to be a part of. And it wasn’t a blow off letter, either. My pleas weren’t ignored as I’m sure they would’ve been had I written to any other company. It was encouraging and thoughtful and upbeat, and even a little inspiring. I’ll never forget it.
Khris’ cameo in Monkey Island 2.
I also wrote to George Lucas himself once, after hitting a BBS friend of mine up for inside info on how to make sure my letter got to his office. I was writing my senior thesis paper on religion and the Force, and I had some questions for him. And, again to my surprise, he actually responded. And he answered every single question I asked. Now, I don’t know if it was actually George himself that wrote me back or if his secretary just signed his name at the end of the letter, but I kept it with me for years.
I never did go to work at Lucasfilm, though. And now I never will. Its era has passed, the sale to Disney the final nail in its coffin. I doubt its magic will ever be reproduced, although companies like Double Fine give me hope, along with non-publishing publishers like Kickstarter helping to fund projects that would otherwise never see the light of day. And people like Steven Dengler, who is probably the nicest, most faith-in-humanity restoring gazillionaire who has ever walked the Earth. (He funds games and all sorts of projects, and he has a gravy-making space laser.) The magic of the Lucasfilm days may never again come together under one roof, but the sparks are still out there. Ron Gilbert is still making games. Tim Schafer is still making games. Other veterans of the studio are still making games. There’s still hope, but part of the wonder is gone now. Even though LucasArts hadn’t really made a good game in years, as long as they were around, there was still hope that they could somehow get the magic back. And now that hope is lost.
More pew! Pew! Pew!
But maybe someone will get the money together to license Star Wars and make another X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Maybe Ron can rob a few banks and get enough money to buy the rights to Monkey Island, since he’ll never pay to license a property he created. Perhaps Tim can revive a genre with his Kickstarter-funded Broken Age graphic adventure. The future holds a lot more promise today than it did a few years ago, despite the shuttering of LucasArts. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I’ll always regret never having had a chance to work in the environment that produced such amazing games and encouraged such zany creativity, though. My own career path has meandered from working in IT to becoming a web designer, to a brief stint as a journalist and back around again to technology where I now work for the Black Mesa/Aperture Science/Umbrella Corporation of the real world. It’s a good gig and I enjoy the work, but if I had a chance to drop everything and leave the good salary behind to go sweep the floors at Double Fine just so I could occasionally have coffee with Tim Schafer, I’d probably do it. And I hate coffee.
Lucasfilm / LucasArts
1982 – 2013
And that’s it. So long, LucasArts. I was there with you when you were Lucasfilm Games, and I was there with you when you changed your name. And I’ll always be with you. Like the Force, only less mystical. Or maybe more. Like I said, it was a magical place and the world won’t soon see anything like it again.
If you’re the type of adult who would strip all belief in magic & wonder from a child, you’re a vile bastard and no one should ever love you.
I tweeted that the other night, after Trey let me know that an adult he trusts told him that Sesame Street is for babies, and that the characters are just puppets. I guess by itself, that’s not entirely a bad thing. I mean, Trey is six years old now (-now 9 in 2015, and it continues; he just had every Captain Underpants and Wimpy Kid book he owns at one house confiscated by this same adult, because he spends too much time reading kid books) and it’s probably time to put away childish things like enjoying educational public television and believing in cookie-eating muppets. But for whatever reason, I guess I’m just overly sensitive to adults pushing kids to grow up on their schedule rather than their kid’s. I mean, I know I’m only his stepdad, but personally, I think it’s my job to cram as much magic and amazement into Trey’s life as possible. The world will try its best to squeeze it out of him as fast as it can, but I think it’s a parent’s responsibility to push back. Because there’s a lot to be said for being able to truly believe in the impossible when you’re young. It helps you still believe in what you know is possible as an adult, even when everyone around you says it isn’t.
So yeah, to my way of thinking, the Sesame Street characters can be real and not puppets for as long as Trey wants them to be. His stuffed animals can be real friends who listen and talk to him, and who he shares adventures with for as long as he wants to. And monsters and danger and dire wolves in the forest can lie in wait just off the road to pounce on unwary travelers for as long as he can imagine they’re there.
And that’s not a bad thing. He doesn’t need to know that Santa Claus is just me stomping clumsily around the roof and hoping I don’t die on Christmas Eve. He doesn’t have to be told that vampires and werewolves and witches aren’t real on Halloween. He doesn’t need me or any other adult to tell him that his favorite television show is for babies, or that believing he can become a Jedi is stupid. He can wait for his Hogwart’s letter to come on his 11th birthday, if he wants to. Because it’s not about turning a cute baby into a self-reliant adult once they stop being a prop you can use to get people to fawn over you and start having minds of their own. It’s about letting them let their minds take them to wherever they want to be.
And an imagination can take you to incredible places. And terrifying places. And places of magic and wonder, and of hopelessness and despair. A vivid imagination can make the mundane interesting and the amazing truly transcendent. Childhood is made up of a brief series of moments compressed into an ever-dwindling few years where magic can be real and the impossible can be ordinary. A child encouraged to believe is a child who isn’t shackled by the dull and inescapable realities of the mundane world, but rather is set free to explore the limits of their own reality – which, for a child with a good imagination, has no limits. Why, then, do some parents insist on taking this from their children as fast as they can?
I honestly don’t know the answer to that. Maybe they think it’s for the best that children grow up into an increasingly hostile world hardened by as much disillusionment as possible. Maybe they want their kids to be miniaturized versions of themselves as adults, and all the kiddie stuff just gets in the way. Maybe they’re just impatient. And maybe they’re just tired of watching endless reruns of Sesame Street.
But I don’t have any tolerance for an adult who would rob a child of magic. I just don’t. Childhood is short, and it’s getting shorter every generation. I don’t know why we make kids grow up so quickly today, or why a little boy’s clothing options go from Mickey Mouse and Thomas the train from 0-5 to skulls and camouflage and Affliction t-shirts by the time they’re six. Or, for that matter, why girls go from Pretty Polly Princess Everything to sequins, short shorts and miniskirts overnight. Seriously, it’s like zero to slutty in 4.5 seconds – and we think that’s ok. But that’s a rant for another time, and trust me. I have plenty to say on the inequity of gender roles and the great disservice we do to our girls by painting their world pink.
Back to the topic at hand though, please stop forcing your own insecurities on your children. It doesn’t matter what other parents might think, or what your childless friends (who always seem to somehow know everything about raising children) say. And it doesn’t matter that you want your son to hurry up and grow into liking whatever you think is cool. Nothing matters but your own kid, and what he wants to grow into. At his own pace.
A child needs to feel free to like childish things until he matures to that particular point of immaturity where he puts them away for fear of ridicule and out of the childish desire to grow up. But some of my favorite people never did that. Or they did, but then thought better about it and decided the rest of the world could get bent.
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C. S. Lewis
I have a short list of people I truly admire. My parents are on it, who, if they did one thing wrong in raising me, was giving me too good of a childhood. I miss it terribly. They gave me the freedom to like whatever I liked, to pursue whatever interested me (outside of a couple of ill-conceived but well-meaning nudges towards various sportsball activities that never quite stuck) and to generally grow into whatever I wanted to become. Sure, they guided me and helped push me in the right direction from time to time, but by and large, they just let me be a kid. I’ll always love them for that.
I draw the line at believing in the Elf On The Shelf, though. Seriously, parents. This is a one-way ticket to Creepytown. Stop taking your kids there.
If I can teach him one thing, it’s that choosing his own path is the only way he’ll get to wherever he wants to go. Throughout his life, plenty of people will offer him directions. Some may offer him a ride. But no one can get him to where he’s going but himself, because only he knows where he’s been, where he is and where he wants to be. Anyone who says any different is already lost and just wants company.
So anyway, I encourage him to dream with the dreamers. I read him dangerous stories with threatening ideas from authors unburdened by the constraints of reality. People like Neil Gaiman, Adam-Troy Castro, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Jay Lake, Harlan Ellison, Cat Rambo, Ray Bradbury, Sandra Odell and Arthur C. Clarke will be on his reading list as he grows up. Some already are. And one or two of them are my friends, because sometimes I’m a lucky bastard. And I’m extraordinarily fortunate to know them.
I hope Trey grows up to miss his childhood so much that he gets back to it as quickly as possible, and leaves the world of the Normals to the normal, boring people doing normal, boring things with their normal, boring lives until they die normal and boring little deaths. I hope I give him the courage to dream big and dream often, and to dream at least a few dreams for all the other grown-ups who’ve forgotten how.
But what do I know? I’m just a kid who wanted to be an astronaut before he became an anthropology student who became a computer technician who became a writer who became a webmaster who became stepdad who became a journalist who became a systems administrator for the biggest defense contractor you’ve never heard of, who is now kinda/sorta freelance word working. Clearly, I have no idea what I’m doing.
And I like it that way.
Dreamers grow up to be literary rock stars with crazy hair and a private army of bees trained to smite one’s enemies. True story.
Texas school principal shuts down entire cosmetology course to keep a gay man from taking it. Yep, everything is bigger in Texas. Even the bigotry. —-
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In case you live under a rock, or just someplace more enlightened than the backwoods armpit of America I call home, you might not be aware of what I’m going to talk about today. That’s ok, though. I can bring you up to speed. But be aware that, while I’ve written this in my standard irreverent tone, it’s a very serious issue. Please lend your support accordingly.
Basically, it’s like this. The local school district here in Beaumont, TX used to offer a night course in cosmetology at the Taylor Career Center. But this year, a guy that the principal of the campus thought looked a little gay tried to enroll. I’m not sure what looked gay about him, but I’m assuming he had on a unicorn sweater-vest with rainbow earrings and a giant button on his crotch that said, “I LOVE PENIS. ASK ME HOW!”
But anyway, according to the class instructor, the principal immediately told her to not allow the student to take the course, on account of his perceived gayness. To her credit, the instructor refused and the principal was forced to meet with BISD’s legal counsel, during which he learned that he couldn’t discriminate against the student by refusing to allow him to take the class. So instead, he reacted in the most sensible way any reasonable bigot in his situation would: HE SHUT IT DOWN. The entire night course. Gone.
Naturally, this didn’t take long to hit the Internet, where it quickly shot to national attention. Strangely enough, people seem to have a problem with shutting down an entire course just because a gay guy wanted to take it. Especially when it was a course in hair styling. I don’t want to get all stereotypical on you here, but come on. If the principal doesn’t think at least a few gay dudes have slipped under his radar to learn how to cut hair over the years, he’s slower on the uptake than that guy on the Titanic who stayed in bed because he was pretty sure all the water coming into his stateroom was from the toilet he’d backed up after devouring forty tons of shellfish on the rich-bastards-only buffet.
So yeah, the rest of the world got in on the outrage, a Facebook group got started, protests were organized and eventually the wrath of Reddit descended upon the Beaumont Independent School District Of Intolerant Cruelty until they finally relented and decided that it might be a good idea to go ahead and offer the course, after all. Gee, ya think?!
We’re exhausted from beating off reporters all day about this gay thing we’re getting rammed with, but we’ll suck it up. Like professionals.
— BISD Parody (@notBeaumontISD) September 15, 2012
Originally citing “budget restraints” as their reason for shuttering the course, the district has suddenly found a way to keep it open…by funding it in the exact same way it was funded before: through student tuition. Of course, it’s important to note that they chose the term budget restraints rather than the more expected budget constraints. Granted, BISD’s communication department is no stranger to being a stranger to the dictionary, so it’s entirely possible that they just used the wrong word because it sounded close enough and they just didn’t know any better. Then again, budget constraints would imply that a limited availability of funds caused them to shut down the course, which would be odd because they’re always talking about how much money they have. Budget restraints, however, would tend to suggest that, while the money was there, they decided to restrain themselves on how they wanted to spend it. Or, more specifically, how they didn’t want to spend it teaching gay dudes how to make people look FAAABULOUS!
Either way, they’ve decided to go ahead and offer the course. After issuing a statement explaining how the principal has been properly disciplined and will be removed from his position, along with offering a lengthy apology to the LGBT community and the city as a whole, the BISD communication department then slapped me with a trout and told me I’d never amount to anything until I stopped letting Kevin Bacon dance with Jon Lithgow’s daughter…
Later, after I woke up from my nap, I realized I was dreaming. BISD doesn’t apologize, dammit. Apologies and responsible actions are for the weak! Or something.
Anyway, they did release a statement explaining themselves by not explaining anything at all. First, they said there wasn’t enough student interest in the course to continue offering it. Then, they said that there was so much interest, they just had to offer it. And then they said the media lied about everything, presumably because of reasons.
There was a protest at the BISD Administration building today that had a fairly good turn out, and there will be another one at this week’s school board meeting. I doubt anything will come out of it, though. This is the same district that re-hired its electrical contractor after he admitted defrauding the district, despite enormous public outcry to, you know, not keep paying money to a criminal. It’s the same district that purchased countless copies of a horrible book self-published by its own spokesperson to distribute to graduating seniors. It’s the same district that had one of the highest paid superintendents in the nation, with a history of corruption, unaccountability and disdain for the public interest that always seems to skirt its way around ever actually getting in trouble for anything. Of course they’re not going to do anything about this principal’s bigotry, except maybe promote him to the executive cabinet. That’s what they do.
Still, it’s nice to see regular folks taking some sort of political action, even if it’s less David and Goliath and more David and Goliath’s Unholy Bazooka Of Pitiless Smiting. Then again, BISD has pretty much just spat in the face of the Golden Rule Of Our Time, which is simply: Don’t piss off the Internet.
By making the front page of Reddit, BISD might just be forced into action after the angry, unwashed horde of net savvy redditors storm their little castle and start making demands. And I hope that’s what happens. What the principal did is inexcusable – and therefore, no excuses should be made for it. He should be terminated, the district should issue an apology to the community, and the teacher – who was let go, by the way – should be given her job back. With a raise. And the ‘gay’ student should get to take the class for free, after BISD’s new Superintendent buys him the fanciest set of scissors, clippers and combs available to today’s discerning cosmetological professional.
Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?
UPDATE #1: As you’ll see in the archive of the live blog below, the BISD school board made it clear that they have no intention of investigating this matter beyond any cursory, done-in-a-few-hours investigation they claim to have already done. They also made it clear that they most likely won’t be releasing any documentation to support their stated reasons for closing down, then re-opening the cosmetology program. It’s just more cover-up and doublespeak for a school district well-versed in the machinations of deceit.
UPDATE #2: The Beaumont Independent School District has begun mailing out their Fall 2012 class list for Adult and Community Education, which is where the administration has decided to “continue” the adult cosmetology program. So, let’s take a gander at a few of the courses they’re offering:
So yeah, that’s a nice course listing. There are other courses like beginning piano lessons and grant-writing, but it’s important to know that you can get your Zumba on after some Power YOGA, before you learn how to use your iPhone and become Self-Aware that you’re carrying a Concealed Handgun. And they’re all reasonably priced, too. Good for you, BISD! Way to show the residents of Beaumont that you care.
Except, well…there’s this entry:
Yikes! Something strange happened there, but in case you missed it, the cost of this one course (as compared to the others) shot up by just shy of OHMYGODITSFULLOFDOLLARS! Granted, $3,500.00 is still a pretty good deal for an entire course in cosmetology, assuming it’s a full course that will end in certification, like the one Lamar offers for around $6,000.
Oh, and a minimum of ten students must sign up for the course, which is probably what BISD is hoping won’t happen.
Shortly after writing this update, it was brought to my attention that the course used to cost $75 tuition per week, along with $100 non-refundable deposit, a $175 lab kit and $25 registration fee. The current course allows the $3,000 tuition to be paid in bi-weekly installments of $125, which would actually make the course cheaper at $62.50 per week, not counting the extra $200.00 book fee.
So, it turns out that BISD is actually offering a pretty good deal here – one that, apart from the new book fee, is actually cheaper for students than it was previously. You know, when they cancelled it due to “budget restraints”. I guess charging less for something now makes sense after cancelling it for not bringing in enough money then. Or something. This is BISD. Logic need not apply.
It’ll be interesting to see if the documentation ever turns up that supports their stated financial reasons for shuttering the course, considering that the supposed documentation can in no way make any sense at all. Something costs too much? Cancel it! Then bring it back! But this time charge less!
Then again, we’re talking government math here. In that context, their figures actually make a sort of sense. In a weird, totally doesn’t make any sense at all sense, but it’s a still sort of sense, nonetheless. And that’s something. I guess.
If you’d like more information about the Adult Cosmetology Course, contact Ms. Sheryl George at (409)617-5740 ext. 3819. Just make sure you call before 4:00 p.m., because we’re dealing with government hours here. Working until 5:00 is just so private sector.
UPDATE #3: I’ve been told that the tuition for the course has not changed. It always worked out to $3,000, which is what BISD is now charging for the course. The $200 book fee is new, but everything else remains unchanged. Well, everything except for one teensey-weensey detail the district would rather us not talk about…
And that’s the specialty courses. Previously, the Adult Cosmetology Program offered the following specialty courses, which amounted to roughly 50% of student enrollment:
It seems strange that the district cites “budget restraints” as the original reason for shuttering the course while, at the same time, reinstating the course without these money-making specialty courses that, I’ve been told, accounted for roughly half the student enrollment in the Cosmetology program. If money was the issue, why cut out 50% of your student enrollment along with 50% of the income generated by the program? It’s all beginning to make the sort of sense that doesn’t.
Unless, of course, they’re lying. Unless they want student enrollment to drop below the new 10 student minimum so they can go ahead and shut down the course anyway. Unless everything they’ve said up to this point has been a total fabrication designed to lead to the inescapable result of BISD just doing whatever it wants to whomever it wants, regardless of how anyone feels about it. Especially if they’re gay.
UPDATE #4: I’ve learned that, at the time Thomas Amons shut down the adult Cosmetology program at Taylor Career Center, the course had the new minimum number of ten students either already enrolled and attending, or ready to enroll. So, let’s add all this up. The cost of the program hasn’t changed. The number of students hasn’t changed. The BISD budget hasn’t changed. State cuts that might have affected the budget haven’t changed. In fact, nothing has changed except for a gay guy trying to enroll, and, well…you can take it from there.
Don’t believe me? Didn’t Dr. Chargois talk about how the state cuts in funding might have been to blame for the “budget restraints” the district has cited as the reason the course was cancelled? So I must be making this up, right? I mean, I’m one of those mean-spirited bloggers that’s worse than the media, who “isn’t always your friend,” according to BISD Board President Woodrow Reece.
So yeah, I’ll just let ol’ Woodrow tell it like it is:
Did you catch that? In case you missed it, here’s the quote, taken from “Principal Matters” as made available on BISD’s website on August 28 of this year:
“Well, so far, from the last cut, we did not lay anyone off. A lot of the school districts laid folks off. They had to cut here and cut there. We didn’t have to cut here and cut there. We’re fortunate that we’re financially safe. We’ve taken care of business. We’ve done projects, but we still have money for education.”
Did you catch that? A month ago, the state cuts hadn’t impacted BISD at all. No layoffs, no cutting here or cutting there, nada. But a month later, and well, you see, the state cut their funding, so naturally they had to close programs. Both of these statements can’t be true, so we’re left to wonder: Were they lying then, or are they lying now?Also, keep in mind how the BISD Administration has repeatedly stated that the course should have never been run from the Taylor Career Center, and that as soon as they were made aware of its existence, they had to shut it down. And fire the teacher who blew the whistle on the principal’s alleged bigotry. And then re-open the course under the Adult Education umbrella after they got caught and the Internet found out. I’m not entirely certain how they were so unaware of the program and how it was run when the adult cosmetology course was putting on hair shows and popping up on local news every year, but hey, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure no one like the Special Assistant to the Superintendent knew about it or anything. I mean, it’s not like she had Thomas Amons telling her about it himself on her goofy TV show back on August 20, 2010 or anything, right?
Granted, he’s talking about the high school program there, but he specifically mentions the night courses, which is when the adult classes were held. So maybe Jessie Haynes was blinded by the golden splendor of her magnificent banana suit during that interview and just doesn’t remember it. I guess, when you really stop to think about it, the whole program could easily have escaped the notice of the BISD administration for years. After all, it’s not like the Beaumont Enterprise ever ran a front-page story about Cequena Clark and the Cosmetology program back on November 15, 2011 or anything.
Wait. You mean they did? Ok, but lots of people don’t read the paper, I guess. Too many words and all that thinkin’ too early in the morning is probably the last thing the royal court of BISD wants to do before stumbling into the office. So I bet they never even saw the story. It’s not like it was posted online or anything, was it?
It was. Well, crap. Let me think for a minute. Hrmmm…well, we did just get a fabulous technology display at the last board meeting, so I guess it’s possible that the presentation was to let the upper echelons of BISD know that the Internet comes on computers now. Or something.
Oh, fine. Have it your way. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re probably right. Of course BISD knew about the program. However you slice it, its existence was more obvious to the BISD administration than a Taco Bell fart in a compact car, and there’s really no way they can continue to claim otherwise. Except that they will.
I’m in the process of getting some documents up for you guys to check out that will shed further light on all this nonsense, but mull this over until then. The fact is, BISD knew about this program, supported it, promoted it and condoned its existence for years. The fact is, there were no financial reasons for closing the adult cosmetology program, as it was self-funded in the exact same way, for the exact same price as it is under their new version of the program.
Of course, now BISD has to pay to get a new license and go through a chain of command to get the program going again after moving it to Adult Education, but I’ll have more on that later. For now, let’s just sit back and enjoy Dr. Chargois talking about how bad GED students smell. Because that’s always fun.
UPDATE #5: I have a couple of quick scans of a document to show you. These are from last year’s Adult Cosmetology program. The first one shows that the program was always self-funded by students, and that the cost of the program has not changed in any significant way under BISD’s new version.
So much for those “financial restraints”…
The next scan shows the specialty courses BISD has quietly omitted from the new version of the program. Remember, these specialty courses accounted for roughly half of the students enrolled in the program, and they weren’t exactly cheap. Now, losing these specialty programs and the income they generated might not seem like the smartest idea for a district claiming that “financial restraints” caused them to close the program down in the first place, but it does…if they have no real intention of starting the program back up, anyway.
Specialty courses? We don’t need no stinkin’ specialty courses!
You see, in order to even offer the course, BISD has to do a few things first. Keep in mind, I’m not exactly a cosmetology licensing expert or anything, but I’ve been contacted by someone a little more well-versed in it than me, and they had a couple of questions. First, they’re not even sure opening a new school operating in the same space would even be legal. When the course was entirely handled by the Taylor Career Center, that didn’t matter. One school, one license. But now that the adult course has been entirely separated from the Career Center (although it will still be taught there, in the same location) and brought under the Adult Education program’s umbrella, BISD probably can’t use Taylor Career Center’s license to teach the adult course. And, even if they did get a new license, it might not even be legal to operate two separate schools with two separate instructors in the same location, with students from one mingling with the other.
Of course, to even get a new license, BISD is going to have to submit a financial plan, write and submit curriculum, then pay a $200 inspection fee and a $500 application fee to the Texas Department Of Licensing And Regulation – and, from what I’ve been told, none of this has been done yet. Which is understandable, I guess. After all, why should the district go through all that effort when it’s already doing its best to make sure that they won’t even have to offer the course, anyway?
So let’s recap. BISD claims it shut down the program to save money. Then, it opens the program back up under a different department, creating a potential licensing conflict with the state in the process, followed by the increased cost of having to get new licensing, inspections, curriculum, etc…
Saving money by spending money? That’s BISD math right there. I wonder if they test for voodoo arithmetic on the STAAR™?
Please check the How You Can Help section below for information regarding who you should contact to lodge complaints. For license-related inquires specifically, check out the contact info for the Texas Workforce Commission and the US Department of Justice.
The best hope we have of getting some semblance of justice or transparency out of this district is you. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, please share this story with your friends, share the links to the news articles I’ve placed within this post and, most importantly, let the Beaumont Independent School District hear from you. The more their inboxes and voicemails and pony express satchels fill up with the complaints of concerned people from all over the world, the more likely it is that they’ll be forced to take some sort of action to respect the wishes of the people they claim to represent. But we can’t do it without you. We need your help, Internet.
Sign the petition, then email the BISD Administrators and let them know how you feel. Of course, this is easier said than done, since they like to keep their addresses secret and hidden away from public scrutiny. So naturally, this means I have them.
I’ve added links that point directly to the inbox of each relevant administrator below. Because I love you.
Also, be sure to check out the link to the Texas Education Agency to find out how to report this incident higher up the chain of command.
BISD Superintendent of Schools
Dr. Timothy Chargois (tchargo@beaumont.k12.tx.us)
Special Assistant To The Superintendent
Jessie Haynes (jhaynes@beaumont.k12.tx.us)
Taylor Career Center Principal
Thomas Amons (tamons@beaumont.k12.tx.us)
Adult and Continuing Education Programs Director
Richard Cantu (rcantu@beaumont.k12.tx.us)
Communications Specialist
Ron Reynolds (rreynol@beaumont.k12.tx.us)
BISD School Board
trustees@beaumont.k12.tx.us
Texas Education Agency
TEA review process for school discrimination complaints
Texas Workforce Commission
The Texas Education Agency out sources the licensing and regulation of private career schools and colleges to the TWC’s Career Schools and Colleges program
512-936-3100
The United States Department of Justice
DOJ Educational Discrimination line
1-877-292-3804 or 1-202-514-4092.
Additional reports:
theexaminer.com
patheos.com
hackcollege.com
queerty.com
jonathanturley.org
radionz.co.nz
outsmartmagazine.com
New Orleans. City of southern dreams. The Big Easy. The nightmarish land of loneliness and regret. Take your pick.
As you may have noticed, I’ve been absent for the past couple of months. At first, this was due to a lack of interest in the gaming series I was writing, but quickly became about just not having the time to sit down and string a few predicates and participles together. My new job is great, but it’s fairly exhausting. Especially when I’ve made two week-long trips to New Orleans in as many months. I think I kind of hate New Orleans.
First up, the food. Everyone raves about how the city exists as some sort of culinary holy grail, where the very mud of the Bayou transforms the most mundane chicken soup into a gastronomical delight. And that’s true…as long as you think chicken soup is improved by throwing alligator and crawfish in it, along with all manner of conspicuous spices and questionable ingredients of a slimy and suspicious nature. I, for one, do not.
I’m a pretty simple eater, despite my tendency toward food snobbery. I like simple dishes prepared simply. Nowhere in my vast and limited knowledge of the culinary arts do I subscribe to the notion that a hamburger can be made better by inviting crustaceans to the party. But that’s the sort of thing they do here in New Orleans. I tried a roast beef sandwich today. Something simple. Only, it was layered with an odious and unidentifiable cheese that hid below it some sort of Cthulhuian horror of brownish chucks of questionable viscosity that somehow evoked images both fungal and cephalopodial. I have no idea what it was, but I’m not the sort of person who goes around trying new things. Not when the new things remind me of homicidal, antediluvian god beasts.
So let’s skip the food discussion. I’ve mostly stayed in my hotel, feasting on $16 uncooked chicken fingers battered in the broken dreams of a disheveled kitchen staff forced to prepare a dish without slipping something terrifying into the marinara sauce. Yeah, they tasted like they were deep fried in some unfortunate soul’s liposuctioned backfat, but that’s Louisiana. That’s just how they do things here.
Of course, the $16 chicken fingers are actually $20 after the hotel adds a $2 service charge (presumably because you had the nerve to order something without Swamp Thing’s penis in it) and a $2 delivery fee for the long trek up the elevator to your room. Throw in an insulting $3 tip to the mix, and you get $23 of chicken finger-shaped regret in a little square box that the hotel staff insists – beyond all reason – upon placing on a massive room service tray that literally barely fits through the door. Oh, and they cover it with a fancy metal hat. You know, because nothing screams class like salmonella fingers at midnight.
That’s not to say that there haven’t been moments worth remembering here and there. The hotel has a vicious no-smoking policy, forcing smokers to make their way through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel to ground level, then out past the entrance to a tiny alleyway that reeks of nicotine and murder. There’s been a guy out there most of the times I’ve made my way downstairs and to the scary little alcove of smoky terror. He sits on a bench and smiles and argues with himself, or perhaps with an unseen mystical entity in another spatial dimension of which mankind is not yet ready to experience, and he waits. He waits for someone to finish choosing cancer over spending another second inside the high-priced hotel that’s probably feverishly working out some way to charge guests for how much oxygen they breathe inside its marbled halls even as I write this. He waits for them to slip their cigarettes into the holes on the special cigarette putter-outer…and he makes a mad dash to the box, where he rips off the lid and reclaims the still smoldering butt. Then he smokes it and grins some more, while making an odd clucking noise on his way back to his bench. It sounds way less freaky than it actually is. Trust me.
The scary alleyway with the crazed smokeman sits between the hotel and where I’ve been going for work during the day, which I could talk about now, but I’m not going to talk about it now. One of the most efficient ways of leaving the job market is to speak publicly about your job, even when you have nice things to say. And I have mostly nice things to say, but I also have some not-so-nice things to say involving a week’s worth of mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations punctuated by a presenter making awkward and violent stabs at humor. A Waterworld reference was involved at one point. I felt embarrassed for him, empathically speaking. Like Counselor Troi, only with better acting. And less cleavage.
So no, I’m not going to talk about work. I will talk about how horrible it is to be away from my family, though. If I’ve learned one thing from traveling – especially to a party city like New Orleans – it’s that I’ve become totally incapable of having fun alone. I need my family with me, or it’s just pantomime. I can smile and laugh and pretend to enjoy my tiny $12 glass of watered down Long Island Iced Tea at the hotel bar. I can even flirt back with a few of the drifters in the endless stream of desperate women that seem to have booked entire floors of this hotel, presumably for some sort of motivational seminar involving hitting on married guys sipping overpriced drinks at pretentiously named hotel bars. It isn’t pretty, though. And it isn’t fun.
Mostly, I just slink back to my room where I load up a few shows on my iPad and catch up on this season of Walking Dead. (Speaking of, I’m pretty upset about what happened in the last episode. But I’
m even more upset that Shane hasn’t been murdered in the face yet. And no, I don’t hate him because he’s the ‘villain’. I hate him because his character is obnoxious and stupid and reminds me of everyone I’ve never liked in Texas. Seriously. Just write him off the show already. They’ve proven they’re willing to write characters off all the time, only they keep getting rid of the good ones. We haven’t seen Lennie James’ character since the first damn episode, and that wasn’t only a great character; James is a great actor. And now we’ve lost…well, I won’t spoil it. But let’s just say they killed off the Giles of the group, and we all know how well that worked out for Buffy.)
But anyway, that’s been my week. I fly back home tomorrow after one more session of slideshow waterboarding, and it can’t come soon enough. I’ve tried video chatting with the family over the hotel’s $15/night Internet, but all it did was remind me how horrible things like video chatting were back in 1997. I really hate this hotel.
And I hate it even more now that someone has apparently detonated a 50-kiloton thermonuclear frat boy bomb in the lobby, thanks to the SEC basketball tournament. They’re everywhere all of a sudden, stumbling into and falling out of the elevators, dropping their overpriced drinks to crash and shatter upon the polished marble floors and generally making a nuisance of themselves. You know, like frat boys do. They’re like an obnoxious plague of drunken locusts in TapOut shirts. And I loathe them.
I never thought I would be so eager to get back to Texas. But then again, I’ve never been in Louisiana so frequently or for so long. It really is a different world here, and I’m not just talking about the food and the voodoo, or the fact that New Orleans is the murder capital of the country. It’s a different world here because it’s…different. Too different. Crustacean pudding and alligator ice cream different. The sort of different that creeps up on you in the middle of the night and runs a shiv through your spleen for looking at it funny. The sort of different that I could do without.
Oh, and I just remembered that my ex-wife is from New Orleans, which made me think of her for the first time since the last time I felt like dragging sandpaper over my eyeballs. So thanks for that, NOLA. You have yourself a good night. I hope you choke on it.
Welcome to Chapter Two of Life Bytes. I’m not entirely sure why I’m calling these things chapters when they’re really just a series of blog entries, but I am. So deal with it. Anyway, continuing with the ‘if this was all a novel’ theme, click here for the back-of-the-book description of what this particular bit of insanity is about, or skip ahead and click here to jump straight into Chapter One. The choice, Captain Planet, is yours!
Also, my birthday is this week, so give me a present by sharing this series with your friends. Go on, click one of the share buttons above. It won’t kill you.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Chapter Two
Christmas, 1983
In the months and weeks leading up to every Christmas morning of my childhood, my parents, being a strange and conniving pair of offspring generators, would begin the annual tradition of convincing my sister and I that we lived in a Dickensian tragedy of abject poverty. We were told to expect no presents each year, on account of how we were likely to be shipped off to a workhouse at any given moment. Of course, it was always a lie, but we always fell for it all the same. Because we were kids. And we were stupid.
One side effect of my father working at an electronics store in the ’80s was that he was always bringing home interesting gizmos, which was great when it was my Atari, but when my mother began Christmas morning in 1983 by saying, “Wait in the hall with your sister until Dad finishes setting up the video camera,” his unlimited access to gadgetry began to take a turn for the worse.
This was the early ’80s, back before you could just whip out your cell phone to record a video. Instead, there was a lengthy setup period involving plugging a giant, over-the-shoulder camera into a VCR you had strapped under one arm while the other began the bizarre finger waggling necessary to synch the camera to the recorder and set the white balance. Of course, this was after you rigged enough lights to trigger a full-scale DEA assault today, just so you could kinda-sorta make out the various quivering shapes as human when you played the tape back later.
The downside to all of this video prep work to an eight-year-old waiting to see what Santa Claus brought him is that I was stuck in the hallway for what seemed like just shy of ten minutes past eternity. The upside, of course, is that the video couldn’t be instantly uploaded to the Internet, because Al Gore hadn’t invented it yet.
“Ok, come in!” my mother shouted in the hesitant tone of someone who doesn’t know if the red light on the camera means it is – or isn’t – working.
A half-second later…
“No, wait! Stay there!” she yelled, louder and with panic. My sister and I could make out the muffled voice of my father trying to convince her that everything was fine. “Are you sure?” we heard her ask, worry and disbelief dripping from the question mark.
“Yes, sugar. The red light means it’s on,” said my Dad in the slightly increased volume and annoyed tone of someone who’s just realized that conspiratorial whispering just isn’t going to cut it.
“But is it recording?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Are you sure, because the VCR doesn’t look like it’s recording.”
“Is the red light on?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s recording.”
“Ok. But are you sure?”
My father’s sigh was audible far in the hallway as my sister and I finally decided to just sit down, leaning against the stuccoed wall while we waited. After about five more minutes of persuasion followed by confusion, followed by frustration, followed by reluctant acceptance, we finally got the all clear to come into the living room.
Approximately .0003 seconds later, I lost my damn mind.
Imagine this kid, only worse.
Insanity, it should be noted before we go any further, is a legal term rather than a clinical one. It is sometimes used in courtrooms to defend the crazy actions of crazy people on account of how they can’t be held responsible for all the crazy stuff they’ve done because they’re just so filled with crazy. However, it is primarily used to defend the crazy actions of sane people who, for whatever reason, briefly come completely unhinged and run about doing stupid things. This is called Temporary Insanity, and the point is that it has absolutely no bearing on whether a person is actually crazy or not. It’s just one of those things that happens inexplicably, like Austria’s Falco. Or blue eye shadow.
“WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!” I screamed as I rounded the corner and saw the gorgeous yellowed box of computational glory that would take over my life for the next few years. It was already plugged in and turned on, with a small television set on top of the case as a monitor. Again, I screamed. “A COMPUUUUUUUUUUTERRRRR?!”
I spent the next few minutes chanting some variation of the words ‘what’ and ‘computer’ while flailing my body around in the most spastic way imaginable, which is saying something if you can imagine me as a skinny little eight-year-old with a bowl cut and freakishly long arms. At some point, I calmed down and stopped embarrassing myself, but the videographic evidence remains to this day. Fortunately, it’s currently trapped between dimensions in the magnetic tape of a VHS cassette, and I have no plans of releasing it into the wilds of the Internet. So don’t ask.
I have no real memory of anything else I got that Christmas. When I look back on that morning, all I can see is the title screen to a game called “In Search Of The Most Amazing Thing” flashing on the television monitor of my Franklin Ace 1000. The computer was one of the many Apple ][ clones that flooded the market in the days before Apple employed specialized assassination squads to murder anyone even thinking about copying their engineering, which meant it was pretty much an exact copy of the famous personal computer that launched personal computing.
And I loved it.
Enter the solitude
By the end of the second grade, I was more or less out of the ‘friends’ I’d made during my Atari days. Sure, there were a few kids I knew that still liked to come hang out with me, but they were all infected with a severe case of nerdism, so they didn’t count. Except that they did and I just didn’t realize it at the time, on account of how I’d also been infected with the dread disease and just hadn’t been smart enough to realize it yet. I would, though. And soon.
My second grade class was called “The Apple Core” because our teacher had a thing for apples, both the fruit and the computers. Our classroom was completely decked out with both.
Nerdism: It’s nothing like this.
A typical second grade day in the Apple Core often meant arriving early and staying late, although this was more of a problem specific to my own experience rather than a summary of the average day for the rest of my classmates. At some point during the day, my teacher would say to me, “Go get me your Apple, Kristian.”
And I’d go get my apple, which was a bit of red construction paper cut out in the shape of the fruit. Every time we did something good in class, the teacher would make us go get our apples so she could whip out a hole-punch and stab a tiny circle or two into the paper. She called these ‘nibbles’ and they were the currency of the classroom. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you needed nibbles. If you wanted to go to recess, you traded nibbles for time. And, if you were like me and the only thing you cared about was getting to use the computer, you needed nibbles for that, too. So I loved bringing her my apple.
Of course, the teacher hadn’t quite worked out all the kinks in her system. For one, any fool with a hole-punch could create their own nibbles, which was surprisingly easy to get away with, provided you didn’t get too greedy with it. Second, since her currency was subtractive rather than additive as concerns the paper of the apples, it was impossible for her to remove nibbles once they’d been spent. If you were bad in class, she’d just rip your apple in half and toss it in the trash – but if you hadn’t done anything wrong, you got to keep your apple if you had a remainder of nibbles after concluding whatever trades you’d made with her.
The smart kids (us nerds) figured out early on to always leave a few nibbles on the apple, rather than use them all up in one go. That way, she’d put your apple back on the paper tree she’d constructed on one of the room’s corkboards. And, the frantic life of a second grade teacher being what it is, she would promptly forget that you’d used any of your nibbles. Between sneaking a hole-punch into class and our teacher’s lack of foresight concerning the remainder situation, my friends and I got a lot of computer time. All three of us.
We’d often stay in at recess to get some computer time in so we could die of dysentery or infect our wagon trains with cholera. And when our parents were late picking us up, we’d while away the time selling digital lemonade…when I wasn’t busy cleaning out my desk, of course.
Our teacher had a habit of periodically dragging my desk into the middle of the classroom at the end of the day and dumping its contents onto the floor. I was a bit of a hoarder in those days (and my wife will say I still am), so this was her way of making me purge: through public humiliation and staying after school.
But I like to think she was just looking for the hole-punch.
Searching for the most amazing thing
I spent the better part of the year at home with my Franklin, trying to complete the game I’d gotten for Christmas. It was a fun, if infuriating, little game from Spinnaker Software. Technically, it was ‘edutainment’ software, but this was over a decade before some asshat invented the term during the ’90s dot.com boom. To me, it was just a game, much like Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand or the truck driving sim we played at school where you lived the glorious, text-based life of a long-haul trucker. Yeah, we were easily amused in the ’80s.
Anyway, In Search of the Most Amazing Thing started off with you, the player, being summoned by your Uncle Smoke Bailey to go searching for “the most amazing thing”. He provided you a ship called the B-Liner, which let you explore the world and interact with its shy inhabitants, who you communicated with by way of drawing out little line patterns that the game turned into tones called Musix. It was a weird little game.
I spent hours, days, weeks and months subsisting on the questionably-named food called Popberries while dodging deadly Mire Crabs in my jetpack and gathering intel from Musix trades, all with the singular purpose of discovering what (and where) the most amazing thing was. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing.
The world of In Search Of was divided into the surface world and the underworld of the Mire. The game constantly warned you against going into the Mire, and suggested you get out as quickly as possible if you ever went spelunking beneath the surface. It was so dead-set against you strapping on your jetpack to go underground (yeah, it didn’t make a lot of sense) that it was pretty much the last thing you’d ever do.
So naturally, it’s exactly what I did.
One day, after finally getting so frustrated with the game that I decided to just murder my little pixelated character before rage quitting the game forever, I took him deep into the Mire. Very deep. So deep, in fact, that I eventually got bored and just wedged a book onto the joystick so he’d keep flying to the bottom of the Mire, sinking further and further into inky blackness with each refresh of the screen. So gleeful was I during these final moments of the little bastard’s life that I actually remember sitting there, watching him fall while I stared at the screen and smiled. The dude was going to die, and I was going to watch it happen. Evil had taken hold.
Except the guy never died. He just kept on falling and falling and falling. I was beginning to lose patience and was about to just switch off the computer and do something sensible like give the floppy disk a nice warm bath in soothing lighter fluid when it happened. The screen dissolved into nothingness and a bit of text began typing itself before my very eyes. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of, “Congratulations, kiddo. You found it! The Most Amazing Thing is…YOU!”
I just sat there, blinking my eyes in disbelief. After months of struggling to complete this game, I’d finally done it. On accident. While trying to murder the main character.
To this day, I don’t know if I just got lucky and accidentally exploited a bug in the game’s code, or if the programmer actually meant to bury the end of the game at the bottom of the Mire for whoever eventually discovered it through research and determination. In my case, it was pure homicidal rage. All I know is that I’d finally won, and I was done with the game. I felt great about that.
And a little ripped off. It was kind of a lame ending. Besides, I already knew I was amazing. Spinnaker Software could have saved us both a lot of time by just admitting that up front.
In any event, as soon as I walked away from the computer, I immediately called all two of my friends to tell them the news…and I distinctly remember how excited both of them weren’t. They didn’t seem to be impressed at all, which served as my first lesson in the harsh realities of life: No one cares about your shit but you.
Unfortunately, that particular lesson is one that would haunt me for the rest of my life, straight through to the present day.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
And because I still haven’t figured out that no one cares about my life but me, be sure to check out Life Bytes: Chapter Three!
There will be dragons….
In The Beginning…
I missed the first generation of video games on account of having not been born yet. I blame my parents for that one, and it’s a resentment I carry for a few reasons. First, by waiting until 1974 to have the unprotected sex that would eventually lead to my glorious birth in 1975, they made me miss all the good music of the ’60s and most of the ’70s.
By the time my ears were my own and I could start choosing what sounds went into them, it was the ’80s, which was great if you loved the keytar, but not much good for anything else. Second, Bruce Lee had been dead a full two years before I was finally expelled from my mother’s uterus in a lonesome hospital in a miserable corner of the great state of Sorry-We-Gave-You-Dubya-xas. And that’s no way to come into the world.
Still, my parents did eventually get around to making sweet ’70s love at some point, or I wouldn’t be here. So I’m pretty happy about that, even if I did miss all the best stuff of the past 50 years. Well, except for all the cool stuff of the ’80s and early ’90s, like computers and lasers and the space shuttle. And video games.
…there was Razzle Dazzle
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
I was barely five years old when I experienced two moments that would come to define the rest of my life. The second was the premiere of the best movie in the Star Wars franchise, but the first? The first was my introduction to video games.
My Dad brought home something called the Fairchild Channel F System II Video Entertainment Computer. I didn’t know why it was called the Fairchild Channel F System II Video Entertainment System, because we didn’t have an F channel on our television. I still don’t know why it was called the Fairchild Channel F System II With The Longest And Worst Product Name Ever System, but I’ve since concluded that it probably had something to do with the fact that, while the fine minds at Fairchild Semiconducter might have been familiar with the concept of marketing, they never quite got the hang of it.
Despite its horrible name, the Channel F was a great little system. It was capable of drawing in three distinct and exciting colors with five different background colors that came in varying shades of ugly. It was also capable of letting you play games against the computer, which set it apart from other game systems at the time that required human opponents because no one had figured out how to squeeze in enough raw computing power to create the awesome artificial intelligence necessary to play Pong. So it had that.
It also had a football game called Videocart-24: Pro Football, which stands as another exciting example of the brilliant marketing strategy of the Fairchild Semiconductor team. I loved the game, probably because my Dad would always play it with me. When you’re five years old, all you want to do with your life is whatever your Dad is doing with his. And my Dad was playing video games with me. I loved it.
The thing about Videocart-24: Pro Football was that it was a terrible game, with lousy graphics and even worse game play. I could be wrong here, but in the window of my memory, you didn’t actually play much in the way of football when you played Videocart-24. Instead, you selected from a list of plays, then watched as the computer ran them. I think you could grab hold of one of the monstrous cylindrical sextoy joysticks and push a button to make one X pass the square ball to another X, but the computer would decide if one of the Os intercepted it. That’s how I remember it, anyway.
And I remember the play I always used to run…and when I say that I always used to run it, I mean that I always ran it. Every. Single. Time.
That play was “Razzle Dazzle” (or at least that’s what I called it), and I thought it sounded really cool. For his part, my Dad never got tired of letting me run the same play over and over again, always acting surprised each and every time he let one of my Xs razzle the holy dazzle out of one of his Os. He did this for two reasons. First, because he was a man of endless patience. And second, because he was a pretty awesome father.
Whenever I try to recall my earliest memories, I always see myself sitting on the hideous 1970s carpet of our family room with a ridiculous controller in my hand and my Dad by my side. We’re in front of the TV with our backs to the couch, I’m running Razzle Dazzle again for the 500th time, and my Dad is smiling.
So am I.
These days, I play the current version of Videocart-24 with my own five-year-old, only it’s called NCAA Football 2012 now. And we use the 1-button mode.
Blue 42! Blue 42! Hut, hut…ah, screw it. I hate Tic Tac Toe.
The Coming of the Wars
Growing up in the ’80s meant that Star Wars was not only part of your childhood; in some ways, it was your childhood. Sure, the scene in E.T. where Elliot describes his Star Wars toys to the little alien troll with the phallic neck might have just been a bit of product placement by George Lucas’ good buddy Steven Spielberg, but it was also honest. Show me a young boy in the ’80s whose world didn’t revolve around Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and I’ll show you a religious zealot being home-schooled in the Appalachians, just before he writes a manifesto and blows something up in his underwear. The fact is, if you were a kid in the ’80s – and especially if you had a penis – you dug the ‘Wars. End of story.
My first exposure to the saga came about during the re-release of what eventually came to be known as Star Wars: Episode 1: A New Hope. My parents, probably still feeling pretty lousy that Hendrix had been dead and cold for half a decade before they finally got around to creating me, took me to see the film at a local drive-in theater. If you ever went to a drive-in back then, you already know that the experience was pretty great. If, however, you weren’t fortunate enough to make it to one before they were all turned into parking lots and driving ranges, it was pretty much the same as going to a movie today. Except that the surround sound was a tiny speaker hooked onto your dad’s window (if he was driving), and if the person next to you kept talking throughout the movie, you could just punch her in the arm until she shut up…or told on you. Because she was your sister. In short, drive-ins were awesome. I miss them.
By the time the Empire struck back in 1980, the drive-in was already history and my parents took me to a General Cinema, instead. It had, as I remember, two screens. I don’t remember what the other one was showing, because I was only interested in seeing what was going to happen to Luke, Han and Leia. I won’t recount the movie here, but if you’re any sort of geek, you’ll know that Empire was the best of the series, probably because Lucas had a hard time getting his way with Irvin Kershner. And as the prequels proved, any time no one says, “No!” to George Lucas, a baby Jar-Jar is born.
I lived and breathed Star Wars as a kid, especially after I found out that Vader was Luke’s father. (OMG! SPOILERS!) My friends and I would act out the scenes as little boys do, only ours usually ended up more violent than somebody just getting their hand chopped off. I was always careful with my toys, though. I still have most of them, including an original AT-AT (which I never have and never will refer to as a ‘Walker’), the Death Star playset and even a plastic Ewok village. Yeah, I liked the Ewoks. Sue me.
I had that one friend though, as everyone does, who didn’t give two shits about my toys or their relative safety. Thanks to him, I have one broken TIE Fighter, two broken X-Wings and a semi-functional landspeeder with a missing gear shift that’s been stuck in ‘hover’ mode since 1983. I’ve never forgiven that little bastard. And I never will.
Discovering My Joystick
But as much as I loved Star Wars, I loved video games more. Which is why, on one sorry day in 1982 when I home from school due to a lucky outbreak of chicken pox, I was so excited when my Dad brought home an Atari 2600 from the electronics store where he was working at the time. He’d rented it for me since I didn’t have much else to do with my time other than scratch in places I shouldn’t, so I took to it instantly.
He didn’t bring home much in the way of games, though. In fact, the only cartridge he rented along with the system was some sort of typical blast-the-bad-guys-from-the-bottom-of-the-screen type of affair, but I loved it all the same. I played the hell out of that game, so much so that when it came time to return the beautiful wood-grained monster, my Dad just bought it from the store. And there it stayed in our house for the next many years, tucked away in what we would eventually come to refer to as The TV Room.
Not long after I’d recovered from chicken pox, my sister and I came down with Mononucleosis. Given its common name of “The Kissing Disease” this was unfortunate for many reasons, and did nothing to help my confusion over that scene in Empire when Luke does a little tongue wrestling with Leia because Obi-Wan was a little too slow figuring out that it might be a good idea to let the kid know the princess is his sister before the two start banging in the the back seat of the Millennium Falcon. But yeah, I didn’t get it from my sister. Or maybe I did and I’ve blocked it out. Either way, let’s move on.
I had a cousin who was working for Motorola around that time, and it turned out that his company was one of the primary chip manufacturers for Atari cartridges. This meant that he had access to virtually every game that came down the pipeline, including some that never made it to market. All it took to play them was an open cartridge with a ZIFF socket, and you could swap out one chip for another and play every game you ever wanted. And I did, just as soon as he brought me several stacks of black foam with chips stuck in them. I went from having three, maybe four games to somewhere around 150. And I became very, very popular at school.
At first, no one believed that I had that many games. My parents weren’t rich or divorced and showering me with gifts to buy my greedy love or anything, so there was no logical reason why I should be so lucky as to have 150 Atari games. It took the testimony of a few friends who’d witnessed the glory of my stacks of chips to win the confidence of my 2nd grade classmates, but after that, everyone wanted to come to my birthday party.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Which led to one of the best things that ever happened to me: the Apple ][.
Or at least a pretty awesome clone.
Click here to read Chapter Two.
(I started this in 2011. It’s 2015 now, and I’m just getting back around to finishing it. Why the delay, you ask? Because sometimes life happens. Sue me.)
In the present day, photorealistic video games featuring alternate realities and fully realized artificial worlds line the shelves of game stores everywhere. I can start up a game, hop online and kill, shoot, stab, beat, maim, assassinate, decapitate, dismember and just plain murder my friends around the world. I can log in to an MMO and live a virtual life as a fearsome orc or a noble hunter in a mystical realm filled with magic and wonder and plenty of fetch quests. With modern advances in graphics, connectivity and raw computing power, it’s never been a better time to be a gamer.
Which is why I’ve been playing a lot of games lately.
With bad graphics.
And limited gameplay.
From the ’80s and ’90s.
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
Why? Because life has been stressful lately. And by lately, I mean ever since I was laid off eight months ago, back in April of 2011. Sure, I was hired back six months later, but the financial damage was already done. People can say what they want about the Occupy movement (and I’ve said plenty), but one thing the protesters are right about is how bad it is out there for people who can’t find work. If you haven’t been a victim of corporate downsizing (yet), you might have a vague idea of the unemployment situation, but until you’ve been in the thick of it and trying to find work amidst an ocean of other people all competing for the same few positions in a diminishing job market, you can’t really know what it’s like. And if you’ve been relatively untouched by what’s going on in the country because you’re lucky enough to work somewhere that hasn’t decided to start jamming the great Liposuction Wand of +10 Downsizing into its subcutaneous layer of employee fat, then you probably think unemployed people should just get a job and stop being lazy. And you would be an idiot.
What the Space Shuttle’s heat shielding is made of
But today’s essay isn’t about all that. It isn’t about what it means to be so broke that you start selling off everything you own just so you can afford a pack of unmeltable dollar store cheese. It’s not even about what happens when you trust an untrustworthy bank to tell you the truth with each new lie they spin regarding the unfortunate situation with your deteriorating mortgage payments. Instead, it’s about what you do to cope with the awful reality of living in a world that seems hell bent on bludgeoning you to death with the hammer of bureaucracy.
More specifically, it’s about what I do to cope.
And what I do is play video games.
Old video games.
From when I was a kid and life didn’t suck.
Some people watch old movies or listen to music that strikes the right nostalgia-soaked power chords of their youth, but I turn instead to the games I 
played growing up. For whatever reason, whether it’s because they’re interactive or they take longer to experience, or just because playing them is what I spent most of my time doing when I was a kid, games massage my nostalgia prostate like nothing else can. I boot up an old computer game and I’m instantly whisked back to an age where I spent most of my free time sitting at an old desk in my childhood bedroom, using a computer to transport me to fantastic worlds of myths and monsters and pirates.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, life was simpler then. My days might have been filled with the intolerable miseries of a public school education, but my nights were open to flights of fantasy, with the computer as my portal to strange new worlds. Whether I became an Avatar of the eight virtues in Brittania or a scrawny smart ass with delusions of swashing his buckle like a really real pirate somewhere deep in the Caribbean, gaming took me to places I’d never been. It allowed me to escape the emo-drenched courtyards and angst-ridden pathways of a teenager growing up in the ’80s, but there was more to it than that. I may play them now to escape the hideous truths of a miserable reality, but I played them then to explore. Long before I discovered the twisted (and honest) worlds created by writers with names like Ellison, Gaiman, Pratchett and Thompson, I was charting the weird and wonderful landscapes of game designers like Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Richard Garriott.
But it wasn’t just games. I also spent a lot of time dialing into local Bulletin Board Systems with, at first, a 300 baud modem on an Apple 2 clone my parents surprised me with one Christmas morning. Later, I’d eventually graduate to a 1200 baud modem, then a 2400, then a 9600, 14.4k, 28.8k…all the way up to high speed broadband and the Internet. But while I wouldn’t trade my always-on connection of today for the hit-or-miss modular handshakes of my youth, I’ll never love technology now as much as I loved it then, during those early days of posting to message boards, playing text-based “doors” and chatting with Sysops. Sure, we can do a lot more today when we can transfer data at 20,000,000 bits per second than we could back when just 300 bits were being lazily hand delivered between squawking modems by digital pony express riders, but I don’t care. Nostalgia doesn’t work like that.
Eventually, this would all become cat videos. And porn.
Nostalgia is about dipping into the warm waters of the past, where things are always better than they were and nowhere near as bad as they’ve become. It’s about transporting yourself back to a time when things seemed simpler, even if they weren’t. And that’s what playing the old games of my youth does for me. When I’m point-and-clicking my way through an old Sierra or Lucasfilm adventure, I don’t remember any of the lousy parts about growing up in a decade defined by parachute pants and voodoo economics; I just remember the good parts. Like finally killing Minax during a quick session of Ultima 2 one morning before school, or realizing that the red herring in Monkey Island wasn’t a red herring at all. Except that it was, and that was the whole point. Either way, I gave the stupid fish to the troll guarding the bridge…
…then it took off its mask and turned into George Lucas, proving conclusively that Ron Gilbert can see the future. (This was in 1990, remember. It would take another nine years and the release of The Phantom Menace before the world would discover Lucas’ talent for trolling his fans.)
Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek
I’m calling the series “Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek” and I’ll be posting it right here on Coquetting Tarradiddles. I’ll start with the first entry next week, so be sure to check back.
And because I love you, here’s a link the first chapter.
It’s time to talk about The Christmas Problem again, which I did last year and will repeat a bit this year, but most of it’s fresh. Or at least not dead-horse-beaten quite yet. Or maybe it is. I can never tell.
Last year, I was in the dumps mainly due to a lack of both funds and sons, with the former having been stretched like a sheet of elastic putty over the newspaper comics so thin that the fat kid from Family Circus went anorexic and the latter was at his Daddy’s Dad’s place in Colorado for the holiday – which, except for the fact that Hunter Thompson lived there, is a pretty miserable state made up of equal parts snow and John Denver divided by South Park and Columbine. It was a depressing time, with very little money to spend and minus the one person I wanted to spend it on. This year is slightly better, though. Which might explain why I’m just so darn chipper.
It’s an odd-numbered year, which means Trey (my stepson, for those keeping score at home) is here with us for Christmas, and that makes me happy. Of course, money was tight last holiday season, and that was with a full year of employment under my belt. This year, we’re going into Christmas with barely two months of paychecks between me and the bread line.
I joke, though. Thankfully, it never got as bad as that during my unemployment, mostly because I’m not even sure they 
have bread lines anymore. I think they went out of style sometime between the beginning of the Great Depression and the end of the Soviet Socialist Republic, right around the time Pepsi was making Democracy the choice of a new generation of Russians. Or something. It was the ’80s. I was a kid. Mostly I remember Ronald Reagan telling Gorbachev to tear down his wall…and then Michael Jackson danced all over everything, doing the moonwalk through Red Square and flashing his rhinestone glove at the Romanovs until Rasputin got sick and puked his Glasnost all over everybody’s Communism. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was like that.
Anyway, things are better this year, except that they aren’t. With six months of unemployment at my back, I’m feeling pretty stingy about sharing the holiday cheer with anyone other than my immediate family. And I feel especially stingy about throwing even a few pennies into the depressingly cheerful red buckets of the approximately 500 charities ringing bells at every freaking entrance of every freaking store I’ve freaking been into in the last few freaking weeks. It’s annoying, but that’s the holidays.
I suppose I could spare a few pennies here and there, and I do. At least, whenever I think I can get away with it. The looks of feigned gratitude stretched across sneered lips are a little too much to bear when I’m caught tossing some coppers into the tin rather than the shinier coins preferred by your discerning bell ringer. But times is hard, people. And you should be grateful for those pennies anyway, regardless of what you think your bell ringing skills are worth. Sure, pennies are the nusiance coin, but just ask anyone whose ever been too broke to buy a drive-thru taco how quickly they add up when you get a few of them together. One determined excavation of the couch cushions can lead to a happy visit to the CoinStar machine, followed by a voucher for unfathomable riches. Sure, the store clerk cashing in that voucher for a buck fifty might scoff at you for wasting her time, but $1.50 when you’re broke and hungry is as close to heaven as any of us are ever likely to get in this horrific little world. So take my charity and be glad for it, you little yuletide cockroaches.
I do have some things to be thankful for this year, I suppose. Take, for instance, the documented fact that festive joy can find no foothold in the soured belly of a proper newsroom. This means I’m spared the usual holiday routine of Secret 
Santas and white elephant gifts the rest of you poor cubicle monkeys are subjected to. I worked a job where, for years, I endured such miseries and I’m glad to be rid of them. When dollars are few and toys are expensive, every nickel spent buying co-workers comically masturbatory exercise equipment are nickels I can’t spend buying my son one of the very few things he’s asked for. Sorry to break it to you, overzealous office party planners, but nobody likes what you make them do every year. Nobody. And anyone who says different is either lying or just too scared of disrupting the natural flow of office indignities to shed their forced grins and phony maniacal laugh tracks to tell you what horrid little trolls you all are. So I’m doing it for them. You’re welcome, cubicleites. Rejoice and be glad in it.
So here we are, another year richer and another year poorer, set to knock ourselves silly trying to conjure up enough financial magic to prevent the holidays from becoming a mocking display of abject disappointment along the lines of unwrapping a sweater vest or listening to a non-Dolly version of Hard Candy Christmas. With a little luck, we’ll make it through.
Pray for us, though.
But send cash.
I’ve been meaning to write about the Occupy protests for awhile now, but I was busy being unemployed. You’d think that would make me a perfect candidate to embrace the 99% and bang my outrage into my keyboard and onto the web as soon as possible, but it didn’t. Probably because being unemployed has its side effects. Like making the dollar store my exclusive shopping destination. Or having to shut off my Internet access for six months because I couldn’t afford it.
Now that I’m working again and the World Wide Web is streaming the collective intelligence of the entire human race and funny cat pictures directly into my living room once more, I figured it was finally time for me to get around to sharing my thoughts on the current state of inequity in America.
Only I don’t feel like it. Mostly because I just don’t care. In a voiceover for a computer game you probably never played until they made its third sequel and added Optimus Prime and Qui-Gon Jinn to the cast, Ron Pearlman once said, “War. War never changes.”
And that’s pretty much how I feel about everything these days.
Inequity never changes. Politics never change. Candidates never change. Maybe it’s just the general sort of complacency that comes from being part of Generation X, twenty years after we perfected apathy and packaged it on the sides of lunch boxes and the covers of Tiger Beat, but I just don’t see the point of being outraged by something that will always stay the same.
Or maybe it’s because I have better things to worry about.
It’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening to the 99% or anything. I’m in the 99%. I think. I might be in the 87.4%, but I’m still waiting on a confirmation letter from the Who Gives A Shit Department. I’ve railed at length against the 1% and the 10% and every other percent that’s ever looked at me funny, but while I still loathe them, I can’t get on board with what the 99% is doing.
Why? There are a couple of reasons actually, not the least of which is that everything they’re doing is ineffective and nothing they’re doing is actually going to change anything. It’s an impotent movement that has no hope of affecting actual change because, like the Tea Party on the other side of the sanity coin, it’s fighting symptoms instead of causes.
It’s fine to hate ‘evil’ corporations, but unless you stop giving them your money, they’re never going to care. You can protest all you want and yell at every corporate exec and police officer who comes between you and your half caff venti soy vanilla latte until the cows come home, but greed? Greed never changes.
Corporations are only doing what corporations do. It’s like being mad at a dingo for stealing your baby because it’s evil rather than simply an animal doing what animals do when you leave your infant unattended in the Australian outback. If you want change, call a dog catcher. Or make the government keep the corporations in check. Teddy Roosevelt understood this. Occupy Hot Topic does not.
The other reason I don’t care probably has more to do with me not being young anymore, but not quite being old yet, either. Francois Guisot once said something that Georges Clemenceau stole that was, in turn, stolen by Winston Churchill when he said, “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.”
Yeah, what he (they) said.
The Occupy protests are, by and large, a youth movement while the Tea Party is, primarily, an old person movement. Maybe not quite elderly, but there aren’t many people in it under 40, and most of its members are pushing walkers to the bank to cash their Social Security checks so they can buy their geriatric prescriptions with Medicare at Wal-Mart. Generalities of both groups to be sure, but they’re still more or less accurate.
With me being in my mid-30s, maybe I’m just too old to get passionate about being liberal, but too young to get riled up about kids playing on my lawn and stealing my hard-earned whatevers with their socialist taxes or something. I’m still not sure what most Tea Party people are mad about, mostly because I’ve never been able to accurately translate a single one of their protest signs. In fact, about the only thing I know of the Tea Party is that they think grammar is something that happens to other people. That, and they hate taxes. But they still pay them. Because they’re sissies.
And so are the protestors in the Occupy crowd. How many 99%ers swarmed corporate stores on Black Friday to buy corporate products during an increasingly corporate-dominated holiday season? A lot. Because they just don’t get it. And they’re sissies.
One 99%er told me that it’s fine to want to stand on principle, but when Christmas day rolls around, your kids aren’t going to have a very magical morning with nothing but homemade socks and knitted sweaters you bought from an independent seller off Etsy waiting under the tree. And it’s true – but what protestors on both sides need to understand is that, when you’re seeking revolution, standing on principle is the only thing you have.
You can’t rage against the machine while powering it on every morning. You have to shut it down, walk away and learn to live without it. The Tea Party can’t bring themselves to do this by just refusing to pay their taxes and facing the consequences, and the Occupy kiddies can’t do it because dammit, iPhones are just too darn cool.
I get the whole sacrificing-principles-for-your-kids thing, though. But I don’t support the 99%. Or the Tea Party. Or anything other than the one principle I have left in my life. But more on that in a minute.
Billy Joel once sang something in a lyric you’ve probably never heard from a song you’ve probably never listened to that said, “I once believed in causes, too. I had my pointless point of view. But life went on no matter who was wrong or right.”
And that’s me right now. I had causes and rage in my youth, and I’ll probably have them again when I get a little older. But for now, I just don’t care enough about any cause that would force me to sacrifice the one single principle I have left. And that’s the thing about causes: if you want them to succeed, you have to make sacrifices. The 99% don’t understand this. The Tea Party doesn’t understand this.
But I do.
And the one thing I won’t sacrifice? Giving my son the best possible childhood I can.
Sure, corporate greed is ruining the world. The free market is a myth and the benefits of competition in the marketplace are as illusory as the whispy clouds of bullshit on which they rest. Capitalism is a great system, but only as long as it’s kept in check by government. Allow it to run free from regulation and it’ll eat itself from the tail up like a Gordon Gekko-flavored ouroboros. Competition doesn’t exist in the age of the transnational megacorporation and the free market will no more correct itself than a dog will stop murdering its food dish when it’s full. Anyone who thinks differently is either stupid or already rich. Possibly both.
But what can I do about it? I’m not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to provoke real change, and I’m not going to waste my time joining a movement with Stupid Sideburns over there, because he can’t resist a two for one sale on ironic t-shirts at Urban Outfitters for the sake of the movement. There’s just no future in it.
As it stands, I’ll continue to be motivated by the only thing that motivates me to do anything in this miserable world, and I’ll make sure he has the best life I can give him. Yes, I know that not helping to put an end to our corporate-controlled oligarchy isn’t exactly going to give him the brightest future, but I’m pretty sure that being pepper sprayed and arrested for locking arms with a bunch of kids with idiotic mustaches in a park somewhere isn’t going to do him any favors, either.
EDIT: It’s come to my attention that some readers are taking this post as me giving up due to hopelessness in the face of what I see as an unwinnable battle. Maybe it is; but I didn’t mean for it to come across that way. It wasn’t meant to be so much about hopelessness as it was about shifting priorities after you have a kid. I don’t have any numbers on this, but I’d be willing to bet that there aren’t many parents of small children in either movement, simply because there isn’t room in your life to fight the whole world when you’re fighting every day just to try and make your child’s life a little bit better. And if you’re not in the 1%, that means you don’t have time for revolution. You have to go to work and spend as much time with your kids as you can. The world can go to Hell, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe that changes when your kids are older and more self-reliant, but for young parents stuck between the righteous rage of youth and the indignant fury of old age, just surviving each day so you can give your child a better tomorrow is enough. Personally, while I love the world, I would burn it down along with everyone in it – including my friends, my family, even my wife – if it meant saving my son. That might be supremely selfish on my part, but there it is.
WAIT!
Before you read through this, go check out the new and improved ACTUAL game over here: Life – The Text Adventure 2.0!
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You are floating in a murky pool of gelatinous fluid. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
>WAIT
Time passes…
You hear the muffled scream of a woman in the distance.
A light appears to the South.
>GO SOUTH
You are at the mouth of a large cave. There is a giant hand here.
>LOOK AT HAND
You look at the hand. It’s coming right for you.
>GO NORTH
That way is blocked. The hand grabs your head and begins to pull you toward the mouth of the cave.
>SCREAM
Not yet.
>RUN
You can’t even walk.
>CRY
Ok. The hand rips you from the cave, which is now collapsing behind you. Another hand slaps your bottom. You cry.
CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve been born.
Now what?
>LOOK
You see a lot of things you won’t understand for years. Would you like to wait?
>YES
Yes, what?
>WAIT
Time passes…
CONGRATULATIONS! You just made a poopy.
Now what?
>WAIT
Time passes…
You are now a year old. There is a cake here.
>LOOK AT CAKE
There is a lit candle in the center.
>BLOW OUT CANDLE
You try to blow the candle out, but just end up drooling on yourself. And the cake. Your parents are mortified.
>WAIT
Time passes…
You are now two years old. There is a cake here.
>IGNORE CAKE
Ok. You fall asleep. Your face collapses into the cake and you spit Gerber’s all over the icing. Your parents are mortified.
>WAIT
Time passes…
You are now three years old. There is no cake here.
>WAIT
Time passes…
You are now four years old.
>WAIT
Time passes…
You are now five. There is a kindergarten here.
>LOOK AT KINDERGARTEN
You see a boy licking his shoe.
>TALK TO BOY
He says, “Hello.” Then, he licks your shoe.
>WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, WAIT
Time passes…Time passes…Time passes…
You are now 14. There is a puberty here.
>TAKE PUBERTY
CONGRATULATIONS! You receive the ability of inappropriately timed erections and develop an inexplicable hatred of your parents.
>GROW UP
You need to finish high school first.
>FINISH HIGH SCHOOL
But you haven’t even had sex yet!
>HAVE SEX
Have sex with whom?
>HAVE SEX WITH GIRL
Fat chance.
>HAVE SEX WITH SELF
CONGRATULATIONS! You have earned a Kleenex.
>FINISH HIGH SCHOOL
You graduate. There is a diploma here.
>GET DIPLOMA
You take the diploma. Nothing happens.
>PURSUE DREAMS
You need to go to college first.
>GO TO COLLEGE
You enroll in a university. There is a crippling debt here.
>ACQUIRE CRIPPLING DEBT
CONGRATULATIONS! You have earned student loans and receive a +10 to your Regret stat. There is a diploma here.
>TAKE DIPLOMA
You can’t finish college without having sex. It’s like a rule and stuff.
>HAVE SEX
Have sex with whom?
>HAVE SEX WITH EVERYONE
You have sex with everyone. Nothing happens.
>FINISH COLLEGE
You should probably try going to class first.
>GO TO CLASS
You need to stop having sex with everyone first.
>STOP HAVING SEX
Ok. You stop having sex.
>GO TO CLASS
You go to class. It looks a lot like a bar. There is a drink here.
>TAKE DRINK
You take the drink…and start having sex with everyone again.
>STOP DRINKING AND HAVING SEX
CONGRATULATIONS! You have finished college. There is a job here.
>TAKE JOB
You take the job.
>GO TO WORK
You arrive on your first day of work. Your office is in a cubicle. There is a chair here.
>SIT IN CHAIR
You sit down at your desk. There is a computer here.
>USE COMPUTER
You turn on the computer. The stupidity of other people fills your screen.
>MAKE OTHER PEOPLE LESS STUPID
If you did that, you wouldn’t have a job. Try just fixing their problems, instead.
>FIX OTHER PEOPLE’S PROBLEMS
CONGRATULATIONS! As a reward for your hard work, your boss gives you more work. There is a rest of your life here.
>TAKE REST OF MY LIFE
You try to take the rest of your life, but fail. It is being guarded by a crippling debt.
>KILL CRIPPLING DEBT
You need to finish working first.
>FINISH WORKING
CONGRATULATIONS! You are now old. There is a retirement here.
>TAKE RETIREMENT
You take the retirement and are killed by a crippling debt.
**** GAME OVER ****
SCORE: 35
RESTORE | QUIT ?
>RESTORE
Loading…
CONGRATULATIONS! As a reward for your hard work, your boss give you more work. There is a rest of your life here.
>PURSUE DREAMS
You need to find another job to do that.
>LOOK FOR NEW JOB
You find a job closer to your dreams in an unstable position at a dubious corporation. There is a huge mistake here.
>TAKE HUGE MISTAKE
CONGRATULATIONS! You’re hired.
>GO TO WORK
You need to quit your old job first.
>QUIT OLD JOB
You leave your cubicle. There is a farewell party here. And cake.
>EAT CAKE
You eat the cake. It is your boss’ favorite flavor.
>HATE CAKE
You silently seethe with secret loathing. Nothing happens.
>GO TO NEW JOB
You arrive at work to find your new office lacks a cubicle. There is a chair here.
>SIT IN CHAIR
You sit down. There is a computer here.
>USE COMPUTER
Use computer to do what?
>USE COMPUTER TO MAKE CORPORATION MORE EFFICIENT AND RELEVANT TO THE CURRENT MARKET
You earn some money. There is a crippling debt here. It looks hungry.
>FEED CRIPPLING DEBT
The crippling debt devours your paycheck, but still looks hungry.
>USE COMPUTER TO IMPRESS YOUR BOSS BY MAKING THE CORPORATION EVEN MORE EFFICIENT AND PROFITABLE
CONGRATULATIONS! Your work enables the company to set new records and even wins an award! Your boss is so impressed by your ability to automate daily tasks that he gives you a special prize: he lays you off. There is a severance package here.
>TAKE SEVERANCE PACKAGE
You pick up the severance package. A crippling debt glares at it with hungry eyes.
>FEED CRIPPLING DEBT
You give your severance package to the crippling debt. It growls as it snatches it from your hands and sprints off into the shadows.
>FIND NEW JOB
In this economy?
>YES
Are you serious?
>YES
Really?
>YES!
Ok. Would you like fries with that?
>HATE LIFE
Hating life won’t stop the crippling debt.
>HATE CRIPPLING DEBT
Your heart fills with anger and disgust. Nothing happens.
>FIND NEW JOB
Seriously, there’s nothing here. Try moving.
>RELOCATE
You need money for that.
>FIND MONEY
You plunder the cavernous depths of your couch cushions and then go buy a drive-thru taco.
>APPLY FOR TACO JOB
You’re overqualified.
>WRITE NEW RESUME
You construct a new resume, where you have no experience doing anything.
>APPLY FOR TACO JOB
You’re too old.
>PURSUE DREAMS?
Nice try. You are eaten by a crippling debt.
**** GAME OVER ****
Score:36
RESTORE | QUIT ?
>QUIT
Now go play the new and improved ACTUAL game over here: Life – The Text Adventure 2.0!
It’s not easy being a Texan when the rest of the civilized world ranks your state’s politics somewhere between corporate prostitution and eating babies, but it’s home. And I hate it.
Don’t get me wrong, though. The area of the Lone Star State in which I unhappily reside does have its good points. For instance: the weather is always a pleasant 50,000 degrees and, with no shortage of refineries spewing toxins into the air around the clock, you never have to wonder if you’ll get cancer. Because you will.
You might have heard that Texas is the gem of the nation when it comes to having jobs in this miserable economy, and it’s true. Sort of.
While Texas has created a lot of jobs, what no one tells you is that those jobs are mostly low-paying, blue collar shift work – which wouldn’t be so bad if most of the shift work in my area didn’t involve prolonged exposure to the toxins of those refineries I just mentioned.
However, if you bothered to fork out thousands of dollars for a degree and expect to walk out of school and into a nice desk job somewhere deep in the heart of Texas, you’ll probably need to extend your higher education with an introductory course to Basic Disappointment.
Not that a job is worth moving to Texas for, if any jobs even existed.
The climate here makes air conditioning a life-saving luxury, and “heat advisories” are daily warnings that let us know it’s hot outside, just in case we forget or are confused about the esoteric medical relationship between heat stroke and it being really freaking hot.
While we technically follow the same four seasons as the rest of the nation, we really only do it because everyone else seems to think it’s a good idea and we want to fit in. In truth, we have only two seasons: Summer and Not Summer. There’s a week or two of Autumn and Spring thrown in there somewhere, but comfortable temperatures make Texans nervous, so we usually just lie down until they go away.
The perpetual hell-heat does have its upside, though. Fashion is no respecter of climate, so there’s always fun to be had by laughing at women who wear furry winter boots and stylish overcoats to do their Christmas shopping in 95° weather with a 105° heat index. Try to picture it. I bet you can’t.
Texas is also a state where the majority vote chooses candidates based solely on the criteria of how good their hair looks and how many lethal injections they’re willing to give to brown people. It’s a little bit like the old west, if the old west had cowboys that wore three piece suits and smiled as they murdered you.
Alright, maybe it’s a lot like the old west.
If you’ve heard about southern hospitality and want to see what it’s all about, please don’t come to Texas looking for it. The only non-Texan that Texans seem to love is Jesus, but only because they’re pretty sure he was born here and smuggled away to the middle east by Jewish Mexicans with ties to Al-Qaeda in order to discredit Ronald Reagan and get Obama elected.
People who choose to live in Texas love the place and protect it from outsiders in the same sort of way that a paranoid schizophrenic might love a soiled handkerchief that talks to him at night and tells him to murder the wallpaper with a fork because it’s been making fun of his grandmother.
Sane people don’t choose to live in Texas.
Because they’re sane.
In contrast, New England is the inverted image that Texas would see in the mirror if it wasn’t afraid that mirrors are how the Devil gets inside you. It is the opposite of the deep south, and I wish I was there right now.
New England has four seasons, wonderful history, great schools, friendly people and breathable air that won’t give you cancer faster than smoking twelve packs of asbestos cigarettes a day. It is, in a word, Paradise.
And all I have to do to get there is wait until the day I’m finally old enough to retire. Unfortunately, by then my body will have reached an age where it can no longer tolerate the cold and my kids will demand I check in to an old folk’s home in sunny Florida…
…which is a lot like Texas, except with even more crazy.
Oh well, maybe if I’m good and eat all my tapioca pudding, they’ll let me drive the little boats around Disney World once in awhile.
It’s good to have goals.
Dammit.
Sir Terry Pratchett is going to die.
Or rather, the friendly staff of Switzerland’s Dignitas clinic is going to politely assist him to death.
This is a deeply personal decision on the part of Sir Pratchett and I really have no business commenting on it. But I’m going to, anyway. Probably because I’m a tactless American.
Part of me (the smaller part) wants to applaud him for taking the reins on his life to determine exactly when and where he’ll go quietly into that assisted good night. But the larger part of my personality (the one that likes to whisper horrible things directly into my frontal lobe at night, just after I fall asleep and just before I wake up screaming) wants to slap him around a little until he promises not to do it.
But that part of me is the selfish part. It’s the one that wants him to stay around forever (or at least for as long as I’m around), writing more brilliant novels and shoving more unforgettable quotes into my braincase. I want him alive so that his work keeps going – but the problem is, simply living won’t accomplish that.
You see, Sir Pratchett was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s a few years ago, and his days of cogent thought are numbered. He wants to go out before his mind turns on him, which is a terrible prospect for anyone. But it’s even worse for a writer.
Writers are funny little creatures. We spend the majority of our time on this planet bringing our lives to the brink of ruin, just so we’ll have something interesting to write about later on. And when we’re not writing, our demented little brains are cooking up all sorts of fiendish ways to punish us until we finally sit down and bang on the keyboard again. We live almost entirely inside our own minds, which is usually a great – if occasionally demented – place to be. Unless it decides to betray us, that is.
And this is the situation in which Pratchett finds himself. Why spend useless years as a burden to his loved ones while he curses his fate on lucid days and is unsure what pudding is all about on the others? Why put himself and those he loves through that prolonged pain and suffering?
There’s no good reason, really. No rational one, at any rate.
But death isn’t rational. And no matter what the Dignitas clinic calls itself, it’s certainly not dignified. Death is always horrible. It’s always hard. It’s always ugly and it’s always heart-breaking, no matter how your clock gets punched.
I certainly respect Sir Pratchett’s right to decide when he dies, because if we’re ever going to live in a free society, then the one thing we should have an intractable freedom over is our own damn bodies. If you want to pump yours full of drugs and go through life as an only slightly less interesting version of blueberry jam on burnt toast, then that should be your decision. And, if you want to decide when you’ve had enough of the wonderful miseries of life, then it’s nobody’s business but your own.
And mine, apparently.
I just don’t like the idea that there can ever be anything dignified about death. It’s a painful, brutal part of life that haunts us every waking moment after our first goldfish dies and we learn all about the heavenly fishy peace to be found in the holy pipework of municipal plumbing.
Maybe choosing your time to die lets your family get closure, but I don’t buy it. Mostly because I find the very idea of closure to be complete bullshit.
You never get over losing someone you love, no matter how they die. There’s never enough time to be with them, never enough moments to share. And when they’re gone, it won’t matter that you got to say goodbye. They’re still gone. Forever.
Whenever Death comes, at least he’s always smiling.
Nothing you can do will ever make that feel any better. You can’t ever have “closure” unless you can stop loving the person you lost. And I don’t know about any of you, but the day I stop loving the people I’ve lost is the day I’ll check myself into the Dignitas clinic. Because life won’t mean a damn thing anymore.
I don’t know how to feel about Terry choosing when he dies. I honestly don’t. It’s not like I’ve ever met the man or even had a pleasant thirty-second conversation over a book signing. I just know how I feel about death, and I know that it is never, ever dignified.
It can’t be. It hurts too damn much.
If you’re not from Texas, you probably won’t understand Texas. But one thing you can understand about Texas is that it is a strange and silly place, not entirely unlike Camelot. Except without all the singing.
Here in Texas, we have a governor. His name is Rick Perry. He has great hair. And that’s about all I can say about him, according to the international rules of motherly advice of the ‘if you can’t say anything nice…’ variety.
If you live in the USA (as I’m sure at least a few of you do), then you’re probably familiar with the Bible Belt. If you’re not familiar with the Bible Belt, it’s pretty easy to get a handle on. Just rent yourself a copy of Footloose.
Yeah, it’s like that.
As you are no doubt aware, America was thrown into terrible financial chaos in 2008. As you are also no doubt aware, this crisis was brought upon by corporate greed, corrupt politicians and the insidious little insects buzzing about on Wall Street. However, what you are probably not aware of is that is wasn’t really their fault.
It was ours.
The blame of the current miserable state of the United States lies firmly at the feet of its citizenry, not its leaders. And certainly not its broken, upside-down financial system.
No, it is entirely the fault of us, the people of America. Because we haven’t been praying hard enough.
So says Governor Perry, anyway. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Guvnah Goodhair in his own words:
To be clear, if Perry wants to pander to the religious right (who don’t seem to care that he pays no heed to the teachings of Christianity as long as he golly-gee-shucks his way through a big prayer meeting and makes them feel better), that’s fine. Catering to the religious crowd is what politicians do. There’s a reason they do it, and it’s nothing to do with any religious ideology other than the Religion Of Getting More Votes. And it works.
My problem is more with the commercial that comes after he testifies; the one that implies all the problems facing the country are because God is mad at us for not praying, rather than placing the blame firmly at the feet of evil, greedy bastards.
You know, people like Rick Perry.
I have no problem with prayer. Whatever makes this miserable world more tolerable for you is fine by me, as long as your holy rolling doesn’t gum up the works for those of us who want to find real solutions to the real problems that we really face here in the really real world of the real.
Then again, there’s a large part of me that wants to slap all of you.
Hard.
And twice on Sunday.
You see, even the most devout Christians – especially the most devout Christians – have to acknowledge that prayer is ultimately futile. Prayers of gratitude and worship are fine and all, but most people pray for something to happen. It’s what Governor Perry’s little Holy Ghost circlejerk is all about: effecting change in the world.
The problem is, prayer can’t do that.
If you’re a Christian who believes in the God of the Bible, then you must believe in His Divine Plan and that He is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. (And that he loves the Oxford comma.)
By those criteria alone – the basic principles of Christianity – then your prayers do absolutely nothing in the real world. They can’t.
If God is omniscient, then He knows all things. If He is omnipotent, then He is all powerful. And, if He is omnipresent, he exists in all places, at all times. And He does not change.
Add all that to the Divine Plan, and even the most pious Christian in the world must accept that their prayers do nothing other than make themselves feel better.
If you get cancer, then God already knows you have cancer. He’s omniscient, after all. And, since everything is part of the Divine Plan, you got the Big C for a reason. Sure, He could flex his omnipotent muscles and cure you, but He’s omnipresent – so He already knows if He’s going to heal you or let you die.
You can pray all you like, but you’re neither calling to His attention anything He doesn’t already know, nor are you going to convince Him to change His mind. God doesn’t change. And He has a plan. (Kind of like the Cyclons, but with less power chords and Hindu chanting.)
So what I’m saying here is, please stop using prayer as a means of making yourself feel better at the expense of actually doing something that might make the world better.
The afterlife is all well and good – and I honestly do respect everyone’s right to believe whatever they want to believe about it – but it’s after life. It’s right there in the name. It happens later, after this life is over.
It’s at this point when my devout friends will often tell me, “Well, wouldn’t it be better to pray and do all these things, just in case everything is true and you need to do it to get into Heaven?”
To this, I usually answer, “Sure. But wouldn’t it also be nice if you prayed and did all these things, but also stopped clinging to the hope that maybe life gets better after we die, and instead kept doing your prayer and ritual while you also started doing a little something to bring this life out of the cosmic shitter?”
And that’s the whole point, really. What if there is no grand reward when we die, and no ultimate punishment for our sins? What if the only time we have is right here, right now on this little rock called Earth? Wouldn’t that make what we do here and now the only thing that matters? That actually means anything at all?
I don’t know about you, but if I were keeping watch at the pearly gates, I’d take a good, long look at the guy that did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do, not because he wanted a shiny prize or was afraid of being punished by God’s jailer with the bifurcated tail.
So anyway, today’s message is simple, kids:
Stop praying.
Start doing.
Amen.
He came home from work like he did every night: tired and hungry and late. His children are already asleep in their beds when he creaks open the doors of their rooms to check on them and blow silent goodnight kisses in the dark.
He creeps down the hallway to his own room, careful to avoid the squeakiest of the old floorboards. He find his wife there, in bed and asleep, with a book resting on her chest. He smiles and switches off the light.
Making his way back down the hall, he stops beneath the dangling string of the attic door. Pulling it down, he winces as the noisy cracks and groans of its rusted springs reverberate throughout the house.
He stops and worries for a moment that his children might wake at the sound and cry out in fear of a monster skulking toward their bedrooms – but only for a moment. They hadn’t been frightened of monsters in years.
The wooden ladder scrapes against the hallway floor and comes to rest, snug and secure against ancient grooves worn deep into the floorboards. He climbs the ladder and ascends into the darkness.
As he makes it to the top rung, he reaches out one long arm and fumbles around for the string tied to the lightbulb. He gives it a tug and it flickers to life.
He pulls himself up into the tiny space of the attic and, bending his head low to wind his way through cobwebs and crossbeams, begins to walk.
He passes by the holiday decorations: first Easter, then Christmas, then Thanksgiving and Halloween. He pushes through tinsel and string, brushes past an old set of golf clubs he’s never used but that once belonged to his father, and gently moves aside boxes of old toys his children once loved, but had long ago forgotten.
He makes his way to the very back of the attic, into a tiny corner where the dim light from the old bulb can’t reach. It’s cluttered with broken tools and mouse traps, and an old blue tarp. He squeezes himself into the tiny space and sticks his hand under the plastic.
He pulls out an old wooden jewelry box that his mother gave him years ago, when he was younger than his children were when they forgot about their boxes of toys. It is a treasure chest, with a tiny keyhole in the center.
With his back resting against a nearby rafter, he sets the box on his lap, reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a tiny metal key.
He unlocks the box.
The scent of old wood and decay hits his nose as he pulls back the lid. He smiles, closes his eyes, and reaches inside.
He pulls out an old scrap of paper, torn and yellowed by time. There was a name on it once, and some numbers. Both are too faded now to read. He puts it back in the box.
Next, he removes a tattered bit of dull green fabric; frayed at the edges, where it had been cut years before. He holds it between his fingers for a moment, then lifts it to his face. He takes a deep breath, but doesn’t smell anything. He sets it aside.
A toy space shuttle is next. He holds it aloft and makes it fly for second, then returns it to Earth.
An ancient paper airplane crumbles in his hands, and he lets the bits drip down into the box.
He lifts out a photograph, but it’s old and faded, and he’s unable to tell who was in it, or what they were doing. He puts it back.
He pulls out a pocket watch and reads its inscription, “Until the end of time…” It is tarnished and dull, and its hands don’t move when he winds it. He tosses it aside.
Next, he finds a medicine bottle, still half-full. The prescription label is faded and worn, and he can no longer read it. But he remembers what it said, and he remembers the day when his mother didn’t need the medicine anymore. He lets go and lets it fall when he feels the tears returning.
He rummages through the box for hours, pulling out fragments of memories and the lingering remnants of his dreams.
And that’s what they were, tucked away in this tiny corner of the attic where the light couldn’t reach. His dreams.
He never called the girl whose name was on the yellowed bit of paper, but always wished he had.
He’d only worn the Halloween costume his grandmother made him from that green fabric once, but it had smelled like her for years. He wished it still did.
He never became an astronaut or a fighter pilot, and the one time he flew in a plane, he was stuck in an aisle seat, couldn’t see out the window, and was sick in a paper bag. But he still wanted to fly.
He never became a photographer, but he still dreamed of finding beauty in the world.
The girl who’d given him the pocket watch left years ago, but he never stopped believing that forever should have lasted longer.
He never became a doctor or discovered a cure for cancer, but he kept waiting for the news that someone, somewhere had.
And tonight, after he’d pulled out the last of his dreams, he sighed and he smiled, and he added one more before closing the little wooden box and locking it with the tiny metal key he kept in his coat pocket.
He returns the box to the tiny space beneath the old blue tarp and makes his way out of the attic, past the toys and golf clubs and holidays. He tugs again on the long string to click off the light as he makes his way down the ladder.
As the rusted springs groan once more and the attic door closes into the ceiling, he thinks about waking his wife to tell her the bad news, but decides that it can wait until morning, after the kids have left for school.
Eventually, she’ll notice that he hasn’t left for work, and he will tell her.
Then, he’ll start looking for a new dream.
Again.
*******
This post is intended for graduating high school seniors and the parents of graduating high school seniors. You know who you are.
My Commencement Speech To The Graduating Class Of
Whatever-The-Hell-Year-It-Is-When-You-Read-This
I will never be your commencement speaker, but if I were your commencement speaker, I would commence to speaking one thing and one thing only: You do not need something to fall back on.
If there’s one piece of advice that parents always get wrong, it’s the idea that their children need to set aside their dreams for a few years, go to college, and get a degree. You know, so they’ll have something to fall back on when the world crushes their hopes and leaves them shattered and bleeding in the back alleyways of life.
It’s nice advice, and it comes from a well-intentioned place.
Your parents don’t want to see you beaten and broken by the world just because you might not be as talented as you think you are. They want you to have a safety net, for when the inevitable happens and you realize you’ll never be a Hollywood director or bestselling author, or a rock star or movie star, or even a brilliant concert flügelhornist.
It’s sound advice, tried and tested by parents the world over. It’s why we have so many college graduates in the world today. And that’s a good thing, right?
Right?
Yeah…it’s just too bad most of them end up scrambling to compete for a place in a dwindling job market of over-educated twenty-somethings who find themselves working for peanuts after they realize everyone’s walking around the job market at ground level, with a $100,000 safety net.
College isn’t cheap.
And, unless you’re lucky enough to have full scholarships, you’ll have to pay for it yourself.
And, unless your parents are rich, that means you’ll take out student loans.
And, with very few exceptions, most careers take decades to show profitability after you subtract the hideous amount of debt that typical college graduates carry around with their diplomas.
You’re graduating high school today, which means you’re young. And if ever there’s a time in your life to risk everything, it’s now. You have the whole rest of your life to play it safe and boring, and those days will get here soon enough. Don’t invite them early.
Don’t wait until after you’ve put years of study and thousands of dollars into a degree you can fall back on. That kind of investment isn’t a safety net. It’s a ball-and-chain, and it’s one to which you’ll find yourself shackled for the rest of your natural life.
But what your parents and teachers aren’t telling you is that college will still be there a few years from now. You don’t have to take one foot out of high school and immediately plant the other in a university just because everyone is telling you it’s a good idea.
Because it isn’t.
Not if you’re a dreamer. Or someone with a basic grasp of simple math. If your parents truly understood things, if they encouraged you to do anything, it would be to learn a trade. Learn a skill, apply it, make money from it. Then, use that money to pay for college, if you want to go that route later on. Because the jobs are there for the people with the skills to fill them. However, and I shit you not kiddies, the college system as it is now is designed to accept you with open arms, then wrap saddlebags of inescapable debt around your neck and kick you out into a world that doesn’t have a job for you.
So anyway, take some time to go for your dreams now, before you have student loans to pay back and a mortgage to meet and a family to support. The less you have to lose, the more you can afford to fail. And you’ll never have less in your life than you have right now.
That’s a good thing, I promise. Cherish it while you can
Sure, most of you will never realize your dreams. It’s just the nature of the beast. The world is filled with dreamers, and they all want their shot at the prize. It’s life’s version of the cereal box contest that comes with the disclaimer that “Thousands will enter, few will win.”
And you probably won’t win.
But you might.
The only sure thing is that you’ll never be at a better place to try than you are right now.
Never.
Ever.
So when your parents and all the adults in your life tell you it’s fine to have dreams, just as long as you have something to fall back on, you tell them that it’s also fine to just shut the hell up and let you take a shot at the one thing that’s ever made you happy in this otherwise miserable and loathsome world.
Screw them.
Take your shot now, while you still have time.
You’re the only one who can.
See also: Life – The Text Adventure
-Sincerely,
The Guy Who Will Never Be Your Commencement Speaker
Congratulations, class of when-the-hell-ever!
I’ve been meaning to write something about Firefly for years, but for one reason or another, I’ve never managed to get around to actually doing it. But, since it’s been a topic in the news lately thanks to Nathan Fillion stirring up the fanboys beyond all reason, I thought I’d finally take a few minutes and write something up about why Firefly was such a great show…and why it was doomed to fail from the start.
Let’s begin with three things that made the show so damned good.
There are many common themes in Joss Whedon’s work, but one of the strongest is the idea that failure is inescapable. That life is short, brutal and unfair – and there’s no great reward coming to any of us. The world will beat us down, but what makes us human is our determination to get back up again. Never give up. Keep flying.
Malcolm Reynolds and Zoe Washburne fought for the losing side of a civil war. Their own forces abandoned them in the battle of Serenity, a name which Mal would later give to his ship. Broken and defeated, the crew of Serenity comes together precisely because they aren’t broken or defeated. Not yet.
For Mal, Serenity represents freedom. Freedom from the rules of the Alliance, from the constraints of ‘polite’ society and from every external force in the universe that tries to tell men how to live their lives. Shoved to the “raggedy edge” of society, the ship is always falling apart, the odds are always against her crew and every moment is a struggle to keep going. But that’s what they do. They get back up, they fix the ship, they take their lumps and they keep flying as best they can. And they fail horribly. Because that’s life.
Firefly wasn’t a show about spaceships or cowboys, or cowboys on spaceships doing spacey, cowboyish things. It was, as any good fiction is, entirely about people. The stories told each week weren’t vast epics about interstellar politics as seen through the eyes of archetypal heroes. That’s Star Wars. Nor were they about an interchangeable crew’s mission to land on a new planet each week to fight aliens in rubber suits between bouts of interspecies erotica. That’s Star Trek.
The story of Serenity and her crew was a story of…well, Serenity and her crew. And that story was one of sacrifice, forgiveness, acceptance, love, loss, hope, fear, and all the other things that go into the soup we call people. Malcolm Reynolds was a lost soul, clinging to the fringe of a moral code the rest of the ‘verse abandoned. Zoe Washburne was his disciple, but with one foot in his ideals and the other in more practical, mundane things. Like marriage.
Wash was comic relief, but he was also the other thing Zoe had her foot in. He was often the voice of reason, pointing out the absurdity of Mal’s hardline ways. Jayne was the blunt instrument confused by the goings on around him as much as he was an active participant. He was the selfish, self-gratifying brute struggling with a conscience he never knew he had. Book was the obvious spiritual voice, but his guidance came less from gods and more from the unfortunate experiences of a life best left forgotten. Except when it was needed.
Kaylee and Inara were women who found their femininity from opposite ends. Kaylee was a wide-eyed innocent with deep roots and reckless abandon, while Inara was sophisticated, refined and disciplined. Inara, while the most obvious representation of sex, was the most restricted character on the show. The strict rules of being a Companion both bound and empowered her, and her presence on Serenity was her path to freedom. Kaylee, on the other hand, was anything but refined. She was the down and dirty character most tied to the physicality of being human. The barefoot hippie girl who Mal hired after catching her with her pants down in the engine room went on to paint little flowers on the walls of the mess hall.
Simon and River were the best and worst of the Alliance: the best of what humanity is capable of achieving – and the worst of what it’s capable of doing to get there. The brother and sister were often the driving force behind much of Serenity’s perils and triumphs, on the one hand a motivating plot device and the strongest ties to family on the other. Which brings me to the last reason Firefly was such a great show.
Another theme that Whedon consistently revisits is the concept of family, but not in the traditional sense. The “traditional” family is largely a myth based on a funky twentieth century concept anyway, and Whedon completely disregards it. Accidents of blood have nothing to do with who your family is, or at least they shouldn’t. Your family are those people who stand beside you, who forgive you, who can love and hate and loathe you all at the same time. Our families are whoever we choose to accept into them, and no one is granted free admission just because they share genetic material or were expelled from the same uterus.
Above everything else that made Firefly special was this sense of Family that the cast of the show brought to the crew of Serenity. They bickered with each other, they fought each other, they backstabbed and double-crossed and rescued each other. And none of them had to be there. No member of the crew was forced to accept any self-righteous uncle or manipulative cousins. Simon and River were the only blood relatives on the boat, and their bond transcended traditional family ties. Simon abandoned his life to rescue River, which meant abandoning their parents. Love had everything to do with it. Blood had nothing.
Very few shows are able to capture the bliss and misery of Family as well as Firefly managed to. Maybe it’s because the cast ‘clicked’ off-screen as much as on. Maybe it’s because, after years of exploring the same theme on Buffy and Angel, Whedon had mastered depicting *real* families by the time Firefly rolled around. Maybe it was magic. Maybe it was all of these things.
Now, let’s move on to that bad stuff: three reasons why Firefly was doomed to cancellation from the beginning. The bad stuff here isn’t necessarily bad stuff. In fact, most of it is quite good. And really, my three reasons for Firefly’s success could easily be listed as three reasons for its failure. You never want to put a show that’s too good on the air. Not if you want it to stay on the air, anyway.
The first of these deals with the hesitation Firefly had with continuity episodes. While one-off episodes are the standard in television, Firefly needed a large story arc told episodically. Whedon’s fans, after being conditioned to continuity for years on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, expected it – but they’re not the issue. Continuity, for all the wondrous things it brings to a rich and meaty story is usually very bad for primetime television.
When it works, it works great. But when it doesn’t, it fails horribly. Understandably, networks are cautious about excessive continuity in new shows. That’s why the first seasons of both Buffy and Angel were mostly one-off episodes about the monster of the week. The idea is that you’re building your audience with the first season, and you can start in with the really good stuff later.
The problem with Firefly taking this approach is that the series begged for a lengthy narrative from the start – and we all knew it had one. It just wasn’t going to show it yet, no matter how much we wanted it to. There was clearly going to be something up with the Reavers and the whole River situation, but Firefly’s first and only season wasn’t too eager to let us in on the secrets. For those, we’d have to wait until several seasons were condensed into one two-hour movie.
The lack of continuity from the start really hurt the show, but not enough to get it canceled. Continuity-based shows that aren’t about Kiefer Sutherland going off-mission and torturing terrorists don’t tend to attract a large number of casual viewers for the simple reason that you can’t casually watch a continuity-based program. You have to tune in each week to keep up with the story, otherwise you get lost and are likely to abandon the series altogether. Or just wait for the DVDs. Which a lot of people did.
The problem with DVD sales for a first season show that gets canceled before airing all of its episodes is that, well, the show is already canceled by the time people ‘discover’ it on DVD. It’s too late to recognize how great the show was after it’s already over, and buying the DVD won’t put it back on the air. Maybe if you hadn’t had anything better to do on Friday nights (a horrible time slot), you could have tuned in. Or maybe you didn’t want to get wrapped up in weekly continuity episodes when you could just wait for the DVD and watch them all at once. But whatever the reason, enough people weren’t watching when it mattered. And by the time they were, it was over.
Whedon also shoved a lot of science into his science fiction, although he wasn’t heavy handed about it. And he left a lot of things unsaid, which is a great way to avoid having the Internet tell you how wrong you are about tachyons. What he did do was put in a lot of nods to science without going technobabble crazy, as so many other sci-fi shows are prone to do.
There is no sound in space: Check.
Lasers are pretty impractical for killing things, so guns still fire bullets: Check.
Guns needs oxygen to fire, so take the time to show a character firing his gun through a spacesuit’s helmet: Check.
There is no reason a spaceship built in space for space travel should have to look like a boat or a rocket or an airplane. Giant skyscraper-like Alliance cruisers: Check.
There are a lot more, but putting too much of the real world into the fantasy tends to make the waterheaded masses tune out. Casual viewers want ray guns and explosions and the poorly-advertised “space whores.” They don’t want to try and figure out why the big boom in space didn’t make a big boom, or why the fact that people using horses on a distant planet actually makes more sense than having everyone float around on hovercrafts.
If you don’t believe me on this, check out the differences in the series and the movie. The movie had sound in space. And hovercrafts. And lots of other things the studio thought would be a really great idea to keep the audience from hating it. Sadly, they were probably right.
Oddly enough, one of the most endearing things about Whedon’s storytelling is also something that likely played a role in Firefly’s demise. Joss Whedon (along with the many talented writers and producers who’ve worked with him, including folks like Marty Noxon, David Fury and the sublimely talented Jane Espenson, just to name a few) understands the power of narrative.
He knows the young peasant farmer is supposed to grow up to save the galaxy. He gets that the bomb shouldn’t be diffused until the timer shows only one or two seconds, preferably after it’s already sped up once or twice. After a car crash, one random wheel should go rolling through the frame. Car chases run through fruit stands. The bad guys lose and the good guy gets the girl. He knows all this stuff, but he doesn’t care.
Or rather, he does care. But he subverts it. When the good guy got the girl on Buffy, he turned into an evil, soulless beast who tried to destroy the world. The power of narrative always tries to push a story in one direction: the way stories work. But Whedon and company enjoy pushing things in another direction: the way real life works.
This subversion of the expected narrative path is one of the best things about a Joss Whedon show. It’s also one of the most confusing and off-putting aspects for people who don’t get it. The television audience is not, by and large, keen on subtext. Or subverting accepted norms. Or stories that divert from expected pathways. People only really like the plot twists they see coming.
They want their heroes to be larger than life, and to overcome enormous obstacles with grace and dignity. What they don’t want is to see them fail over and over again until Nathan Fillion ends up sitting alone and naked in the desert. (Unless they’re into that sort of thing, anyway. Like my wife.)
So that’s my entry on Firefly. It’s nearly a decade overdue, but 2002 doesn’t seem all that long ago. And who knows? Maybe we haven’t heard the last of Serenity’s crew, after all. If the Arrested Development movie can finally get a tentative release date, it’s proof that miracles can still happen. Sometimes.
Until then,
Keep flying.
Yesterday, William Shatner woke up the crew of Discovery with a re-working of the Star Trek opening. Tomorrow, the shuttle will land for the last time. But today, I’m just sad.
The end of the shuttle program heralds not just the end of an era in spaceflight, but rings out the last, tinny echoes of hope from a chorus that once sang of all that was bright and wondrous in this new world of technology and promise. Or, at least it was a new world. Back before we forgot that we live in the future.
I’m a child of the ’80s. Not a pretender to the decade as so many twenty-something hipsters who grew up in the ’90s are, but a true, dyed-in-smurf-blue kid of the Reagan era. I grew up alongside computers, as PCs fought their way into the world, but before they’d taken it over.
Back then, during the closing days of the Cold War, when Russia and Cuba could reasonably be expected to launch an assault on Colorado and Patrick Swayze, the air was different. Maybe it was because I was a kid, but it seemed like there was a bit of magic mixed in with the paranoia, and the future was an exciting new landscape of technology and innovation in which I couldn’t wait to live.
Everything was new. Computers were new. Modems were new. Bulletin Board Systems held a tantalizing promise of digital community the world had never known. The future was everywhere. Lasers became commonplace, dizzying displays of light synced to the driving techno-chords of Moog synthesizers. Or Pink Floyd.
I built a robot in third grade. In sixth grade, I reproduced the hydroponics configuration of Walt Disney World‘s “The Land” with a motor, a hamster wheel and a handful of tomato plants. I did everything I could to reach the future of the 1980s, a time where we collectively imagined we’d explore the frontiers of space and test the limits of the human mind. Technology would usher in a new era of humanity, ruled by science and reason and intellect. And flux capacitors.
But somewhere along the way, it all went wrong. I can’t remember when it happened. I just know that it did.
The community of BBSs dissolved into the increasing chatter of FidoNET, which itself later fell to CompuServ, Prodigy and America On-Line, until the Internet eventually ate them all. The sense of belonging to a digital family was washed away by the tidal surge of the Net and its ocean of limitless information. And noise.
Lasers, once a great symbol of science blending with the promise of art, a taste of lightsabers and ray guns, became nothing more than presentation tools for waterheaded MBAs to use during their torture sessions of PowerPoint and buzzwords. Now we use them to annoy our cats.
Computers stirred the imagination to touch the boundaries of the possible and push beyond them. Games rose up from text-only affairs to adventure and role playing games with crude graphics that provided more introspection than they did entertainment. They were a solitary activity, requiring a working knowledge of the arcane science of interrupt requests, input-output addresses and configuration files. (More on that here, here, and here.) Now, they’re photo-realistic, normal-mapped depictions of war and blood and brown. And sometimes they come in happy meals.
Where did our future go, exactly? Thirty years ago, I dreamed of a great world rising up thirty years later. But that was before the promise of innovation yielded to the demand for consumer products. I admit, my iPhone is amazing. I can watch movies on demand anywhere in the world inasmuch as AT&T decides to provide coverage. I can check my e-mail, surf the web and buy any song I’ll ever want with the touch of a button. It’s amazing and I am amazed by it.
So why does it feel so cheap?
Maybe it’s because I grew up. Maybe the hopes and dreams of youth are always dashed upon the jagged rocks of maturity. It happened to the hippies, where the flower-children of one decade became the yuppies of the ’80s. I don’t remember them, though. I was too busy playing with Star Wars toys and charting a course into the infinite unknowns of tomorrow to care about the mundane world of adults. The world I’m in now.
If it is meant to be this way – if the natural course of our lives is one of rising hope and crushing disappointment – then when the nose wheel of Discovery next touches the Earth, it will be the last step on a 30 year journey to nowhere. For all the convenience of our gadgets, the world isn’t much different than it was three decades ago. We just have more things that go bleep and bloop, and more ways to keep us up at night and away from all the things that ever really mattered.
I will always miss the days of my youth, when the future was an enormous playground of unending possibility. But what I miss more is the ability to hope and dream and wonder like I could back then. Whether it was because I was young and stupid, or if there really was any magic crackling through the atmosphere back when Woz tinkered in his garage, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever spark was there – or that I thought was there – is gone.
I can only hope my son feels some touch of it during these early days of his life, and that he’s able to hold onto it longer than I have. And when Discovery touches down tomorrow for the last time, and as the crew pops out to give one last ceremonial wave to the cameras, I’ll hope that maybe one day I can get it back.
So long, and thanks for all the dreams
Today is Monday. It is also Valentine’s Day, which means the universe either really hates or totally adores single people. I’m undecided, but I’m pretty sure I’m off the hook, either way.
Married people celebrate Valentine’s Day differently than other Facebook relationship statuses. We don’t go in for all the lovey-dovey stuff, choosing instead to quietly affirm our affections in private, more intimate ways. At least, this is what husbands tell their wives when they rent a romantic movie for a buck at the Redbox, then come home and “watch” it with her while we play games on our phones and scratch ourselves in inappropriate places.
Still, the holiday is not entirely without merit. Sure, Valentine’s Day could easily be renamed Suck Up To Your Girlfriends Or You’re Not Getting Any For The Rest Of The Year Day and no one would be the wiser, but it’s supposed to be an occasion to celebrate your love for the most important person in your life. So, in an effort to help you define how you should celebrate this most special day, I’ve decided to break it down into a simple list:
Single
You’re a strong and independent person, who doesn’t need a significant other to feel complete. You have your career. Your life goals. Your videogames and cats. This year, celebrate the day for lovers by going to work early, staying late and calling in sick tomorrow morning while you work off the hangover you picked up from that counseling session with Dr. Whiskey and the marathon viewing of Grey’s Anatomy episodes and every John Cusack
In a relationship
You’re screwed. If you’re “in a relationship,” you’re the target demographic for everything red, heart-shaped 
and/or made of chocolate. If you’re someone’s boyfriend, you need to send flowers to your girlfriend’s job, because gloating to her co-workers over how much someone who doesn’t love her enough to commit to anything serious, but at least pretends to care enough to send her a bouquet of dead flora is every girl’s favorite part of the holiday. After that, spring for reservations at an expensive restaurant and let her order the lobster. Later, get ready to spend the next several hours “cuddling” and “being romantic” – and don’t be surprised if neither pays off. Valentine’s Day is not your holiday, fellas.
Engaged
You’re also screwed. The same rules for “in a relationship” apply here, but set aside a block of time to either discuss your wedding plans, or to break out the excuses concerning why you have yet to set a date for your nuptials. If you fall into the latter category, be sure to pop in a few John Hughes movies when you get home. If you’re lucky, your fiance will fall asleep in your arms while ’80s synth pop whisks her away to a romance-and-Judd Nelson-filled dreamland.
Married
Congratulations! You can get by with a box of chocolates and a nice, quiet evening at home. You’ve pledged your lives to one another. You love each other. You’re in it for the long haul. All those displays of pink and lacy affection are for lovebirds, all short-lived and passionate. You’re more like love sea turtles. You need to move slowly, because you have a long, monogamous life ahead of you. It’s best to not peak too soon.
It’s complicated
Since this is another way of saying that the person you love doesn’t love you back, but you’re either too blinded by your one-sided devotion or just too plain stupid to abandon hope and move on to something healthier, you might want to look into celebrating Singles Awareness Day (SAD) instead of messing about with Valentine’s Day. Staying home and sharing the pain of your misery with strangers on the Internet is better than camping outside of your “soulmate’s” house with a pair of binoculars and that stack of unopened Valentines you sealed with the moisture of your own bitter tears. Plus, it doesn’t violate your restraining order.
In an open relationship
Yeah, right. You’re not fooling anyone, you know. And if you’re telling the truth, then you’re either very enlightened or very sketchy. Or both. I’ve seen people like you on HBO’s hit television program Real Sex, which you may recognize by its other title, (un)Porn With Ugly People. People choosing this as their relationship status are likely to be fans of modern pin-up girls, and believe that rockabilly fashion is a thing that’s still around. Also, they’re likely to be old and doughy and… Just skip Valentine’s Day. Nobody wants to see you naked.
With my previous hipster essay continuing to be one of the most popular things I’ve ever written (second only to this), I thought I’d take another stab at the topic to better explain how I really feel about a counterculture movement defined by indie music, thrift store fashion and vintage video games.
With a little luck, I’ll cut through the ambiguity of my last attempt. With a little more luck, I’ll make even more people hate me. So here goes…
First, let’s dispel a few myths. To start with, the term “hipster” doesn’t mean what hipsters think it means. It doesn’t mean hipsters are hip. It doesn’t mean they embody the essence of cool in all that they do and all that they are. In fact, the word doesn’t have anything to do with being hip, cool, edgy, fashionable or smart. And, while I’m sure it means nothing but good things when hipsters use it to refer to themselves, the rest of the world would be better off calling them something else.
Something that would more accurately reflect the true intention of a label meant to describe a group of people who desperately want to be part of a counterculture that rejects the mainstream by embracing all things obscure, ironic and forgotten in society. Something that would best define how much they want to be the people who stand out and stand apart, and show the world that they’re the special snowflakes with exquisite taste they so strongly want to be. Something that reflects how much they want to be more culturally important than they are. Something that defines how strongly they shout at the heart of the world, demanding to be heard and seen and felt. Something that instantly communicates how much they want to be. Something like…wannabe.
Seems appropriate.
Next, there is no such thing as a counterculture. Never has been. Never will be. It, like so much else in this crazy world of simulacra and pretense, the presence of a counterculture is a myth. A very popular, very stubborn – and very marketable one – but a myth, nonetheless.
The hard truth is, you cannot escape the mainstream. The best you can hope for is to paddle down it in your own canoe. Or kayak. Or hollowed-out giant pumpkin. It doesn’t really matter. You’re still caught in the same muddy water as everyone else, and are being carried along by the same cultural current, no matter how desperately you try to fight it. In fact, the harder you try, the more mainstream you become.
Take, for example, the Grunge movement of the 1990s. It started in Seattle, where it was young and raw and real. Wanting to fight the herd and be different and unique, the hipsters of the day flocked to it. They embraced it, shared it and promoted it. Then, the record companies heard about it, and Madison Avenue got involved. Deals were signed. Posters were made. CDs were pressed. And, before long, the marketing machine of the mainstream convinced a bazillion kiddies that this new music was edgy and hip and cool.
It was cool because the marketing machine said it wasn’t popular. It was different. Dirtier than pop music. Harder than rock. Edgier than metal. It was grunge, and it was for the disaffected. The different. The introspective outcasts and the soulful poets, and it appealed to people with better taste than the bubblegum crowd. The ability to find the latest and greatest indie bands no one had ever heard of became the cultural milestone of a generation, and defined the essence of cool just as strongly as abandoning the bands did once they got too popular. Once they sold out. Became mainstream. Got lame.
The problem is, none of it was ever young or raw or real. Certainly no more real than anything else being peddled to the 18-34 demographic. The bands didn’t get popular and then sell out, they sold out only because they became popular. The music didn’t change. What changed was the audience’s perception of how indie the band was. And, once people started hearing the songs that “they” discovered being played on the Top 40, then liking them wasn’t cool anymore. The band they selected as a favorite was too popular for their exclusive, refined tastes. Other people had started listening to it, so it no longer demonstrated their exclusive, refined taste. It had to go.
And it did. They all did. Grunge died away as quickly as it grew to dominate the market, just as all “counterculture” movements do (see: fads, trends, etc…), but not before the marketing machine managed to convince young people across the nation to start wearing heavy flannel year-round, which is no small feat in the deep south, where human life without air conditioning is best described as unpossible. (And that’s not even a real word, which just goes to show how unpossible it really is.)
It’s tempting to say it’s just kids being kids. After all, young people never want to identify with old people, but age isn’t really at the heart of the issue as much as economics are. The 18-34 demographic – while cherished by corporations the world over – isn’t exactly filled with people who have oodles of money to spend on luxury items. At least, not on the same expensive level as older people do. And, since we live in a culture where social status is determined by displays of consumption, this presents a problem.
Old dudes driving around in midlife crises convertibles, all top down and windswept hair plugs, are synonymous with the sorts of things people buy to show others how successful they are, but a fancy car is expensive. Too expensive for young adults just starting down the winding roads of their careers. They may have disposable income to burn, but it’s on an entirely different level than their bosses or parents. Economics limits their buying power to such a degree that how much they spend on something isn’t the defining factor of how far it moves them up the social ladder. Instead, since they all operate off of the same general budget, buying power isn’t nearly as important as buying preference.
Showing how much more refined your tastes are than those of your peers is how young adults show everyone else how cool they are, because it’s all they can afford. Thriftiness becomes a badge of honor, and the cheaper and more obscure the look, the better. Rich old guys buy yachts, but poor interns have to make due by finding that ultra-rare vinyl album from the hip indie record store, or that really sweet t-shirt with a cheesey ’80s pop culture icon ironically silk-screened to its front. Hipsters show how cool they are by how exclusive their tastes are. They wear vintage clothes from thrift stores not because they’re genuinely better or more fashionable than clothes from the Gap, but because they’re different. You have to look harder to find them, because you can’t buy them in the mall. (Well, until you can, anyway.)
Marketing departments know how important social status is to everyone, at any age and every stage of life. They know it, and they exploit it. It’s why there will never be a true counterculture that’s defined by what you can buy, no matter how rare it seems. For the same reason The Disney Channel and Nickelodeon spend most of their programming hours serving the needs of tweenage audiences with tweenage dramas and tweenage sitcoms, marketing departments dictate the tastes of every demographic they serve. Sure, something may start off small and exclusive – like Facebook – but it eventually gets popular. And this is when most people discover it. And consume it. And display it – until it reaches a tipping point and it’s everywhere. When that time comes, when the alternative culture gets a little too popular and reaches a critical mass, then it becomes mainstream and is quickly abandoned by everyone craving an exclusivity factor that shows the world their inner cool kid. Just look at what happened to MySpace. (Or Friendster before it. Or AOL before that.)
The problem is, every bit of exclusive counterculture bibblebabble was mainstream all along. Sure, it wasn’t mainstream across the demographic board, but for its target market, whatever you thought was unique and limited to your own tastes was, in fact, entirely ubiquitous to your peer group. You just thought you were special. You weren’t.
Millions of dollars go into exploiting the need people have to be distinct and different and special. Coca-Cola’s “Obey your thirst” campaign for Sprite is one example. Its “Image is nothing. Thirst is everything” slogan urged people to be unique and selective in their choice of carbonated sugar water, and it was a huge success for exactly this reason. Irony isn’t an 8-bit pixel art version of Alf on a Hot Topic t-shirt, kids. Irony is marketing Sprite as the drink for people who aren’t swayed by marketing, and managing to convince them that drinking it will show the world just how independently minded they are.
So, do I hate hipsters? Nah. I mean, it’d be nice if they actually made an effort to stand for something, but we live in an age of Slacktivism, where magnetic bumper stickers and Facebook status updates take the place of actual activism and social unrest. I can’t blame the hipsters for being just like everybody else, although they’ll probably hate me for it. But no, I don’t hate them. Not really.
Hipsters are just the latest version of the same demographic that’s been there all along. Whether we call them hippies or metalheads or grunge kids or mallrats or wannabes, they’re just impressionable kids trying to find their place in the world. Like we all were. Like we all are.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my 36th birthday is tomorrow and I have to go see a man about a Porsche…
[Images from “If Superheroes Were Hipsters” via College Humor]
I think it’s time we talk about the Christmas Problem. Or, more to a point, it’s time that I talk and you listen. And agree, unless you’re a hypocrite – in which case you can just go right on and have yourself a merry little bowl of shut the hell up.
I’m going to skip through the usual Christmas hate, bypassing altogether the hand-wringing over the commercialism, the wanton spending and strange disconnect from the purported purpose of the holiday. All of these things are as self-evident as Jingle Bells muzak in October, and I won’t waste your time repeating them here.
Instead, I’m going to cut straight through to the heart of the Christmas Problem and attack it head-on. In my usual roundabout way.
For one reason or another thousand, I’m not in a festive mood this year. My stepson is away at his Dad’s, being as even-numbered yuletides fall on the father’s side of the King Solomon approach to child rearing. Money continues to be a problem, in the sense that we have so little of it. Work is bothersome of late, and my family is far removed in a neighboring city that might as well rest on the edge of the world, for all the gas we don’t have to get there.
All in all, it’s a pretty lonely holiday. But that’s not the Problem.
The television is filled with Christmas specials. And I watch them, reminding myself of younger, happier years in much the same way as salt rubbed into an open wound reminds the flesh of more joyous, less blood-soaked times. It hurts, but it’s not the Problem, either.
Neither are the shambling hordes of ridiculously grinning happy holiday pushers intent on selling me the elusive drugs of peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
Nor are the bell ringers and the charity drives and the one time only sales to blame. The Christmas Problem cannot be tagged to one offending party. It’s the collective groupthink that’s to blame, and so I blame you all.
Christmas will be just another day for me this year. A Saturday, in fact, and one without even cartoons to ease the misery. Instead, there will be parades and endless channels of Jimmy Stewart and the kid who shoots his eye out. Everywhere I look, I find the joyous symbols of a wondrous holiday in which I don’t get to participate.
I’m kind of like Rudolph, except without the Montgomery Ward’s ad campaign to give me a happy ending. I’m just a clumsy, goofy-looking reindeer with a shiny honker and a speech impediment, and I’d do quite well enough alone in my cave with a cup of hot cocoa and good book, thankyouverymuch.
But you lot are a vile and vicious sort of festive little herd. Instead of leaving me to wallow in peace, you stand outside singing carols and throwing cookies at my head, all the while telling me how happy I should be about how happy everyone else is.
Only, I don’t care about everyone else. I care about me and mine, and the rest of you can get bent. I don’t need to be made to feel like an ogre because I can’t get into the Christmas spirit this year, when the great four-year-old joy of my life is absent and I’ve just enough money to wish my wife a “Mer X-ms” because the printer charges by the letter and I need some change left over to buy more crackers for dinner.
It’s not my fault that I can’t muster up the inner light of happiness to join in your reindeer games and go along with your witless shenanigans. The stresses and demands of real life have gotten in the way this year, and I’ll thank you to step aside and let them pass so they can go ahead and trample each other on their way to see who gets first grabs at ripping out my soul.
Unless, of course, your spirit of giving extends to leaving a briefcase full of money on my porch. That, I would make an exception for.
Happy Holidays! Bah, humbug!
There, I fixed it!
Hello again, Internet. I see you have gotten along rather well in my absence, but all good things must come to an end. Deal with it.
I could recount all of my grand adventures since my last post, but I want this to be a shorter entry than normal. In fact, I want all my future entries to be shorter from here on. Why? Because I can.
Also, because you asked for it. Or, at least, the Internet at large did. So consider this my gift to you addle-brained jellyheads with the attention spans of AD/HD mayflies. You’re welcome.
Of course, my benevolence is a lie. I’m writing shorter entries because I don’t have time to write longer ones anymore. Between being a parent, a writer, an online producer and general all-around awesome human being, I have to cut corners somewhere. At least this way, the dummies out there who stumble upon this blog can get a bite-sized entry without having their brains explode in the face of too many words.
Everybody wins!
In fact, I should be writing my column for Thursday’s paper right now instead of rambling here. Technically, I should have written it this weekend.
However, my editor is a kind and gentle sort of monster who will likely forgive me a few missed deadlines here and there on account of her not having to work so hard at amputating my words for a few days.
She wields her editorial knife with a steady hand not unlike the killer in a slasher flick: calm and with murderous intent. Seriously, she absolutely lives to cut whole swaths of text from my work like an angry volcano god smiting an entire village of non-believers who didn’t bother checking to make sure the virginal sacrifice was fresh.
Still, her gleeful massacres of my beautiful words have made me endeavor to be more concise. At least, that’s what she tells herself. And me. At length. Daily.
The truth of the matter is I look at the whole thing like a war of attrition. I continue to throw a massive amount of text at her and she continues to exhaust her energies whittling it down to something that can actually run on two pages of newsprint without consuming an entire section. Do this enough, and she’ll get tired. Sloppy. Things will start to slip through. A phrase here and a sentence there until finally, entire paragraphs pass by unnoticed and intact. Eventually, I will have my way. It’s just how things work in my world.
Unless she reads this…
Right then. I’ll be back later in the week with something of more substance. Brief, but with some meat on it. For now, accept this meager post as my way of saying thanks for not abandoning the site whilst I was away.
I love you little bastards.
As you may have noticed, Coquetting Tarradiddles is no longer running new content on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is because I’ve decided to slightly alter the publication schedule to ‘whenever I damn well feel like it’. This is a minor change and absolutely no one should send me hate mail about it. Or, for that matter, thank-you notes. And, with that bit of business out of the way, let’s go ahead and jump right into the big bowl of verbal salad I’ve prepared for you today. This one is for all the writers out there.
You are not an author. Even if you are a writer, you’re probably not an author. Sure, you may pound your keyboard into the lunatic hours of the morning when only field mice and dead things are awake, but that doesn’t make you an author. A professional keyfucker maybe, but an author? No.
Authors are people like Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf. Authors are mythical titans of the written word and are, by prerequisite, absolutely deceased. There’s a reason for this, but I’ll get back to it later. For now, let’s just assume that anyone alive today who makes a living by putting pen to paper, typebar to ribbon or ASCII character to screen is just a plain old day laborer working to make ends meet, like everybody else. This includes everyone from bloggers to bestsellers and sitcom scribes to Hollywood screenwriters. Granted, some folks make more money than others, but wherever we are in our careers, we’re all just one idea away from greatness…and one miserable failure away from ruin.
The problem with writing professionally is that it’s essentially a manufacturing job without the benefit of an assembly line. To be a writer is to be responsible for producing an endless stream of unique prototypes, each slightly more impressive than the last – and to keep them coming. A dip in either quality or quantity is equally damning, and are best avoided altogether. If your latest work is weaker than the one before it, you are slipping. If the time between your previous success and your next is increasing, you’re blocked and losing your relevance. If you’re a novelist, then your next book should come faster and read better than your earlier work, or you’re regressing. If you’re working on a television series and you can’t maintain the jokes after six seasons, your work has gone stale and it’s time to look for another job. Right?
Produce, produce, produce. That’s the mantra. Once you get your hooks into a professional writing gig, dig them in deep and keep the work flowing. But keep making it better. And keep writing it faster. And don’t ask for more money. Blah.
The biggest hurdle for new writers to overcome is the notion that they’ll ever be rich and famous. If you’ve been working on a novel for the past ten years and expect wealth and adoration to be waiting just around the corner, get used to disappointment. Even if a publisher picks up your manuscript and runs with it, you’ll still need your day job. Even with several books under your belt and on store shelves, you’ll need that income. Unless poverty is your thing, that is. Which brings me to “artists”.
Writers scribbling for the sake of creating Art are much more common than writers working for a paycheck. This is probably because Art is pretty easy to create and even easier to not sell. Just make it obtuse, fill it with references nine out of ten people won’t get, toss in a heaping tablespoon of multisyllabic words pilfered from obscure sources and dead languages, and you’ve got a riveting rumination on the drama of the human condition…that no one will read.
Writers wanting to create Art are the ones who usually call themselves Authors. They are people who see themselves as modern day Tolstoys, who take their repeated rejections or low sales numbers to be indicative not of their talentlessness, but of the persecution inherit in the system. People are stupid, after all – and Authors don’t write for stupid people. Smart people, they reason, probably love their work – but since the stupid outnumber them by about a zillion to one, that’s why they can’t sell a book. It’s not their fault. They’re just too damned good!
On the other side of the coin, there are writers who thrive in the shallow waters of the mass market. They write meaningless tripe for lonely housewives and boring fanboys, and they sell it by the truckload. They recycle characters and themes, cutting and pasting their way through books filled with a third grade vocabulary and plastered by cliche. The mass market needs easily digestible pap: nothing too challenging, but just hard enough to make them feel smart. You’ve heard the arguments before, so let’s just accept them as writ and move on to my point.
Readers aren’t interested in stupid writing, regardless of what you may think about the state of intelligence in the modern world. Neither are moviegoers or TV viewers. Rather, our audiences are only as stupid as we allow them to be. If we fill our product with nothing but challenging material that we suspect (and secretly hope) will go sailing over their heads, they’re not going to be interested in it because it’s simply not interesting. No one wants to read a book to learn how smart its writers is, and outside of the arthouse crowd, no one wants to watch a movie or television show that doesn’t make any sense.
The same goes for the other end of the scale. By and large, the mass market isn’t interested in deeply stupid material. Sure, there’s a demographic that loves slapstick and low-brow humor, who won’t go anywhere near a movie that might make them think, but that’s fine. That’s what Michael Bay is for, or Dan Brown or Tyler Perry. However, it’s a fallacy to assume that simply because some really dumb movies are really successful, that the market only wants to see Stupid. It doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, though. People like Stupid, just like they enjoy ice cream and fast food – but most people don’t want to live on it.
The challenge a good (working) writer faces is to create neither Art nor Stupid. Rather, it is to breed the two and write Stupid…with Intelligence. If you’re really clever about things, you can make something mass-marketable and still sneak in just enough smart stuff to trick people into thinking. It’s kind of like putting some sugar in the cough syrup or hiding your dog’s vitamin pill in a wad of squishy Alpo: learn to speak on the level of everyone without talking down to anyone, and you can get away with trying to make the world a little less dumb – and still get a check at the end of the day.
By way of example, look at Joss Whedon and company. Along with his excellent cadre of writers like Jane Espenson, Marti Noxon and David Fury (among others), Joss created an entirely new myth in the Female Superhero genre when Buffy The Vampire Slayer hit the airwaves. He could have gone the easy route of just making a hot girl with superpowers kick undead butt every week, but he didn’t. I mean yeah, he did – and Sarah Michelle Gellar certainly did her part as butt-kicking superhero – but he went deeper with it. On the surface, the show was pretty simple: it was filled with silly jokes and catchy one-liners mixed in among the teen angst and asskickery – and it worked on that level alone. But then, there’s the subtext…
Oceans have been written on the brilliant stitching of subtext and pop culture that defines the Whedonverse, of the great strides his series have made towards ideals in the areas of feminism, acceptance, addiction, redemption and the concept of family (to list just a few), so I’ll skip all that here. (If you want to read more on the subject, pick up some of these books.) My point is that you can fill a story with sexy bodies, huge explosions, vampires, demons, programmable people and robot overlords and it’ll make for a nice bit of fanfiction pulp that a few people know, but that no one really cares about. However, if you take those sexy bodies and put intelligent, multi-faceted characters in them, or tie the huge explosions and robot overlords to genuine human drama where the fact that everyone’s scooting around the universe in spaceships doesn’t really matter, then you’re onto something. You can take space cowboys and weave in ancient philosophical questions that have plagued mankind since Plato was buggering little boys, and make people think while they’re being entertained. In other words, you give them art. Little ‘a’ – but it’s enough.
I’d argue that one piece of well-written genre material (be it television, movies, novels or comics) is more capable of examining the human condition than any number of high-brow works of Art. Not only is it more digestible and easily accessible, but the best bits of genre enter the zeitgeist of public consciousness, where they infest themselves in the collective unconscious and become the stuff of pop culture. And, they get people talking: “OMG! Gandalf Starbuck ruined Battlestar!” or “Woah. Kara Thrace blew my damn mind. What was she?!” The arguments show it’s working.
And that’s my final point for today: if you’re a writer, don’t try to be an Author. Authors are dead legends, held to lofty ideals and praised for works that wouldn’t be impressive now, were Hemingway writing his staccato narratives today. Their work inspires us still because it has endured the test of time, not because it was amazing when it was written. Hell, in a hundred years, episodes of Webster may be revered as high art for all we know. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with how history will praise or revile our work, because none of that matters today – and it certainly doesn’t pay the rent.
Instead, just be a writer. Don’t try to write to the lowest common denominator, and don’t work to be so clever that no one could ever hope to understand you. Just write. Write something you’d like to read or watch or listen to. Throw in some universal questions and make your story about people – even if they’re purple, live on the planet Zentoo and have sex with their eyes. Work the subtext. You can get away with murder in subtext. Stupid people won’t see it, smart people will love it, and everyone else in-between will be affected by it. Pay attention to pop culture, and create a phenomenon. Then keep making it better.
And don’t think you can’t do it. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not possible to make a dent in the Great Wall of Stupid that surrounds the world. When Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen got it in their heads to create a cheaply produced web series with Zack and Joss Whedon, they ended up creating Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – a three-part webisode Internet thing that took all of its silliness and singing for a lark, then slapped audiences in the face with abject tragedy, ending the entire production on a melancholy note of despair and regret. It was brilliant, it was cheap and it was smart. And stupid.
So be like Dr. Horrible…except maybe without the Wonderflonium, and with much less Evil.
Things have been quiet here at Coquetting Tarradiddles for the past few weeks. There are reasons for this, but they’re nothing too out of the ordinary. Let’s just say that things have been both Busy and Interesting, which is not always an altogether pleasant combination of activities. Some unfortunate and unavoidable legal issues arose with Brittany’s ex that needed to be dealt with, in addition to car trouble, work busyness and all sorts of other fun and mundane life stuff.
The legal issues came about, once again, due to problems with Trey’s dad and his summer visitation (along with unpaid child support), but they have been put behind us once more. For now, at any rate. This time mediation failed and actual court proceedings developed, wherein Brittany was forced to defend herself against her ex’s…shall we say, creative version of the truth. Fortunately, our attorney was easily able to quash each fabrication by quick and decisive blows with the blunt club of Fact, and everything worked out fine. Still, it was interesting to see just how far into fiction things can go when emotions run high, but complex and inconsistent, nonsensical testimony isn’t much of a threat against demonstrable fact along with the clear and simple truth.
But anyway, that’s behind us now and with a little luck and the simple passage of time, things will get better before next summer rolls around. That’s my hope, at least. I get so tired of all this fighting and familial sniping when it’s all so unnecessary. It only hurts Trey, who doesn’t benefit from being told negative things about one of his parents, and who certainly doesn’t have anything to gain from feuding families. For our part, we only talk about his dad and stepmom on the rare occasion he brings them up in conversation, and then we only say nice and encouraging things about them. I know a lot of divorced families get mired in some sort of byzantine model of competition and conquest over their children, but I tend to think that’s a horrible practice. Rather than being threatened by Trey having a fun time when he’s at daddy’s house, the idea that he enjoys being there is a comfort to me. I much prefer the idea of being out-parented by his dad to the unfortunate alternative of learning that Trey is miserable or neglected when he’s away from home. And, while I don’t think either is the case right now, I do know that he tells us he has fun at daddy’s house and that he loves his baby sister, and that’s good enough for me, for now. I just hope that Trey having fun and learning and growing when he’s with Brittany and I here at home is of equal importance to his dad.
As far as car troubles go, let me make one thing perfectly clear: the South was not meant to be inhabited by Man. Especially not in the summertime, when temperatures drive the heat index to an unbearable warmth that would instantly result in spontaneous human combustion were it not for the omnipresent soup of humidity hanging in the air, keeping everything and everyone perpetually moist and sticky. Were it not for the invention of air conditioning, I suspect we would all be dead – and this is where the car trouble comes in. My air conditioner broke.
Or I thought it did, at least. It turned out that it was just low on freon and that some part or other required a little percussive therapy by way of smacking on it with a wrench for a little while, but it’s working now. The sad bit is that I hadn’t realize how poorly it was cooling until it started doing its job again. I know global warming is a problem and all – and I’m as environmentally conscious as the next guy – but I’ll murder the world before I let anyone take away my freon. I don’t care about CFC emissions or whatever whatsits are doing nasty things to the ozone layer or the polar ice caps – without air conditioning, I would be dead. End of story.
The heat of the South is so bad, in fact, that it led to more automotive difficulties than the air conditioner dying. As it happens, a simple but important bit of plastic and rubber in my car’s engine melted. 
That’s right. It melted. There was still some of the part left that hadn’t turned to slag that I discovered when I opened the hood after my car began to sputter and spasm like a whimsical jalopy in a Disney cartoon. A violent hissing sound was coming from somewhere near the front of the car, and even a mechanical dunce like me was able to find that the semi-congealed blob of partially melted rubber was at fault. However, the fun happened when no parts stores had the exact part I needed in stock. It was the little rubber “elbow” that comes off the PCV valve (whatever the frak that is), and all anyone had was a so-called “universal” replacement – and it didn’t fit.
Technically, it didn’t fit. In practice, with enough force and persistence, I was able to work it onto the bits of the engine where it needed to be, and things should have been fine after that…but they weren’t. Apparently, even though it looked like I’d made the part fit fine, it was actually pulling on another bit farther down the hose that was causing another little whatsawhozzit to get out of line with a thingamajig doodad. It took some ingenuity and cleverness to find a work around for that, but I credit a visit to my parents and my dad’s innovation for the ultimate success on that front. He was able to secure the wandering hose with a wrench, some tape and probably a few dark incantations to forbidden gods. Whatever he did, it worked and the car is running – and cooling – like a champ, once again.
The rest of my time has been consumed by work, both in the newsroom where we’re preparing for some big changes and at home, where I’ve been working on a couple of new projects. As you may have noticed, I’ve put Snowflakes In Autumn on indefinite hold for the foreseeable future. 
I don’t think I’m going to serialize the whole novel, as I’ve been approached by an interested party to publish it in a different format. I’m not sure I’m going to do this, either – but the reality is that, until I’ve decided exactly what I’m going to do with it, it’s best to keep the rest of it off the Internet for the time being. The other projects I’m working on are pretty exciting, but haven’t gone much past the planning stages so far. I’m working on a concept to co-author with another writer, who has a much greater knack for plot than I. However, don’t expect to see anything new on the fiction front for quite awhile, and I wouldn’t hold my breath on any of it appearing here for free at Coquetting Tarradiddles. I’ve completed that little experiment, and it’s not one I really want to repeat again anytime soon.
That about wraps up this entry and should catch everyone up as to what’s been going on with me, and why there have been no updates to the site. Mostly, I needed to remain silent for a few weeks while we waited for the court stuff to play out. It’s too tempting to write regrettable things when one is upset and disappointed with the world, so much of my little hiatus was the result of me simply not saying anything at all when I couldn’t say anything nice. The rest of it was just laziness. Sue me!
I was at a loss for a subject for today’s post until about half an hour ago, after Brittany disclosed her discovery of the vile and regrettable videotaped evidence of my first wedding. She’s been working on cleaning out the accumulated detritus of my office, which has – for the last year or so – been the dumping ground of everything that wouldn’t fit anywhere else in the house. It started with boxes, when my parents moved into my house for a brief period after their home was bisected by a giant tree during Hurricane Ike. Then, after they moved into an apartment and I moved myself back home and brought Brittany and Trey along with me, the boxes gave way to scattered bits of furniture and bulky toys before eventually progressing into the catch-all area for anything and everything that we didn’t want to throw out, but had no idea what to do with. It’s been long past time to gut the sucker.
So that’s what she’s been up to this week. I think it started Monday morning, as a way to work out stress and aggression after a sweet little old process-serving lady showed up on my doorstep to serve Brittany with papers filed by her ex-husband, seeking the court’s assistance towards helping him sate his semi-regular rage. In truth, it’s his way of retaliating against Brittany after she got wise to his scheming around Trey’s birthday and he didn’t get his way. It’s a whole thing that I don’t really want to get into here, save to point out that I believe the experience drove her to brave the many sordid perils of the Danger Room as a way to keep her mind off things while our attorney sprang into action. The upside of the whole business, of course, is that her ex actually saved us a bit of time and bother, as well as a small chunk of change. Since Brittany was about to file her own papers seeking enforcement for egregiously delinquent child support payments along with some other business, him striking first actually enabled us to skip some of the filing fees and court costs. And, since I’m both getting my office back as well as saving some scratch from the ordeal, I file the whole thing in the Epic Win column.
During this mad rampage of unbridled cleanliness, it seems that my lovely wife came upon a videocassette of something I’d long thought lost, destroyed or stolen by my ex: the video of our wedding. Brittany waited until I’d been home awhile and was fed and content before springing her discovery upon me. And, of course, she wanted to watch the damned thing…
Being with the technical times, I don’t have a VCR handy for playing the tape, and I’d hoped that would get me off the hook of having to endure viewing it. However, Brittany had already planned for this excuse and was quick to point out that we recently put a VCR/DVD combo player in Trey’s room after he murdered his latest DVD player. (He goes through them like a genuine thought through Paris Hilton’s head: there one second and gone forever the next.) I sighed and accepted defeat, and we made our way into the Cars-themed bedroom of a toddler to revel in the horror and regret of the whole miserable experience of reliving my first wedding.
It was a surreal sort of thing, watching myself go through the opening moments of a marriage that would eventually dissolve into a thick lunatic soup of hate and loathing – all of which was completely unknown to the earlier version of me on the tape. That guy was all googley eyed and hopeful, eager to start down the short path of a temporary forever with his blushing whore bride. Now, anyone who’s been reading Coquetting Tarradiddles since the early days – along with anyone who’s bothered to go back to some of my earlier, angrier posts that were poorly written in drunken, hate-filled spurts of embittered rage – will know exactly how I feel about my ex-wife, so I don’t want to retread old ground here. The short version of the story is a familiar one, and one I share with the woman I wish I’d married to begin with – but the really short version can be summarized in just four words: What was I thinking?! (The really, really short version takes just two words, but the FCC won’t let me use them.)
Anyway, we sat in Trey’s room and watched the accursed video of my Huge Mistake, with Brittany seated on the uncomfortable plastic wedgie of his Smart Cycle X-Treme while I lounged in a fuzzy pink circular chair thing. As I said, it was a surreal experience – not only because the whole thing felt like watching a horror movie where you’re yelling at the stupid character on screen and urging him to not open the damned door because the killer’s standing on the other side with a really big knife and a surly disposition, but because I was sitting next to my wife, watching myself marry someone else. It was unsettling to see vows pledged that I knew would be broken and promises made that were never kept and that sort of thing, but it was downright eerie to know that Brittany was seeing it all unfold from the perspective of an earlier me, back when I was under the illusion of the fairy tale and made stupid by Love Goggles of +10 Ignorance.
I wanted to keep hitting fast forward, but she wanted to keep watching. Mostly, I think she was enjoying mocking my ex-wife’s insincerity and freakishly poofy hair that I’d never even noticed before, but I know some of it must have stung. I know I didn’t like watching the kissing parts, at least – and nobody wants to see their spouse smooching on someone else. Still, Brittany got a kick out of playing armchair body language expert as she pointed out each time my ex rolled her eyes or looked away from the preacher man when he was speaking unsettling words about faithfulness and devotion. The funny part is, I can’t say she was entirely wrong with her observations. Although I certainly didn’t see it at the time, watching the rehearsed machinations of my ex-wife was itself an education in well-oiled sociopathy. The flash of a canned smile here, the practiced tilt of her head there, and you’d never notice the blank, emotionless face nestled between all of the pre-programmed poses. It was kinda creepy.
So anyway, that’s what we did tonight. We watched me get married and then joked around as we considered tacking on an addendum to the video when it ended with “And they lived happily ever after…” We laughed about it all, then settled into a long and comforting discussion about the early days of our relationship, which was still tinged by the stain of our mutually failed marriages at the time. Finding some old e-mails and papers in preparation for court certainly contributed to some of our conversation, but mostly it wasn’t about my ex or her ex, and was instead focused on wishing we’d just not been so naive when we were younger. And, while I’d be perfectly fine with hopping into a flux-capacitor equipped DeLorean to go back and warn myself of the dangers on the road ahead, I’m very glad there isn’t such a thing as a time machine. For all of the misery we’ve had to endure at the hands of Brittany’s ex, I’m thankful that there’s no way for her to slide a banana peel down Mr. Fusion’s gullet and go back in time to erase him from her life, simply because I don’t want to imagine a world where Trey goes all Marty McFly transparent before poofing out of existence while on stage at the Under The Sea dance. That would suck, even if she did hop into the future on her way back to the present to pick up an auto-drying jacket, some power-laced Nikes and a HoverBoard.
That wraps things up for today. Be sure to come back Tuesday for the first half of the next chapter in the serialization of my novel, Snowflakes In Autumn. See you then!
First, some business. The next installment of Snowflakes In Autumn will go up next week, broken into two parts and published on Tuesday and Thursday. I’ll probably keep the goal for Chapter Six set at $75, since you guys met that pretty quickly (although much of it was due to a generous donation from a Ms. X in New York, who did wonders to combat the Southern perception of Damn Yankees). We’ll see if we make it to $75 in round two as fast as we did with the first effort. I think you can do it. Don’t disappoint me or bad things will happen. I have connections…
Now, for today’s entry. Recently, Brittany and I have taken to watching cancelled series over Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature, which we use via Xbox Live. We don’t mean to only watch cancelled series, but since I only enjoy viewing good television, it’s inevitable. Of course, as soon as I play the first episodes of shows like Better Off Ted or Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, it’s immediately obvious that cancellation awaits. Smartly written television just never lasts very long, especially when it insists on referencing things like literature and philosophy. (Gilmore Girls is a welcome exception to the rule, although I still contend that it could have run for another three seasons, provided Amy Sherman-Palladino had stuck around.)
Better Off Ted, while a smartly written satirical look at corporate America, was only a good show. I don’t consider it great simply because it was too slavishly devoted to one-off episodes with little regard for continuity, which is something that actually worked in its favor for sustainability, but that tends to prevent me from ever giving such a series any long-term devotion. No, I need continuity. Shows like Babylon 5, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, True Blood and the aforementioned Gilmore Girls have totally eradicated my tolerance for the old sitcom / dramady / whatever format. Studio 60, thankfully, played right into what I love about television.
While a feature length movie tries to be the live-action version of a novel, it’s only got 90 minutes to play around with. A season of good television, however, gets roughly 990 minutes to devote to telling its story – which makes the movie a short story and the series a novel. Studio 60 worked off this principal, which is one of the main reasons I enjoyed the one-season series. The other reason is that it was smartly written for smart people – or, at least, people who bother switching off the television now and again to do things like read books and think. Unfortunately, exposure to the show has had a very peculiar side effect on my marital relationship.
For those who aren’t familiar with the series, Studio 60 is an entirely fictional behind the scenes look at the goings-on of a Saturday Night Live style production. I say that it’s entirely fictional because the characters are too friendly to one another, the studio executives actually care about their product, and the head writer calls all the shots. This is not how Hollywood works – but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief because the show is just so darn fun to watch – especially since it routinely provokes my wife to make not-so-subtle noises whenever she thinks it’s talking about me.
This is something she does when we watch television together. She watches for a character who she feels reminds her of me, then delights in pointing out how right her assessment is. For instance, when we watch Angel and I find myself empathizing with the titular character, she quickly moves in to point out that – at least in her eyes, I’m Spike. For those who didn’t watch Buffy or Angel, the character of Spike is an unrepentant, self-aggrandizing smart ass who apologizes to no one and does as he pleases. (Except, of course, when he’s being love’s bitch.) Brittany enjoys pointing out how similar the character’s actions are to my own behavioral patterns, which is something I’d like to argue against but can’t. (Even when it comes to his whiny lovelorn crap – just read some of my earlier essays on this site if you don’t believe me.)
In Gilmore Girls, I’m Luke – the gruff, unrepentant smart ass who does as he pleases as he ineffectually rails against the world. In Battlestar, I wasn’t one of the main characters. Instead, I was the gruff, unrepentant smart ass lawyer who appears late in the series and does as he pleases and manipulates everyone to get what he wants. In True Blood, I’m apparently Eric – but she bases that mostly on the books rather than the television show, where she’s explained to me that the character is an egocentric smart ass who does what he pleases and adores himself while doing so. In Dollhouse, I’m Topher – the spastic, smart-assed genius. In House, M.D. I’m Gregory House, the smart-assed, acerbic genius who verbally abuses everyone around him as he manipulates the world to get what he wants. Are you seeing the pattern? I haven’t persuaded her to watch Babylon 5 yet, but when she does I’m sure I’ll be pegged as G’kar and Londo’s love child.
So anyway, when we watch Studio 60, I’m Matt – the show’s head writer and resident smart ass. He’s condescending and sarcastic, brilliant but often stupid, proud to a fault and generally just like me – except that I don’t write a multi-million dollar sketch comedy show. The fun part about this particular series, however, is that Brittany finally gets to be a character, too. Matt’s love interest on Studio 60 is an actress/comedian named Harriet, the spiritual foil to his wicked intelligencia. She’s kind and nurturing and – most importantly – deeply, deeply religious. This is where things get interesting.
Matt and Harriet have an on-again-off-again sort of relationship not entirely unlike Moonlighting had before it sucked, and the source of their fighting usually comes down to the two arguing over religious matters. Matt mocks her beliefs in the most condescending way possible – through logic – and Harriet defends her convictions in the most irritating way imaginable – through gracious deflecting and unwavering acceptance. Ugh.
Watching the show together seems to have strengthened the differences between Brittany and myself when it comes to matters of Faith. Namely, she’s bursting at the seams with the stuff while I’ve nothing to do with any of it. I hate faith. No, I despise it. In fact, I loathe it with nasty words so powerful that mankind has not yet invented them. Faith is the antibody to the virus of the intellect. It erodes rational thought and enlightened discourse, it leads well-meaning people down dangerous roads of absolutes and certainty, and it totally ruins any chance anyone ever has of actually winning a religious debate. When backed into a corner of logic and reason, a Believer can always fall back on Faith to dismiss every single piece of contradictory evidence presented to her without the need to provide any of her own. It’s infuriating!
So last night, after turning off the Xbox before heading to bed, the topic of religion somehow came up. I’m not sure how it started, but we eventually found ourselves on the topic of demons and Hell and all things supernatural. For whatever reason, during the course of our conversation I said something about not rescuing her from the fiery pits of eternal damnation if a demon were to ever pop up and drag her screaming to Hell. I do not know why I said this.
Immediately thereafter, the debate took on a new life. As it did this, I somehow managed to steer the conversation in the direction of all the supernatural books she loves to read. Apart from the Sookie Stackhouse novels (where True Blood comes from), there are a slew of vampire and/or werewolf books she reads that she dearly loves – including, and I can’t possibly type this with enough scorn – the Twilight series. I think I brought these sorts of books up originally to try and build a case towards exposing her inner heathen, but my plan took a wrong turn somewhere around the time that she told me she doesn’t believe in demons and that, while she enjoys reading supernatural books, she doesn’t think they’re true.
To this, I replied that she was a big, fat liar. “You have so read a supernatural book that you think is true,” I said.
“No I haven’t!” she replied.
“Have so!”
“Have not!”
“So!”
“Not!”
“So!”
“Not!”
“Yes, you have! I know for a fact you’ve read it and you think it’s absolutely true.”
“What fictional book have I read, Kristian, that you think I think is real?”
I paused for a second, gathering my thoughts. “Well,” I began, “I didn’t say it was necessarily fictional – just that it’s a supernatural book you think is real.”
“You’re full of it, you know that?”
“No, I’m not.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Then tell me what book it is!”
“Um, no.” I said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“You won’t get in trouble. Just tell me!”
“Well, ok. Just remember, *you* said it was fiction, not me.”
“If it’s nonfiction, then of course I think it’s real. What book is it?!”
“Well, I didn’t say it was nonfiction, either.”
“FINE! Whatever!” she yelled, before growing strangely quiet as the lights switched on. “Wait a second…”
I put my hands up, instinct taking over. Self-preservation and all that. “Hey now, before you get mad…”
“Too late! I’m already mad, Kristian! How could you even say something like that?!”
“What do you mean? I didn’t say anything”
Another pause. “Go take your shower.”
“But I – ”
“Go. Take. Your. Shower.”
“You can’t be mad though, I didn’t – ”
“I don’t care! Get up right now and go someplace else.”
“But – ”
“Seriously, Kristian!”
I stood up and shuffled my way to the hallway door. I turned one last time and said, “Ok, I’m going to take my shower now. But when I get back, you have to not hate me.”
She glared at me with her ginormous looking balls of scorn and contempt. “I don’t hate you. And it’s 66 books, by the way. I can’t believe you went there.”
“But I didn’t! You said – ”
“SHOWER. NOW. GO!”
“Well you know, the Bible actually had a lot more or a lot less than 66 chapters through the years, depending on who you ask and when. So it’s not like – ”
“I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“But I didn’t – ”
“GO AWAY AND TAKE YOUR SHOWER!”
I went away and took my shower.
In summary, I want to say thank you, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip! You’ve contributed immeasurably to the continued success of my marriage. I actually mean that sincerely, since having a good shouting match every now and again is good for the continued longevity of any good relationship. Arguments release stored up stress while venting excessively strong emotions in the mostly safe and somewhat controlled environment of the debate’s parameters. Still, I’m a little glad that the series only lasted one season. If we’d watched much more of it, there’s no way of predicting just how often I’d get to tell my wife how utterly wrong she is about almost everything.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a couch to go sleep on…
Pushing into the late evening of this Tuesday night past, the Internet suddenly got a little more stupid. Discouraged by some comments left on a website about his 2010 book purge, Harlan Ellison finally thumbed his nose at the ‘Net and switched off the pops and hisses of his antediluvian dial-up modem for the last time. He’s done with it, with you and with us. He bought the ticket, took the ride and hopped out of the spinning teacup when it started teetering a little too precariously upon its own axis as the ridecar, he realized, was being dangerously overspun by a gaggle of waterheaded asshats who somehow managed to take control of world. So he’s out of here. Gone. Absent without leave from all of the flippant inanity that continues to consume the entirety of Web content from ass to mouth like some sort of twisted, fiber-optic Ouroboros. Good job, Internet. You just climbed another rung on the Great Ladder of Ineptitude and murdered a Titan along the way. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I know what it was on the site in question (which I refuse to reference) that crawled under Harlan’s skin to skitter about his endoskeleton and finally push him over the edge, and I agree with him – to a point. Some say the man has built a career out of being an obstinate and irate blatherskite, but the kind of person who says things like this tends to be the sort who spends too little time with books and too much with thesauruses. Talentless hacks (to use a less polite but more succinct description), the failed and the failing always look upon the mighty and despair, not out of jealousy or frustration but out of resentment and loathing for that which they will never be. And they know it – and the more they know it, the more vitriolic their contempt grows and the greater their hate becomes. Every writer knows this, and every writer out there busily keyfucking their typewriters and cut-and-pasting their manuscripts knows in their guts that they are better and worse than some other writer out there doing the same. There is always someone you’ll never best and there’s always someone who will never best you. The difference between someone like Harlan and everyone else is that he’s earned the right to shout hate at the heart of a world gone drunk and stupid from reality television and talk show book clubs. He’s earned it not because he’s built his career out of being a loudmouthed braggart, but because he’s built his career out of doing the work.
He’s done the work and he’s sold the work while aggressively and willfully spitting in the eyes of an industry filled with vipers and leeches, who smile as they sink their teeth into the soft flesh of weaker writers too afraid of rejection to lop the heads off the murderous little bastards. The sad truth is that if more writers were like Ellison – even with half the talent, but all of the drive – the world might not be governed by the whimsical fancy of the functionally illiterate. Harlan’s “Pay The Writer” speech from Dreams With Sharp Teeth recently passed 400,000 views on YouTube – an ironic twist considering the content of the speech and its method of distribution – and still, no one gets the point. Writers are such insecure, neurotic bundles of broken dreams and phantasmagoric hope that the world is bursting at the seams with wannabes all scrambling to freely donate their souls to every slick-backed producer or priggish publisher who winks at them and offers them ‘exposure’. Websites offering publicity in exchange for the right to freely publish submissions fill the Internet with no shortage of hopeful scribblers looking for their big break. “I’m published, Ma!” and now click on over to a site called Unicorn Moonbow Press International (or something equally inane) to read my stuff! No, I’m not getting paid – but I’m published!
The same mentality pervades every level of the industry, and it’s why brilliant and successful writers still have to hold down day jobs to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. Well that, and too few people bother to read challenging books. The same industry that is loathe to pay daring writers of dangerous visions a sum they might live on is more than happy to shovel paperbacked horse crap onto bookstore shelves, because the shitstank books simply sell better than the hard stuff. It’s the way of the world, and it’s only getting worse as the chigger of the Internet crawls deeper under our skin to continue its parasitic draining of our collective intelligence.
But none of this is news. It’s an old story, but one that only grows more depressing with time. The Internet, for all its glittering promises of equality and brotherhood, of leveling the playing field for everyone and creating the world’s first true meritocracy, has amounted to little more than a collection of nut-shot videos and Stupid Human Tricks. It provides safe haven for liars and thieves, dilutes our consciousness and bends our reality. Hiding under the mask of some inverse morality where the slogan “Information is free” gets people out from under the weight of a crushing cognitive dissonance that comes from knowing that stealing someone else’s work is wrong. Books, movies, music, games – everything is up for grabs on the World Wide Web, and only suckers actually pay for anything, right?
But again, this isn’t news. Harlan has long crusaded against the digital theft of his work, and he’s won more times than he’s lost. He’s been called many names and been the unfortunate recipient of a lot of misplaced rage, but he’s always stood his ground and given as good as he’s got. No, none of this is what pushed one of the greatest literary voices of our age off of the Internet. What finally did it, I’m afraid, is the same thing that threatens anyone who puts his soul out there on the page for all the world to see and mock and shred. It haunts each and every one of us, and we defend against it all our lives. Eventually, it takes its toll.
I’m not going to quote the comments or cast light on insecurities that plague every single creative professional working in the world today, and I’m certainly not going to risk embarrassing Harlan by exposing my thoughts on exactly what pushed him over the edge and made him push the big red Abort button on his Internet presence. What I will say is simple and direct, and meant as solely for Harlan as it is for anyone else who dares to actually live:
Fighting against an uncaring world is what we do. We do it because no one else will, or can, or will do as good of a job. It’s who we are, even when we don’t want to be. We’re misanthropic because we love harder and stronger than anyone will ever understand. We see the dirt and grime of this world with keen, sharp vision that stings our souls because we know just how beautiful the filth really is because it’s part of something real, something true – undiluted and sharp and nasty and brittle and broken…and sublime. We ply our trade in artifice because the real truth of things can be excised only from the malignant tumors of our fiction. We are a cancerous lesion on the soul of humanity that must be cut out, burned off and nuked into oblivion because that’s what we’re here for. We hold up a mirror and reflect the hideous reality people would rather not see – but that they must, if they are ever to become something more. Something better. Something…like us.
That’s it. I’m done, and let the comments flow forth from your poisoned pens and chemo-keyboards ridiculing my hubris and mocking my confessions. I’m ready for it. It’s what I’m here for. It’s what I do. Kinda like Harlan, only half of a half of a quarter of a tenth as good…but I’m working on it. Give me time.
And Harlan? Get back up. Your story isn’t over yet, and you know damn well that you’re the only menacing old bastard who gets to finish it – not them. Never them.
It’s Tuesday, which means Coquetting Tarradiddles is back to its regular posting schedule. I apologize for all the confusion while I got my feet wet with my first experiment in the serialization of my novel, Snowflakes In Autumn, but things should go smoother from here on in. I’m wrestling a bit with the Donate / Contribute / Whatever button right now as I try and persuade the demons chained to the walls of the PayPal basement that my bank account does, in fact, belong to me. There’s been some confusion, as it was previously associated with another e-mail address and somehow tied to my ex-wife’s lingering online presence, but I think I have things squared away now. I’m just waiting for a confirmation at this point, after which I’ll slap up the button and you little goblins can start sending me money.
I promised to write a bit about Trey’s Super Mario birthday party, so I’ll go ahead and jump into that before moving on to more recent happenings. As you know, Brittany and I had been planning Trey’s fourth birthday party for months, an event for which Trey had been contributing helpful tips and making intractable demands providing gentle, polite requests on an almost daily basis. He helped out with the cake baking and marshmallow fondant tasting, and lent his considerable crafting talents towards giving me a hand with some of the treat bags. There were endless shopping trips over the months, where we’d pick out some knickknack or other, the end result of which was that by the time his party finally rolled around, his little toddler brain was auto-synthesizing some sort of naturally occurring variant of crack cocaine that kept him in a perpetual state of overexcited bliss. Getting him to sleep the night before his party, therefore, was an education in futility.
The party itself went off without a hitch, despite some unpleasantness Brittany had to endure the night before, due to a bit of subterfuge from Trey’s dad. Months earlier, her ex requested that his summer visitation start on Brittany’s time – specifically, on Trey’s birthday. Since we’d already been planning his party at that point, Brittany declined the dates and offered to work with him on establishing an alternate schedule. This incensed him, but he was repeatedly assured by Brittany’s attorney (who drafted the decree to which both parties are bound) that she had the right to refuse his dates if they conflicted with her own, as per some modifications done to the decree after a dispute over dates last year. After sending a few e-mail protestations, he went silent, which led us to believe that he had accepted his default summer visitation of July 1-30. We found out only days before the party, however, that this was not the case.
I’ll spare you the painful details, but the summary version has to do with Brittany discovering documentation that her ex had developed a deceptive little stratagem designed to allow him access to Trey for a 2-hour visit, after which he was planning to not return him (much as he did in August of last year), and the subsequent fallout that arose from thwarting his scheme. Apart from his dad almost forcing Trey to miss the birthday party he’d been excited about for months, Brittany’s ex is now attempting other nefarious machinations that will, I’m afraid, ultimately force everyone back into the courtroom to have this sort of behavior finally stopped by court order. It’s frustrating to see a sweet and sensitive child like Trey be kicked around like a metaphorical soccer ball in some bizarre World Cup of Spousal Revenge while the vuvuzela whine of indifference drowns out the tearful cries of a mother pleading from the sidelines, but it is what it is. Trey is the one who suffers from every dispute, and I long for the day when his needs are finally placed at the top of the What’s Important list – but, to quote the immortal wisdom of Malcolm Reynolds, I’m afraid “that’s a long wait on a train that don’t come.”
Anyway, all of that aside, Trey’s party was great. He had a pretty good turnout from family and friends, some of whom traveled a good distance to be there. Brittany’s cake was a tremendous hit, and she’s had some follow-up requests to make specialty cakes for other birthdays and celebrations, which has led to numerous trips to the Cooking section of the bookstore as well as countless hours of TV viewing involving shows like “Cake Boss” and “Ace of Cakes” and generally any show having anything to do with the word ‘Cake’ anywhere in the title. I’m not complaining, though. I get to eat her experiments!
In other news, I want to come clean on my latest display of ultimate stupidity. Over in another post, a 17-year-old reader in Hong Kong recently left a very nice comment identifying himself as a fan and thanking me for the bibblebabble I write here. I was so overjoyed that there was someone out there under the age of 30 who hadn’t had his attention span neutered at the alter of the World Wide Web and was intelligent enough to both read and understand the thesaurus-raping vocabulary I often employ, that I quickly tossed off a reply without really thinking about it first…a reply wherein I thanked him for his comment. In Japanese.
I’m still recovering from that gaffe, made especially ironic since it’s attached to a post where I go on and on about how terrified I am of ever looking stupid. Sometimes, it seems, the universe is not without a sense of terrible and merciless humor made at my expense. I apologized to the guy, said my mea culpa and skittered off to the shadows to lick the wounds of my idiocy and whimper at the moonlight. I do that sort of thing. Don’t judge!
That about brings you up to speed on current events. Thursday’s entry will be a return to typical essay form, where I’ll rant at length about some unsettling and ultimately pointless topic, so be sure to check back.
Awwwwwwww!
Hello, kiddies. This is my first essay since I started posting Snowflakes In Autumn, so I probably have a lot to say. However, I’m going to keep things relatively brief today before we move on to the last two installments of Chapter Two later in the week. My days of late have been filled mostly with work, writing and party planning for Trey’s 4th birthday extravaganza. Due to his unwavering adoration of all things Super Mario, he started asking for a Mario party back in March and hasn’t waivered in his decision since. His actual birthday is this Friday, so we’ve planned his party for Saturday and Brittany and I have spent the past several weeks trying to figure out how to make this happen after discovering that there’s an amazing amount of Mario birthday party merchandise NOT out there. Instead, we’ve had to get Crafty.
It should be noted that I am not, in fact, a crafty individual. Armed with a hot glue gun and a two pieces of fabric to stick together, I’ll invariably wind up with third degree burns on my inner thigh and one piece of fabric stuck to my forehead. Thankfully, Brittany is a bit better at these sorts of things than I am. Maybe it’s to do with genetics and information carried exclusively on the second X chromosome, but it always seems like Moms are better at the crafty stuff than Dads (or stepdads, as it were).
Pay no attention to the clutter…
Those of us in the XY side of the chromosomal pond are better at the logistics and general, big-picture event planning and shouldn’t ever be recruited to stich things or glue things or bake things. I say this not out of any sort of sexist worldview, but simply as a matter of fact. Dads like to play Hannibal Smith and concoct elaborate top-level plans while leaving the details to Moms. We do this for two reasons: First, we suck at the details – and second, we’re lazy.
I’ve scattered a couple of pictures of some of the things Brittany has come up with for the party, which range from Paper Mario caps to Mario-overall treat bags, the latter of which was actually one of my Big Ideas, arrived at after finding some girls purses in the shape of denim skirts one night at the store. “Look at this,” I said to Brittany. “We could make these into Mario overalls pretty easily. Just cut the handle in half and hot glue the two ends back to the purse to look like shoulder straps, then cut the skirt down the middle and glue the two pieces to look like pants legs. It’s brilliant!”
A pile of treat overalls and a giant Trey
It was a great idea and I was very pleased with my ingenuity, but I knew the moment I suggested it that I wouldn’t be having any truck with anything to do with scissors and hot glue. The responsibility for actually pulling off my grand suggestion fell to Brittany, who managed to accomplish it quite handily with a little help from Trey. The little guy gets extremely stoked every time the subject of his birthday comes up, and he’s always eager to lend a helping hand in getting things ready for the party. He even worked on the experimental fondant recipe we devised to cover his elaborate homemade cake, which we hope turns out something like the picture we found on the Internet. I remain cautiously optimistic.
It’s difficult to describe Trey’s level of excitement for the party. Seeing as how we’ve been planning it for months, you’d think he’d be tired of it by now – but he’s just getting more and more stoked each day. Brittany wrapped a few of his presents the other night, and he keeps carting the packages to different areas of the house to stack them in various configurations – but he doesn’t try to open them. He’s really good in that regard. In fact, he’s generally a great little boy all around. When he was helping make the treat bag overalls, for instance, he kept telling us how eager he was to share with his guests. With each new purse-turned-overalls Brittany completed, he’d announce, “This one is for Gabe, and this one’s for Olivia, and this one’s for Chloe, and this one’s for Zach, and this one’s for…” He has a lot of kids coming to the party, from both nearby and relatives traveling in from out of town, which means a lot of treat bags. I hope we have enough…
Trey helped with the coloring – and stayed in the lines!
Well, that about wraps things up for today. Check back at midnight tomorrow for the third installment of Snowflakes In Autumn, Chapter Two. I’ll be explaining my plans for future chapters after I wrap up Chapter Three next week. Some of you will like the idea, others will probably hate it. It’s a little scheme I’ve adapted from Lawrence Watt-Evans, who is doing something similar with one of his novels. (If you’ve never read The Misenchanted Sword, you’re abusing yourself and you don’t even know it. Seriously, go buy a copy. You won’t regret it.) I’ll be back next Wednesday with a new essay, which I’m certain will include a postmortem of the birthday festivities, complete with pictures and probably a little video. If you don’t care about such things, then you’re dead inside and should just skip your daily visit that day – but don’t forget to come back for Chapter 3 next week, because after I post the last installment of Chapter 4, things will be changing…
You may have noticed a conspicuous lack of my ramblings last week. I assure you, I did not die, nor was I horribly maimed in some terrible accident that left me disfigured and without the use of my typing fingers. What did happen, however, was that the devil decided to swing by to do a little cloven hoofed tap dancing on my soul, and it’s taken me awhile to recover. In less dramatic terms, I had a toothache.
Well, it started out as a toothache, at any rate. It was the week before Memorial Day when it all began, and what was at first a mere dull ache coming from my upper jaw eventually transformed into a pulsating monstrosity of pain by week’s end. By the time Memorial Day came around, I was clinging to my face like I’d just looked into the Arc of the Covenant and I wanted to die.
I did not die. Instead, the left half of my face began to swell in the style of the Elephant Man, and the throbbing pain began to course through me with every beat of my cold, black heart. My little toothache had turned into an abscess from Hell, and it was out for blood. By Tuesday morning, I walked into the dentist’s office looking like I’d just gone three rounds with Ali, and left feeling a strange urge to run up some steps and start shouting, “Yo Adrian!” at the heart of the world. My dental doctor loaded me up with antibiotics and painkillers, and scheduled me to come back for a root canal a week later. Or, to put it another way: yesterday.
I spent the past week in a medicated haze of incoherence and misery, punctuated by the sharp staccato beats of soul-crushing pain whenever the damned tooth decided to remind me it was still there and still angry. The swelling didn’t start going down at all until Sunday evening, when it finally began to subside and return my face to its normal shade of pretty. It still hurt, though. A lot.
So I went to my dentist’s appointment yesterday morning (an appointment to which I’d been awaiting with the same eager anticipation a fat kid has towards an unopened Moon Pie) shouting “Drill, baby, drill!” like a crazed Republican, hoping to have the root canal and put this terrible experience behind me. Fate, it turns out, had different plans. My dentist advised me that not only was my abscess bad, but it was along the lines of the worst kind of abscess possible, then he set to work on numbing me up. This took some patience.
Eventually, I was loaded with nerve-deadening medicine and he clapped on the latex horror of the dental dam, then got to work murdering my tooth. After the numbing, it was a fairly painless procedure, although it took quite a bit longer than expected on account of the level of infection being so mind-numbingly pervasive. The tooth kept draining what I can only assume to be ominous bodily fluids that oozed forth from the tiny gateway to Hell that had opened up in my jaw, and it showed no signs of stopping. At one point, the dentist sort of pushed on my swollen gums to coax some of the fluid out in much the same way as I imagine a more foolish courageous type of person than myself goes about extracting the venom from a poisonous snake, although my reaction probably lined up well with the serpent’s: I wanted to bite the man to death.
Eventually, he concluded that the infection was just too great to finish the root canal with a proper filling today, since the odious infectious fluids insisted on relentlessly seeping from the freshly dug canals in my tooth. Instead, he packed it with some sort of medicinal concoction made up of antibiotics and at least 10,000% Extract of Cloves, and told me to come back next week for the finishing round. The rest of the day, he advised, I would be pretty miserable.
And I was. The throbbing was excruciating, the painkillers inexplicably decided to take up pacifism and stopped killing anything, and I spent the majority of the day again clasping my face and whimpering like a lost puppy. The good news, however, is that the throbbing crescendos of pain seem to have faded now, and a general dull ache has taken their place. I prefer the ache. The ache is good. It does not throb. The throb is bad. We do not like the throb.
Hopefully, this means everything is on the upswing now and I’ll soon return to some level of normalcy. I’ve missed a ton of work, which means I’ll be pulling some long hours in the newsroom to regain lost ground. I don’t mind that very much, although it will impact how much time I’m able to spend with Trey each day, which is something I’m always on the alert to maximize as much as possible. Of course, I thought I was on the mend last Friday too, until the PainGod decided he wasn’t done with me yet. Let us hope he hath been verily appeased and his appetite for cruelty duly sated so that he shant return again. So mote it be, etceteras…
I’ll be back Thursday with a regular essay that won’t involve me whining about my miserable dental problems. I know this sort of thing isn’t much fun to read about, but trust me when I say it’s even less fun to experience. Anyone who says an abscessed tooth is nothing more than a toothache has obviously never had one, and is in serious need of an education in suffering. If an abscess is a toothache, then a gunshot wound is a bee sting and I’m the King of the World. Kneel before Zod!
I’ve been thinking about Father’s Day coming up in June, so today I’m giving you a short and sweet guide to being a stepfather. And, while this may seem like a fairly specific sort of thing that has the potential to alienate a large chunk of my readers and drive them away to other websites filled with less niche-related bibblebabble, I promise you it’s not. It’s good advice for any parent, step or otherwise. It might even be a little bit funny.
Step parents get a bad rap in pop culture and fairy tales, and we don’t fare much better in the blood-obsessed nuclear family fiction of the real world, either. In stories, we’re evil and heartless bastards who either care nothing for our stepchildren, or have the annoying habit of trying to bake them into pies all the time. In the mind of your average sitcom viewer, we’re bumbling fools and inconsistent sources of unsteady drama. We’re the extra bits tacked onto the the points of the Mom, Dad and Child triangle that make it stick out at embarrassing angles all the other shapes point at and laugh. In short, we’re not worth very much to anybody. That’s the stereotype.
In truth, however, being a stepdad or stepmom is noble sort of thing, if you tilt your head just right and squint a little. After all, we chose to add our stepchildren to our lives rather than hop in bed to roll the DNA dice and hope it lands on seven. We accept the children as they already are – and, when done properly, we take our place in a kind of familial tetrahedron, where the three points of Mom and Dad and Step Parent make up the base of the pyramid that supports the kiddo capstone at the top. That’s how it’s supposed to work, at any rate. If you’re experiencing something different, you might be doing it wrong. Then again, my experience has been with a toddler, which is a far cry from marrying into teenagers. Your mileage may vary.
Still, in the interests of Education, here’s how to do it properly. I think…
Kristian’s Five Rules For Step Parenting A Toddler
1.) If you are a step parent, you are not Mom or Dad – and you never will be.
Stop trying.
Remember the pyramid and your role as a vital component of the three-point base. (Technically, it’s a tetrahedron, but I don’t want to melt your brain with geometry.) Or, if that’s too Dr. Phil-ish for you, try just not being a selfish bastard. Remember that the only reason you’re a step parent at all is because there are children involved. Try not to screw them up just because you think the real parent’s a waterhead and doesn’t deserve the title. Your kid is still going to love them in a way they simply can’t love anyone else. It’s probably down to new age gobbledeegook I don’t understand along the lines of cellular memory and crystals, but the biological connection is real. Regardless of why it’s there, it’s still there. It’ll always be there, even if the real parent is a mouth-breathing moron. It simply doesn’t matter. Your kid will love them all the same, and it’s up to you to make sure it’s never an issue.
2.) Your stepchild is the most important person in the world.
And if he’s not, he should be.
Children should always take priority in any marriage, without regard to biology or fate. A lot of parents (step or otherwise) forget about this, but it’s important. When a child’s involved, you can love your spouse with all your heart, but if they’re both ever dangling from a cliff’s edge and you can save only one, you’d best pull your kid up and let your better half get the sudden and mortal education in gravity. In daily life, this means that everything you do is done for your child rather than yourself or your spouse. If you’re broke and can’t buy much food, the kid gets to eat while you get to starve. If you want a new car but your kid needs braces, you learn to love your ancient vehicle with the squeaky door and get used to telling people it adds character. If you startle awake one morning with the crushing weight of marriage flattening your internal organs, you don’t get to decide that you deserve better and suddenly start looking for a new sexmate to ease your suffering. You grow up and get over it for the sake of your kid. It’s really pretty simple.
3.) Let your stepchild decide what to call you.
You may long to hear a Mama or Daddy escape your stepchild’s lips when he’s addressing you, but forcing the issue just highlights your own insecurities, which you’ll probably end up passing on to the little guy. If he wants to start calling you Daddy, then let him. Likewise, if he decides to call you Humperdink Rumplefart, that’s fine, too. Trey called me BlahBlah for the longest time, and now he bounces around from names like Daddy Kris, back to Kris and on to just plain Daddy whenever he wants. It’s his choice. Unlike biological parents, stepmoms and stepdads have to earn the good names. Do things right, and they’ll come. At least until the kid’s a teenager, at any rate. (Update: Trey now calls me Papa. He decided that after hearing it somewhere and liked it because it rhymes with Mama. I dig it.)
4.) Accept that the law hates you.
Step parents have little to no legal rights when it comes to their stepchildren. For example, if Brittany were to be killed in some freak household accident or inexplicably contract Ebola and die, Trey would immediately go back to his dad’s, like something out of a bad Lifetime Channel movie starring Sally Field and/or Melissa Gilbert. It’s high and tragic drama, and it completely blows. I don’t like to think about it much, so let’s move on…
5.) You may be a second-class parent, but you don’t have to act like one.
The world may see step parents as inferior to biological parents, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Did The Brady Bunch teach us nothing? What about Diff’rent Strokes or My Two Dads? Hell, Luke Skywalker was raised by his aunt and uncle while his real dad was busy enslaving the galaxy and strangling people with the power of his mind. Real parents get all the glory while step parents get shot by stormtroopers, and it hardly seems fair. Still, even though the law hates you and the rest of the world suspects you of being one Evil Step Parent move away from turning your children out on the streets like dirty little Dickensian street urchins, you don’t have to prove them right. Stop worrying about accidents of blood and what other people think; there are much more important things for you to take care of. See rule one for details.
It was the best of shows, it was the worst of shows; it was the series of wisdom, it was the series of foolishness; it was the plot of belief, it was the plot of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the cave of hope, it was the drain plug of despair; we had answers before us, we had questions before us; we were all going directly to series finale Heaven, we were all going the other way.
Lost was a great television series crippled by its own success and lack of foresight. It was lazy writing and bad storytelling mixed with flashes of brilliance and inspiration. It was filled with wonder and mystery that was befouled by a really craptastical final season, which itself was capped off by a finale filled with copouts and heartstring-plucking inanity. It was all of these things, and I’m both happy and sorry that I bothered watching any of it.
In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I was predisposed to hate Lost. My ex-wife loved the show, and so-called ‘Lost parties’ proved to be her gateway into the land of infidelity. She would leave the house a bit before the show aired each week and spend most of the night with the sweaty-palmed hipsters she was milking for free prizes, then come back around again sometime in the wee hours of the morning. It didn’t take long for suspicion to get the better of me, and I soon had all of the hideous truth I could handle. I blocked it out and endured her unhygienic treachery for a very, very long time before I finally came to my senses and filed a marital version of the Emancipation Proclamation at the county courthouse. So, as you can see, I went into Lost already hating the snot out of it.
I’d tried to watch it in those early years, but found the opening episodes so devoid of interest that I never allowed myself to fall under its thrall. I went back and gave it another go from time to time, but it never quite seemed to stick. Heavy handed and deliberately opaque to the point of absolute frustration, I didn’t feel the desire to push myself to like a television show, not matter what who my ex-wife was doing while I wasn’t watching. Now, grab your remote and fast-forward several long and miserable years until I’m divorced and once again a happy man – but keep your finger on the button and keep zipping along through the past couple of wonderful years I’ve had with a new life, a new wife and my new family, and you’ll eventually get around to the present day. Or, actually, back it up a little bit. No, keep going. Yeah, there. Right there. Hit Play.
It was about a month ago, when suffering through the painful transition from one job to another (minus an expected payout that led to a brief but seemingly interminable period of financial despair) that I finally gave up and decided to fully commit myself to figuring out what the heck so many people thought was so great about this horrid little television program called Lost. We were broke, so our entertainment options were limited. Fortunately, Netflix was offering up the first five seasons of the show, so I added them all to my Watch Instantly queue and sat back in my comfy chair to join the survivors of Oceanic flight 815.
With the final season currently underway at the time, I decided that if there were actually some hidden merit to this show, I’d do well to catch up before the Internet was burning through spoilers like an Avada Kedavra through a Dumbledore. And, with just one week to spare, I accomplished my goal. I’d powered through all six seasons in just a few weeks and managed to watch the series finale with the rest of the world. I regretted it immediately.
For all of its good points, the show’s only real failure was singular: poor planning. Whenever you create a serialized bit of continuity-based fiction, you have to plan for everything. Everything – even your own success.
As a character study, as I had one friend point out to me, Lost was a great success. Regardless of how I felt about the tangled and untangled, then tangled again convolutions of the plot, the characters were what kept me watching. I absolutely hated Kate from the beginning, and it was fun to loathe her for six seasons. I identified most with Sawyer (for reasons obvious to anyone who knows me), and it was interesting to watch the evolution of his character go from self-serving assface, to a guy who eventually only cared about protecting his (chosen and extended) family. Locke was a fascinating exploration of the True Believer, Sayid was a great conflicted hero who didn’t know where the good guy ended and the bad guy began, and Benjamin Linus was every scheming little weasel you ever knew from high school. Of course, all of this ended with the first episode of the sixth season, when the show threw out its own rulebook and started paving the way for an easy out with its series finale, but I’m not here to criticize…much.
As I said, Lost had only one flaw, but it was an important one. The writers didn’t plan for everything. One of television’s most successful (in terms of plot, character and overall fiction) continuity-based series was Babylon 5, created by J. Michael Straczynski. When cooking up the five-year plot of the series, Straczynski considered as many angles as he possibly could, going so far as to give each and every character a trapdoor from which they could either be written out of – or back into – the series. The construction of the plot was solid enough to have a beginning, a middle and an end spread out over five seasons, yet malleable enough to allow for the major adjustments that will inevitably befall any budget-conscious production. It was also a painful series to get into, having to adjust to low budget sets and effects, but once you got over that initial learning curve and let the narrative carry you away down its fascinating character-and-theme driven river, it was a great and rewarding ride. Lost? Not so much.
Perhaps it was because I watched all of the episodes in such a short period of time, but all of the many plot holes were all too apparent in my mind as I sat down to enjoy endure the final season. But again, I’m not here talk about how bad Lost was. In many ways, it was a tremendously successful series, if only we ignore the plot and a ghastly final season written purely as a way to end the series on a finale that resolved nothing. Even the characters – normally Lost‘s strong suit – were unappealing and tiresome in the final season, simply because everything that had once made them interesting was now being set aside in service of supporting a new plot designed to lead up to the disappointing series finale. It would have been better to have not answered any questions in any way and have simply closed the series with strong characters rather than a quasi-religious message wrapped in contrived examples of so-called ‘symmetry’ – but that’s just my opinion.
I won’t spoil anything more for those of you who’ve never gotten around to watching the series, as well as for those of you still waiting to get around to finally hitting Play on your Tivo. (I’m looking at you, Unca H.) Instead, I’ll end this little ramblepiece by saying that Lost is well worth watching, so long as you never put the first disc of season six in your DVD player. Seriously, just trust me on this. Lest there be any doubt, allow me this one teensy spoiler as a word of warning: the island has a giant drain that’s plugged up by a small stone stopper. The bad guy pulls it out and the island starts sinking. No, I’m not lying.
Now, if you have watched all six seasons – or if you just don’t care anymore – here’s a great little video a friend of mine found over at College Humor. Thanks, jjz!
There are many things in this world that want our souls, from demonic beasties prowling the nightmares of legend, all the way up the celestial ladder to the divine and back down again to the terrible pits of devils and fiends. Always the same, but the names change: God and Jesus. Satan and the Anti-Christ. Facebook and Apple… …
Lately, there’s been a lot of talk burning through the fiber optic capillaries of the Internet about the evils of Facebook and the tyranny of Apple. But, as with so many things in this grim and misleading world, most of it’s true and most of it’s lies, and none of it means what you think it means. It is true that Facebook doesn’t care about people’s privacy, but it’s also true that people don’t care about their privacy, either. Oh sure, there are the righteous and indignant who will stand high upon their virtual mountaintops screaming, “Betrayal!” at the heart of the world, but no one’s really listening. Not even themselves.
The truth is, the easiest way to prevent Facebook from spreading personal data around the Internet like a boring little virus made up of boring little facts about boring little lives, is simply to not use Facebook. Abstinence is always the best way to avoid infection or to prevent your browsing habits from shimmering up the fallopian Intertubes to impregnate the quivering uterus of an Advertising whore, but it’s not a very realistic option. The allure of connecting to Facebook to share the mundane details of life is too strong a temptation to resist, and it greatly eclipses the simple pleasures of eating the low hanging fruit from a forbidden garden tree (and we all know how well that turned out). Humanity lost its technological innocence back in the late ’90s when we all began drinking the shimmering electric Kool-Aid of the World Wide Web, and we’re never getting it back again. Get used to the idea.
The naked truth of the matter is that people will continue using Facebook despite all their protests and petitions. They will keep connecting and keep sharing, and the demigods of the Facey Book will be right there to suckle at the 
bleeding teat of all that communication. And you know what? You won’t care, in the end. Nobody will, because it’s much ado about absolutely nothing. Yes, Facebook shares your information with third parties. Yes, your mother will probably find out all the naughty things you post on your Wall and the government will discover that you’re a dirty little teabagger. Your pictures of crazy college nights will find their way to the desktops of prospective employers, and you’ll receive a sudden and uncomfortable education in humility from the Human Resources department. Life is a series of choices followed by consequences, and in this brave new world of always-on, constant communication that we all wanted a dozen or so years ago, our choices are always public and permanent. So are the consequences.
After all, it’s no good to honorably run in a charity marathon if you can’t brag about it on your Facebook Wall, and it’s no fun playing the part of the rebellious, freedom-loving patriot if you can’t show the world how brave and unyielding you because you clicked Glenn Beck’s “Like” Button. Facebook abstinence just isn’t an option in the real world, where feigned concerns over privacy don’t stop people from oversharing in the same way that Purity Rings don’t stop teenagers from driving their cars into hidden alcoves to test the suspension and do a little clumsy organ grinding in the back seat. Sure, everyone may feel a little guilty about it afterwards, but sooner or later they always come back for more.
The powers that be at Facebook are interested in your personal data simply because they can share sell it to third parties and advertisers, who then give the Facebook yahwehs buckets of cash in return. This is the way of the world, of the corporation and the free market. Either embrace the oligarchy and enjoy the new world order of slick technolgical contributions to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or tune out, turn off and drop away into the ether. It’s your choice, but be aware that living off the grid while everyone you know is having fun riding the digital surf moves you away from the beach and into the grimy scenery of Unibomber and Ruby Ridge territory. It’s lonely there. And dangerous.
At the end of the day, Facebook isn’t doing anything new to us that we don’t already do to ourselves. We use store loyalty cards, order things off the Internet, and pay for everything we buy with our debit cards. We connect to the Internet through services that log our every move, and we stumble around its labyrinthine corridors with the help of the almighty Google, who tries really hard not to be evil, but keeps records just in case.
Our lives are already being tracked, logged and sold to the highest bidder, and we opt-in to all these programs either because they make life easier, more affordable, or just plain possible. Facebook sharing your likes and dislikes with advertisers is not giving them the keys to your sanctum sanctorum. It gets you targeted ads. That’s it. And, if you’d rather not expose some tender bit of dangling truth to your friends, family and potential bosses, try not posting it to Facebook. I’m not saying that if you don’t want people to know that you do dirty little things in your private time, then don’t do them. I’m just saying, don’t brag about them. Just skip that particular status update or photo gallery or whatever other miserable thing it is you think is exciting, and leave the naughty bits inside the shoebox you keep beneath the floorboards. Personally, I had my Shame gland excised in a strange and terrible voodoo ritual involving two dozen chickens, forty-eight gallons of diesel fuel and the curious gyrations of a hermaphroditic lesbian priestess back in 1995, so I post everything. Your mileage, however, may vary.
The ugly reality (despite what boxes you think you’re ticking on Facebook and what effect on your privacy you think they’re having) is that Facebook remembers everything you do. It holds it and stores it and, in some cases, reviews it. Facebook owns everything you post into its warm and inviting databases. So, regardless of what privacy you may think you have, the truth is that you don’t have any. It’s an illusion. You sold your soul to the big blue F the moment you started filling in your first status update, and it’s a little late to be getting cold feet now. The devil always gets his due.
For my part, I’ve completely opened my Facebook profile, exposing the soft underbelly of my Likes and Pokes to the seedy side of the Internet in an attempt to provoke my own personal technopocalypse, although I’m prepared for disappointment. Instead, I 
expect to be bombarded by targeted ads, but that already happens. I expect to be routinely bothered by people I don’t know, but that already happens. I suspect I’ll get a lot of spam, but I’m used to that, as well. Maybe I’ll luck out and some Nigerian prince will offer me his fortune, or perhaps I’ll finally know what it means to have a “bonus sexy giant man penis” swinging betwixt my thighs that is “imposing to the sex of super female orgasms” thanks to the herbal wonders of imported Chinese Viagra. Who knows? Maybe nothing at all will change. Nothing ever does.
So stand on your soapboxes and rant, if it makes you feel better. Sign your Internet petitions and pretend to boycott Facebook on May 31, when ‘Quit Facebook Day‘ takes the Internet by storm sprinkle. Hold off posting your latest round of vacation photos until June rolls around, and let your status updates go untended – just make sure to be back in time to harvest your Farmville carrots before they spoil. Face it: the world is wired now, kids. Big brother’s been watching for years, and he doesn’t really care what you’re doing on Facebook. He just wants to sell you something; so either get with the program and jack in, or sign the hell out already and jack off alone.
Check back this Thursday next Tuesday at some point (after I’ve done a little more research) for Part Two: Nibbling The Electric Apple
It’s been a good while since I last wrote something by way of turning my scalpel upon the tender meat of my own flesh, slicing it open and letting the slithery viscera of my own insecurities spill out onto the examination table for the pleasure of external review, so I invite you to step inside the operating theater today, while I commence with the self-vivisection. Refreshments will be served after the ritual bloodletting concludes.
Here at Coquetting Tarradiddles, I often ramble on about the flaws of others while conveniently skimming over my own like a smooth stone skipping over the calm waters of a placid lake somewhere in a picturesque little village where it’s safe to leave your doors unlocked at night, and neighbors are always on hand to lend you a cup of advice laced with a bit sugar when you’re baking a cake and realize too late that it’s eight ounces away from just being bread. It’s the sort of charming little towne that loves a good silent ‘e’ and looks good on postcards, but whose exact location no one can ever seem to actually place. (This, of course, leads many people to jump to the erroneous conclusion that such a village is entirely fictional, while the truth is that its a very real place, but its exact whereabouts have been lost in the mists of time and are now a closely guarded secret known only by a select few members of the greeting card and motel art industries – which is always a contentious issue with Ye Olde Tourism Board at towne meeting tyme.) So, while it may appear that my egotism and rage are the stuff of illusory watercolor paintings and glossy paper rectangles with stamps on, I assure you it’s entirely true. Except when it isn’t.
The reality of Me is as complex and layered as any other multi-layered thing handily used as a literary device, but the core of the Kristian-Onion is decidedly simple: I’m terrified of being wrong. The driving force behind everything I do serves the singular purpose of keeping me from looking stupid, which is an unpleasant experience of which I have a complete and irrational fear. I strive to learn as much as I can about as many things as I can, solely so that I may pass myself off in conversation as something other than one of the slushbrained illiterates for which I so routinely hold in a grim and terrible level of disdain. I believe in a creeping surrealism that’s replacing real Truth in a world built on lies, deception and self-delusion, where the functionally illiterate rule on high from towers of glass and steel, and everyone else sits around in their underwear, licking their shoes and mumbling troubling thoughts about patriotism. I believe in this concept so strongly that I’m loathe to ever find myself a part of it, so I defend the sanctity of my brain by reading lots of books and going to bed a little bit angrier each night than I was the night before. It’s a vicious cycle, but the alternative is a life of supine acquiescence to the rule of authorities I neither recognize nor respect. Instead, I rant…
At length. If I have one standard complaint leveled against my writing here at Coquetting Tarradiddles, it’s always about my complete disregard for the common Internet law of brevity. This, again, flows back to the source of all my behavior and merges my love of knowledge with my utter contempt for those who would ignore Truth in favor of bite-sized news and new episodes of reality tv. I write just as many words as I need to feel like I’m getting my point across, although I know how many readers my verbosity doesn’t get me. Sadly, I don’t seem to care.
I write what I write, and I welcome any of you to stay if you like what I’m doing, or go away quickly if you don’t. I do not advertise my site or participate in link exchanges, or broadcast its location across the web in some desperate need to be heard, even if the tinge of some sort of desperation stains everything I write. Admittedly, I have been guilty of whoring my site out from time to time, but there’s always been a hidden methodology behind such actions, with a clear and distinct pathway in mind that leads towards a specific goal known only to myself. The rest of the time, I just don’t give a toss if people read my blog or remain blissfully unaware of its existence. I do value the geographic dispersal of my readers who dot the map in my sidebar like little red pustules of infection across the globe, but I’m entitled to a bit of egoboo every now and again, (which is the true currency of any personal blog, despite the phantasmic promises of AdSense riches). But mostly, I simply don’t care.
This indifference may appear to be arrogance masking some underlying inferiority complex, but in truth it’s nothing more than me simply not wanting to get dragged into overlong discussions with stupid people, who seem to make up the majority of the international citizenry of the World Wide Web. It’s also why I discourage comments – and long posts have the strange effect of weeding out the hideous and misinformed comments of would-be pundits. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect it’s something to do with that sort of person losing interest around the second paragraph and clicking off towards happier websites filled with illegal .MP3s and barely legal porn. I don’t miss their company.
This blog has always been and will forever be about ME. Not YOU, and certainly not some nebulous concept of a bizarre community built around my ramblings. I write about my life and things that interest and disgust me, and I’ve little concern for whether this either encourages or offends your sensibilities. I don’t really want to hear about it, either way. In truth, I have dark caverns worn deep into the bedrock of my soul that hide a subterranean layer of insecurity and doubt, but that should be obvious to anyone who isn’t stupid. 
Examining and correcting these issues is part of the reason I write the sort of things I post here. Yes, I adore myself. And yes, I’m an opinionated bastard who thinks he’s always right – but the trick of the thing is: I usually am, or at least I am as far as I’m concerned, which is all that really matters to anyone. I believe the world is divided into distinct divisions of black and white: there’s what’s Right and there’s what’s Wrong, and anyone who goes on about shades of grey has just never had the benefit of a proper education in laundry. Think of the world as a giant washing machine, where the light clothes sometimes get mixed with the dark ones and come out in varying hues of unfortunate coloration. That’s how the Truth gets lost in this confused world: in the shades of grey that come from all the Wrong that gets added into the mix along the way.
Am I as infallible as I make myself out to be? No, not hardly. However, I’m only as flawed as I allow myself to be, and it’s something I work on every day of my life. On some topics, I am well educated and brilliant while, on others, I will forever remain deeply stupid. I can’t know what it’s like, for example, to live inside the mercurial braincase of a woman. I can drone on about Right and Wrong until I’ve gone cold and developed a debilitating case of rigor mortis, but I can’t ever experience the world through the perspective of someone else, even if I’m comfortable making comments such as, “Mental health can be best described as points on a straight line, with Reason and Logic on one end and Women on the other.” (Told you I was a bastard.)
Unfortunately, I can only color my own reality with what I’ve learned myself, from my own victories and failures along the meandering road of life, and hope that I’ve found a little wisdom along the way. The truth is, I doubt myself all the time. I hate making definitive statements even while I seem to love declaring absolutes. I’m always afraid someone smarter is going to come along who trashes my arguments and leaves me crying alone in the shower and biting a washcloth to muffle my sobs. I’m terrified of that happening, so much so that I compulsively seek out information at an incessant and obnoxious rate to avoid (or at least postpone) that miserable experience. It’s a difficult life, living in this Kristian skin – but I suspect it’s a great deal more trying for people living nearby, who are forced to tolerate my soapboxing on an hourly basis. My wife, for instance. Poor thing.
So that’s me in a nutshell. I’m the sort of person who believes only in myself, even while I doubt almost every decision I ever make. I divide the world into two neat categories: there’s right and there’s wrong, but most people live their lives in the grey space of a truth that’s been made grubby by the color-bleed of fiction. I’m an insecure and neurotic mess at my center, but outwardly confident to an intolerable degree. I place myself upon a lofty pedestal from which I can look down upon the rest of humanity and frown, even as my secret desire is that they will someday climb up and join me. I want someone smarter than me to come along and slap me across the head like an irritated and abusive parent, even while I live in mortal dread of that ever happening. I’m a contradiction, a sort of personality paradox that both loves and loathes the world. But mostly, I’m just a lonely little scribbler pouring the stuff of my soul out into the world and hoping that someday it will all somehow matter. That at the end of my days, I won’t look back upon my life and see an ocean of unspent possibilities, of missed opportunities and successes lost to the crippling addiction of fear. In the end, I just want my life to have mattered. In the end, I’m just like everybody else. Damn.
A few moons back, there appeared upon the planet a strange and curious new entity called the Internet. At first, (and I’m speaking of the post-academic Internet here) it went by names like Compuserv and America On-Line for people who didn’t know any better, and it was touted as this big equalizing force that would help mankind ascend to loftier heights of wisdom and understanding. But mostly, it was just animated .GIFs and porn. Now, it’s modern classics of literature. And porn.
My love hate love hate love hate tender loathing of modern services like Twitter is well documented, if not entirely understood. I myself don’t know why I continue to tweet, but I think Warren Ellis said it best when he recently summed up Twitter as “Sort of a brain condom for synapse muck.” He describes the service as, “It’s basically mental slurry, the wet lumpy bits from a day spent at the keyboard vented off into a trap so the buildup doesn’t blow some crucial valve in my head.” There’s wisdom there, I think. Of course, he often tweets stuff like, “Good morning, sinners. You may bring me unicorn bacon now,” which just goes to show you how genius and insanity are often rolled into one deliciously weird package, like shampoo-plus-conditioner or the sugary part of a healthy breakfast that has a few bits of fruit tossed in.
Speaking of Twitter, there’s a new game in town called One Book, One Twitter that aims to get gazillions of people the world over all reading and discussing the same book together. It sounds like a good idea at first glance, but like so many things in this strange and miserable world, I’m against it. The book they’ve chosen to launch this new social experiment 
is American Gods, by Neil Gaiman – which is a tremendously clever book that I heartily recommend not reading – at least not on Twitter. The book’s prose is finely crafted by one of the few remaining writers who gives a damn about things like sentence structure and narrative flow, and the idea of chopping his meticulously chosen nouns and verbs to fit into the constraints of Twitter’s 140 character limit is a form of literary blasphemy I’ll not soon forgive. It’s right up there with how I imagine something like the Conservative Bible Project feels to people who give a crap about things like the Conservative Bible Project.
It’s not that I’m against the idea of serializing a great work of literature. Some of my best friends have been serialized, from David Copperfield to Sherlock Holmes and back again to Philip Pirrip and Estella Havisham. I’ve nothing against the idea 
itself; in fact, I think it’s something we could certainly do with in today’s functionally illiterate world. However, in the current brother-can-you-spare-a-dime economic climate, newspapers and magazines are reluctant to embrace the idea of the serialized novel, and after reading much of what many writers try to pass off as literature today, I’m inclined to support their positions. Still, the concept is sound and has produced some of history’s best novels – but slipping a chapter into each edition of a monthly periodical is a little bit different than slicing and dicing your way through a complete work, 140 characters at a time.
I’d hoped that Neil would have objected to the idea, but he’s actually embraced it, if a bit reluctantly. It’s great exposure for the book, and hopefully it will drive some of the electron-addicted netizens following 
@1b1t2010 to go out and buy the book. I can’t help but suspect it’s more likely to drive up illegal downloads of the novel than actual purchases though, but I’m a cynical bastard. Still, the only thing that seems to bother Neil about the whole affair isn’t the idea of Tweeting one of his books, but rather which of his many books @1b1t2010 chose to tweet. American Gods is a love it or hate it sort of thing, and anyone put off by it isn’t likely to pick up some of his other works that they’d probably love, like the recent and wonderful The Graveyard Book. It’d be a real shame if potential readers were kept from his other books – or from American Gods itself – due to the Twitter experiment. I’ll watch it with interest, but I’m not following the feed. I have to draw the line somewhere, and if I want to re-read American Gods, it’s only a short walk to whichever one of my bookshelves it’s currently hiding in. I’ve yet to convince my wife to read it, though. Maybe if she had a Twitter account…
Today is the day that I’m finally on WordPress and free from the tyrannous shackles of Blogger’s incompetence. Took me long enough. I think the first thing Bloggers learn about blogging (apart from how much money isn’t in it), is that they should have never signed up with Blogger to begin with, which is always followed by their second revelation: that switching platforms mid-blog is a sharp and terrible pain in the proverbial tuchas. Eventually, the third thing they learn is that, regardless of how painful and tedious the conversion process is, staying with Blogger hurts even more – and it keeps coming back for seconds.Now that I’ve embraced WordPress as not only a terrific blogging platform, I’ve also registered coqdiddles.com, which you may have noticed up there in your address bar. I might register a few other domains in time, but don’t worry. Those of you who are too lazy or technically inept to change your bookmarks, I’ve taken care of that, as well. Through some mysterious and mystical voodoo, I’ve managed to set up automatic redirects from all of my old posts. This means that you can keep going to my old blogspot address for as long as we both shall live, and you’ll still end up where you’re supposed to be. Ain’t I a peach?
There are a couple of other new things to take a gander at. First, you probably noticed the big stinkin’ features box up at the top of the page. Right now, it’s displaying some of my most popular entries, and I’ll be cycling through the featured posts in the weeks and months to come. I’ve also added a couple of spiffy icons to the sidebar: the one with the guy reading the funky paper on the can is my RSS feed, while the cute little birdie flittering beside him links to my Twitter page. It’s all pretty self-explanatory and simple, but feel free to shoot me an e-mail to gripe and complain, or send donations. Did I mention the indecent and staggering amount of money one doesn’t make by blogging? At the very least, you could work up the strength to click an ad now and again, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been working hard during the conversion process, so this short entry is all you’re getting for today. I still have a lot of work to do with assigning thumbnails to each entry and categorizing all 262 of the little verbose bastards. Right now, everything is up and running, all of my old posts are here and still ribbed for the sensual pleasure of your looking balls to slide over, and most of my old tags are floating around in the Tag Cloud over on the right. If you click a category at the top right now, you’re not very likely to be supplied with an overabundance of relative essays, so for the time being, stick to the cloud. It will serve you better in the interim, and it never complains that you’re doing it wrong.
I’ll be back Thursday with a full entry, which will mark my full and complete abandonment of the Blogger/Blogspot platform. Good riddance, I say. If you only knew how many scheduled posts I ended up having to publish manually, or how many times Blogger decided to spontaneously eat one or more of my entries, you’d probably be more impressed with how much nicer WordPress is. If you’re not impressed, then consider yourself dead inside, because joy will never find its way into the wet and sticky chambers of your miserable black hearts.
And now, just a wee bit after 2:45am has come around to crush and flatten my dreams of not waking up exhausted in the morning, I take my leave of you. See you Thursday, kids!
This past Saturday, I did a very Southern thing and went to a crawfish boil – but not just any crawfish boil, mind you. This was the first crawfish boil I’ve ever willingly attended, due to my overwhelming aversion to the hideous creatures featured on the menu. I’m not sure how or why a person would ever decide to try eating one of the squirmy and alien looking crustaceous bastards, but somewhere someone did, and the rest is Southern History. I just can’t get over how repulsive the creatures look, even after they’re boiled and seasoned and take on the color of a cheap whore’s Crotchfire-Red lipstick. They’re just disgusting to me and, although I know my aversion is purely visual and has nothing whatsoever to do with how delicious they may (or may not) taste, I can’t bring myself to crack open a bumpy red exoskeleton to find out. This is, of course, seen in the South as a sort of questionable form of mental illness, but I’m used to being a stranger in a strange land, even after I’ve lived here for thirty-five years.
Brittany, on the other hand, has no problem with ingesting the horrid little mudbugs. Being mostly Cajun herself, she’s used to eating troubling things that have no business being tasty. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about life on the bayou that breeds great chefs, almost as if the availability of only hideous creatures inspires potential cooks towards lofty heights of culinary greatness. You’d have to be a genius, after all, to make things like crawfish or blackened anything not only taste good, but to become so legendarily delicious that they’re known the world over. As proof of the culinary brilliance of the Cajun mind, I offer the famous example of the weird and wonderful soup/stew/mud known as gumbo. Gumbo is, by all rights, a nasty looking concoction, resembling nothing so much as river mud and algae with vegetables and bits of dead animals tossed in, but it’s delicious all the same. Recipes can be as different as Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, but they’re almost always universally scrumptious. I’ll actually eat gumbo, provided I know what animal bits are suspended within its viscous goo and that those bits are made up of only dead cows and/or chickens. You can keep your squirming aquatic critters right out of my bowl though, thankyouverymuch. I’ve nothing to do with the otherworldly horrors of seafood, from the ubiquitous crab all the way through to the great and terrible Cthulhu squid. I hate them all.
Trey, apart from the occasional fish stick at Grandma’s house, avoids seafood as much as me, although I attribute this to the simple fact that’s he’s three and the embarrassing fact that I eat like a three year old. He did enjoy playing with the crawfish, though. He was nervous at first, but as other kids showed up and started prodding the loathsome creatures with various sticks and pokey things, he slowly started to join right in. He eventually developed a sort of friendship with the critters, going 
so far as to encourage one of the cooks to feed the crawfish with the large jar of Crab Boil seasoning he was carrying over to the pot, which Trey mistook for “crawfish food”. Later, after Brittany ate her fill of the little boiled, bright red bastards, Trey walked over and looked sideways at her box top filled with the discarded carapaces. “They’re not moving?” he said, as a sort of curious complaint, with concern dripping from the question mark. I responded by redirecting him to the fact that the dog had just stolen his frisbee, and so we avoided any complicated conversations of life and death and the nature of the predatory food chain when hungry Cajun stomachs are involved. Instead, he enjoyed running around what he called “the party house” while he played with the other kids and roasted marshmallows over a bonfire later in the evening. By the time we headed home, he was protesting that he never wanted to leave the party, which he elaborated on the next day. Upon waking, he promptly informed Brittany and I of his plans by saying, “After I wake up and go tee-tee, we can go back to the party house!” It was a difficult morning.
The event itself was held at a co-worker’s house, who is the sort of man who collects random pop culture ephemera and revels in the acquisition of really bad art. He’s a gracious host and a solid guy, although he’ll happily steal all your money over a game of poker and still make you feel like you had a good time losing. If he were a movie character, I imagine he’d be someone along the lines of Jeff Bridges’ character from The Big Lebowski, only with less hair and better hygiene. He sits across from me in the newsroom, where we share a pod of four desks with two other equally interesting souls.
The first of these fine folks is the paper’s resident tech guru, who works to keep the online side of the news flowing freely into the Intertubes by way of alternating between being exceedingly helpful and explosively angry. He works hard to lend aid to anyone who needs it, and he does so politely and nicely, along with a whole bunch of other adverbs that make him out to be a swell guy. However, while his people skills are finely polished, his relationship with technology is a seething caldera of 
unbridled rage, ever poised on the edge of a violent eruption. Usually, these sorts of explosions happen when the computer does something he doesn’t want it to, which places his keyboard in mortal peril. You can work out the timing if you listen closely to how hard he’s striking the keys as he types – once the pace slows and each key is thwacked with deliberate and forceful intent, it’s never long before he starts Teaching It A Lesson. This involves a bit of murmuring followed by muffled yelling, which in turn transforms into a full Hulk Smash before it’s all over. I’ll let your imagination fill in the detail, but anyone who’s ever experienced Techno Rage can understand, if only they ratchet the hate up to eleven. If he were a movie character, I’d have to pick any random Adam Sandler flick where the normally nice and well-tempered guy is always poised on the raggedy edge of a precipice overlooking a vast canyon filled with rivers of whitewater fury. You may think it’s not quite so dramatic as all that, but that’s only because you haven’t been around when a telemarketer makes the terrible mistake of dialing his extension…
The other person in our pod must be described gently, since she suffers from a debilitating handicap due to an unfortunate birth defect which left her lacking a Y chromosome. She fights against it every day though, and her struggle to succeed despite her obvious disability is inspiring. It’s also kind of funny. If she were a movie character, I’d have to go with a Smurf (which works, because of that whole The Smurfs movie thing Hollywood is cooking up). Specifically, she’d be Codey Smurf since she’s a programmer and, by now, the Smurf village is bound to have finally gotten broadband and has the Internet on its tiny computers. A photo of Elton John hangs on the wall behind her, and I imagine him singing a steady chorus of Tiny Dancer all day long as she sits beneath him, coding the backend website mojo that powers the online news. She’s a small woman, who fills her desk with tiny things, like miniature trinkets and abnormally-sized food. The other day, she was eating an apple that appeared normal-sized in her Lilliputian hands, but was actually about as big as a really large berry when held by anyone else. She took three weeks to eat a tiny box of Nerds, and even then she gave the last of the miniature candies to Trey when he came up for a visit one day. She will often fill with tiny rage herself when the system behaves in an unpredictable way, but her outbursts are limited to a teeny fist clenched and shaken before the unimpressed phosphors of her computer monitors. It’s fun to watch, and kind of adorable. It’s kind of like watching a puppy yip and growl at a suspicious lamp it finds threatening or, as one reporter put it, “Righteous indignation never looked so cute.”
In addition to the inhabitants of our little pod, most of the rest of the newsroom was at Saturday’s crawfish boil, as well. It’s a strange and wonderful thing, to enjoy work outings that don’t feel at all like work outings. I enjoyed spending time with the people of my department at my previous job, but we rarely did anything as a group. When we did, it often felt forced and a 
bit artificial, so I preferred to spend time with just those few folks I’d developed strong friendships with. Here at the paper, things are different. There’s a sense of belonging to a greater whole, of being part of some kind of surrogate family – and I’ve only been here for one month. I don’t know everyone very well yet, but there’s an ease of getting along that comes, I think, from the nature of the business and from everyone working in the large, open environment of the newsroom. I guess it’s all to do with camaraderie or some such, but I’ve never had any truck with those sorts of nouns before, so it’s a new experience for me. I’m used to doing things on my own, as a sort of not-as-cool version of Han Solo, minus the ray gun and the Wookie. Still, at least I shoot first…
I’ll be brief today, but not out of some kind of misguided sense of loyalty to the unwritten Internet law that says anything longer than two paragraphs will be ignored by 98% of waterheaded netizens. Instead, it all comes down to time and money, and the lack thereof. It’s no great secret that the slow decay of my strange and lunatic first marriage left my personal finances in a state not altogether different from the emotional scarring one might associate with prison rape, and I’m still recovering from the fiscal damage almost a decade after having said “I do” rather than “Oh, hell no!” And, after the unfortunate experience I recently endured at the merciless hands of Beaumont ISD’s mystical payroll voodoo magic that exploited my good nature to rob me of two week’s pay, things are looking pretty grim on the money side of my pursuit of happiness. It has been, after all, a month and a half since I last saw a full paycheck bounce gleefully into the plus column of my bank account, while the minus side has been sitting there growing ever fatter on a high interest diet of endless withdrawals, all the while smiling at me in the same sinister way a spider might look at a fly before offering it a nice (if sticky) bed for the night. From within you, it devours…
All is not lost, of course. Sure, bills are being moved around and money is being juggled, but I simply have to power through these final days of poverty and make my way towards the sweet elysian fields of a financial stability restored through the 
simple and awesome power of a steady paycheck. It’s been rough, but we’ll survive through the sweat of my brow and the ingenuity of the human spirit, which seems to come mostly in the form of destroying piggy banks. For example, just before I sat down to write this entry, I discovered that Bank of America decided to conveniently schedule certain slow-to-process debits in the most fee-happy way possible and, not having any other quick access to a few dollars, I sliced off the head of my childhood piggy bank to get at the glimmering horde of pennies buried deep within Spider-Man’s braincase. It was a collectible bank of the sort that geeks and fanboys across the globe will mourn its passing, but I’ve spent decades saving those pennies for a rainy day to come along – and brother, it’s Raining. We’re talking an up the Biblical flood without a paddle kind of deluge, so it was with little hesitation that I sliced the plastic Webhead open to get at the shimmering stash of Lincolns resting in his noggin.
Of course, the downside to any large penny investment is the fact that you’ve invested in pennies, the most worthless of all the coins. Still, like the Tea Party movement, even in impotence there is strength in numbers. Collect enough of the monetarily anemic little copper bastards together and 
you have a force to be reckoned with, even if the logistics of converting 6,420 pennies into real money is somewhat troublesome. Fortunately, God invented the Coinstar machine – a great contraption that is available at most 24-hour grocery stores to process all of your last-minute coin-to-cash transactions by sucking ten cents out of every dollar like a greedy little vampiric banker. Still, since the Bank of America ATM doesn’t seem equipped to handle twelve metric tons of pennies when I need it to, the Coinstar machine is a nice option to have in a pinch. However, it should be noted here that gravity needs to be taken into account when handling a large amount of pennies. There’s a reason all those old bank robber movies featured guys in black masks running away holding canvas sacks with dollar signs printed on: gravity is a bitch. Even a quadruple-layered assemblage of plastic shopping bags is no match for an assload of pennies, so canvas must be employed. Trust me on this.
With the Coinstar transaction completed, I ran to the bank to deposit my new liquid cash assets into the gaping maw of the 
ATM’s ominous cash drawer. I hate doing this, because I sense its automatic door suffers from an insatiable bloodlust that can only be eased by way of chopping off my hand. It always starts closing while my hand is still inside its terrible maw, and I have to summon the bravery of Tyr just to keep from prematurely yanking my precious hand from its terrifying jaws. I’ve managed to escape unscathed thus far, but every time I’m forced to make a cash deposit at that evil little machine, I can’t help but get the feeling that it’s a little too happy to see me again and is thinking somewhere deep inside its whirring electric brain that this time, things will be different. This time, it will bite.
This time, it was wrong. I managed to keep my hand once more, which somehow resulted in a sudden and unexpected malfunctioning of the dread machine. For whatever reason, immediately after I withdrew my receipt and debit card, the disappointed ATM suddenly flashed a red screen that told me just how much it no longer wished to be of any service, and suggested instead that I try any number 
of alternate ATMs, perhaps out of some sort of synthetic need to spread its own despair evenly amongst its little ATM friends. I don’t know why the machine suddenly broke right after I used it, and I’d probably be a little curious about the whole thing if I wasn’t so paralyzed by not caring. My transaction processed successfully, and that was enough for me. My balance is back in the black, I have my first full paycheck coming at the end of the week, and things will soon get back to normal. That’s the most anyone can ask for in this crazed and confusing economic climate, and I’m learning to count my blessings where I find them. For example, holding a dollar bill right now has become a sort of orgasmic moment for me, like a kid opening a money-filled card on his birthday, or an overweight basement dweller on his first trip to the strip club. It’s real. Tangible. I can touch it, hold it in my hands and take comfort in knowing that I’m not out of the race just yet, not as long as I still have at least one hundred pennies to my name. I’d buy that for a dollar!
I’ll start today off by pointing out the obvious, in that the Coquetting Tarradiddles you are currently reading does not look exactly like the Coquetting Tarradiddles you’re used to reading. I assure you, this is entirely intentional. I’ve been doing a little bit of housekeeping (even those of us gifted with superhuman mutant powers aren’t immune to tidying up the place now and again), and I decided to stop featuring one full essay with each update. Instead, I’ve chosen to list the three latest entries, broken up into their first paragraphs and slathered all over the main page for you to click through. Just hit the READ MORE >> link at the end of the summary, and you’ll pull up the entire essay. It’s a pretty standard setup, and should be familiar to anyone who’s come anywhere near a computer and the Internet within the past decade or so. I’ll be doing more work to the site’s design in the coming days, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll stay with Blogger/Blogspot much longer. After spending some time with WordPress recently, I’ve come to the mournful conclusion that Blogger is entirely staffed by waterheaded hipsters who are so hopelessly mired in their own hubris that they can’t be bothered to notice that their technology is aging about as gracefully as a bacon-wrapped cantaloupe sandwiched between two sweaty loaves of cavernous ass cheeks. In less colorful terms: Blogger is archaic, non-functional and covered in that special kind of mold that’s just as likely to cure a staph infection as it is to drive you towards a Salem witch trial level of insanity. Also, it smells like bacon butt. (Ok, see that innocent looking, all-caps hyperlink right after this sentence that says “READ MORE >>” – click it and you can, amazingly enough, read more!)
Comparatively speaking, WordPress is to Blogger as Knight Rider‘s KITT is to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Sure, the latter has charm and nostalgia going for it, but the Knight Industries Two Thousand is armored with Tri-Helical Plasteel 1000, has cool flashy lights AND the voice of Principal Feeny (that’s Dr. Craig if you’re old enough to remember St. Elsewhere, or Dustin Hoffman’s dad in The Graduate, if you’re even older and especially crazy about plastics…) It’s not much of a contest, 
considering KITT can turbo boost over 200 miles per hour and drive on water with the handy aid of his Third Stage Aquatic Synthesizer, when all Chitty can do is fly around the kingdom of Vulgaria making sputtery noises and upsetting Dick Van Dyke. Like KITT, WordPress is sleeker, more robust and more functional than Blogger and the equally cute but pedantic Chitty. I’ve held out hope that Blogger would someday get with the times and start incorporating more customization, more features and better tools to rival what WordPress is doing, but as the months slip by I’m starting to lose confidence. I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever bite the bullet and move Coquetting Tarradiddles over to a current-generation blogging platform, but the more I use WordPress at work, the more I loathe coming home to hack my way through Blogger. So, if you come here one day to suddenly find yourself being directed to a new site that looks like something out of 2010 rather than a retro throwback to 1999, don’t be alarmed. All will be proceed as the Emperor has foreseen…
In other news, Trey made me feel about two inches tall when I came stumbling in from work last night. I walked in the door to find him sitting on the couch, 
naked from the waist down. In the background, Brittany was sighing. Heavily. It seemed the little guy had a potty accident just before I pulled into the driveway, and I walked in on the tail end of the proceedings while Brittany was busy rummaging through various household cleaners in an attempt to find some concoction possessing the formidable strength of chemistry required to combat the insidious might of toddler pee stains lingering upon couch cushions. Trey, at this time, had been charged with the simple task of obtaining new underwear and blue jeans from his room (a task he was apparently not prepared to fully commit to), further increasing the maternal sighs coming from under the kitchen sink. Eventually, Brittany emerged with cleaners in hand, then paused to stare at the half-naked Trey sitting innocently next to the large dark spot on the cushion beside him and looking not at all like he was about to go get his clothes. Words were spoken, protestations were declared, and stern looks were given. After a brief stare-down, Trey admitted defeat, then reluctantly – and dramatically – lumbered off in the direction of his room. He did not come back with blue jeans.
For reasons unknown to me at the time, the little guy had developed a sudden and uncontrollable disdain for blue jeans and denim 
altogether, instead insisting that he be allowed to wear a pair of black pants similar to the slacks I’d worn to work on Monday. Of course, being the sometimes obtuse and deeply stupid father that I can be in my most confused and befuddled moments, I failed to make the connection. It wasn’t until after he’d cried seventeen buckets of tears, thrown his blue jeans down the hall and emerged from a parentally imposed time out period of two interminably long minutes that I finally figured it out – and even then, it took Trey telling me for it to fully sink in. He wasn’t upset about having to put on clean pants, nor was he just being obstinate by refusing to wear the blue jeans we were asking him to put on. Rather, he was crestfallen by the horrible notion that he not be allowed to wear pants that were just like mine. That’s all it was: he wanted to be like me.
This weekend, when I shed my work attire to don a pair of faded blue jeans and an old t-shirt to work in the yard, he picked out the same outfit for himself. Afterwards, we spent the day together, making the yard “look really super pretty”. I didn’t try to dress him in any other clothes that day because I understood that he wanted to wear the same thing as me while we worked together, side-by-side like really big kids do. I knew what he wanted then, so why was I so clueless about him wanting the same thing now? I don’t know the exact reason, but whether my momentary lapse of competent cognitive processing was the unfortunate result of stress or exhaustion or any number of other external influences, the end result was the same: he’d been punished for wanting the two of us to be “just the same together,” as he says. I felt like a jerk.
To make it up to him (and to avoid an unnecessary struggle at the dinner table after a long and tiring day), I offered to go buy him some chicken nuggets and french fries for supper. I’d just stuffed my delicious and not-at-all-disgusting (I promise!) meatloaf 
into the oven to cook, so I had time to kill and a hungry Trey tummy to fill. Just because I don’t come wandering in the door until seven o’clock doesn’t mean that the three-year-old should have to wait on dinner too, so I hopped in my car and headed to KFC. He usually prefers McDonald’s nuggets, but lately has developed a taste for the Colonel’s eleven herbs and spices. And, despite KFC’s mistreatment of livestock and the fact that ten of the eleven secret herbs are otherwise known as Sodium and MSG, I reasoned that giving him some Kentucky nuggets made up of actual bits of chicken was a better alternative than allowing him to shovel more handfuls of pureed and press-formed chickenlike goo into his mouth than is absolutely necessary. (Although nothing compares to the healthy deliciousness of my own, homemade nuggets.) Also, he loves the picture of Colonel Sanders that adorns every box and bucket of KFC chicken. Trey calls him “the guy” and loves the way that he “always cooks my chicken yummy for me”.
So, I scooted my car down the road to the nearest KFC to place my order, when I suddenly remembered the date. It was August 
12: the day marking the national debut of KFC’s MeatBread Sammich (otherwise known as the Double Down)! Basically, it’s a bacon and cheese sandwich with boneless chicken breasts standing in for slices of bread, with some sort of suspicious looking sauce binding the whole soggy thing together. It sounds disgusting and it looks hideous – but I just had to try one. It has almost an entire day’s worth of the USDA’s recommended amount of sodium, more calories than a hyperspeed StairMaster could shed in a month of constant use, and more saturated fat than butter deep fried in pig lard – but since I’m always on the lookout for terrible new ways to contribute to this blog, I elected to go all in and Double Down, as it were. I did not regret it.
Probably because I only ate a couple of bites of the artery-clogging monstrosity, I didn’t hate myself when it was over. I was in this for the taste test and to document my reaction for the sake of posterity, not to indulge my tastebuds in a euphoric sensory explosion. I did not expect to like it – but I did. In fact, the sandwich was so immeasurably delicious, I’m not sure I have the ability to describe the experience through the clumsy act of making words out of letters. The closest I can come to is transcendent. Yes, that’s probably a little over the top, seeing as how I didn’t exactly achieve some sort of spiritual ascension and become one with both God and Nature as a result of masticating the 
greasy goodness of the sandwich, but it’s close. In fact, tasting the Double Down went in rather the opposite direction of my usual Food Snob tendencies, penetrating straight through to the caveman lurking within me: the always-on-edge hunter/gatherer who thrives on infrequent high caloric meals laced with inhuman levels of salt and fat. The very first bite trigged my Cro-Magnon side, throwing my brain’s reward centers into overdrive and sending a soft but torrential cascade of dopamine and endorphins rushing through my body, ushering me into my Happy Place. I could have done without the bizarre and sticky sauce painted onto the inside of the Meatwich, but other than that minor quibble, the Double Down wins a Double Plus Awesome award for being ballsy enough to even exist in the first place. It’s a horrible meal and should not be part of anyone’s regular diet unless you fancy the idea of having to pay for three seats every time you fly coach, but as an infrequent indulgence, it doesn’t get much better than this:
I didn’t write anything yesterday, because I simply haven’t had time to get everything accomplished and something had to slip. This week, I chose Coquetting Tarradiddles. Next week, I’ll choose something else. However, since I am not without compassion or at least a work ethic best described as Puritanical, I can’t let a week slip by without posting two new entries. So, while this is a little late and sort of recycled (and because copying-and-pasting an e-mail takes all of five seconds), I’m making amends today by posting my response to an e-mail sent to me by a very close friend whom I both respect and admire, but that can be insufferably stubborn about her own wrongness, sometimes. In her e-mail, she sent me a link to a recent column in Pravda titled, “American capitalism gone with a whimper” – it’s entertaining. Go give it a read, then come back here and bear witness to my impassioned rant response:
Ok, I’ve read it – and meh. It’s a tabloid paper, so nothing that exciting. (ed: It is not the same Pravda most people think it is. The “real” Pravda shut down in 1991. The new Pravda launched online in 1999 and runs stories with headlines like, “Killer UFOs hide in lakes“.) Still, some the points are valid – except that they don’t take history into account. Obama hatred is nothing more than anemic political theater, just like Reagan worship. History proves that the STATUS QUO is maintained, regardless of who is in power – and, for decades, the status quo has meant exponential corporate growth at all costs. That’s American Democracy in a nutshell: Oligarchy under the pretense of democracy, and the people don’t care because they’re all manipulated into righteous indignation by “their side” to be furious about the “other side” – when it’s all the same. Poor people stay poor, the myth of a middle class pervades, and barely-solvent households operate under the sad delusion that they are actually wealthy or middle class when, in reality, they are nothing more than one, perhaps two, paychecks away from abject poverty. Meanwhile, the top 1% of the population controls the VAST, overwhelming, and massive amount of the wealth that neither you nor anyone you’ve ever known will ever get anywhere close to. The American Dream is bullshit.
It’s all theater, designed to make people FEEL like they’re doing something, when nothing could be further from the truth. Passing e-mails around, posting angry status messages on Facebook or even attending protest rallies accomplishes exactly NOTHING. Those activities do, however, make the people participating in them at least take comfort in the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from thinking that they matter, when the miserable truth is that they are merely pretending to participate in a political discourse that they couldn’t be further removed from if they tried. Real action requires real risk and sacrifice, but Americans are so complacent and terrified of losing their security that they will never risk anything, especially not en masse.
Hate the government? Want to make a stand and show Washington that the people are in charge? REFUSE TO PAY YOUR TAXES! It’s that simple. Don’t pay. Instead, send the IRS a letter explaining why you refuse to participate in a taxation system you believe is wrong, unfair, and will lead to Armageddon at the hands of an Obama-shaped Anti-Christ. If all the angry citizens took ACTUAL action, then the government would likely yield – but nobody wants to actually RISK anything. No, it’s better to just play with the simulacrum and not have to worry about things like consequence in the form of fines or a little jail time. Blah.
Change only comes from the people enforcing it, not simply demanding it through impotent forms of protest. Take a risk, make a stand, and give your voice meaning by putting everything on the line for what you believe in. Anything less is masturbation.
Whew, I’m tired. I’m settling into my new job quite nicely, but adapting to the change in my schedule is proving more difficult than previously suspected. While I don’t have to come wandering into the newsroom until mid-morning, I do stay at work a bit later than I’m used to. This alone isn’t a bad thing, but when trying to cram in as much quality time as possible with my three-year-old while still maintaining this blog in conjunction with steadily chipping away at the mountain of all the new projects I’m working on, time tends to slip past with an alarming ferocity. Sometimes, when it’s late in the evening and morning’s dawn is racing towards me with an evil grin on its face, if I squint my eyes just right, I can almost peer through the veil of reality to see the hourglass of my life timer perched atop a high shelf in Death’s Domain, its sands pouring through the frosted glass with a terrible alacrity. Ok, so maybe it’s not quite so dramatic as all that, but I do feel time’s sting a bit more keenly these days. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I have a few ideas.
The most probable reason is the extreme shift in working environments I’ve experienced with my recent career change. Going from the melancholy halls of a lethargic bureaucracy so out of touch with reality and behind the times that it would be laughable if it weren’t so scary, to the frenzied and lunatic environment of the modern newsroom has been a bit jarring to the senses – but in a good way. Working for a public school district certainly had its perks: the absurd amount of holidays, the extreme job security of government work and the guarantee that its employees only ever fail upward were hard things to give up. However, by doing so I’ve embraced a lifestyle that promises endless excitement, dynamic working days filled from morning coffee to evening stumblewalk with all kinds of frenetic obliquity and – perhaps most importantly – comes packaged complete with the sweet siren’s song of Making A Difference.
Sure, the newspaper business is risky, but that’s kind of the point. The school district was safe – safe, and mind-numbingly predictable. The only thing more steady than the mail, for example, is the certainty that the Beaumont Independent School District will continue to recruit the most incompetent and offensively stupid jellyheads of the world into its highest echelons, 
passing the twin burdens of cleaning up their messes and doing the real work downward to the underpaid, overworked and understaffed drones of the system. And, bearing that horrible conjoined albatross, those poor hapless bastards will toil through eternity in service of their Captain, who himself has all the navigational acumen of a blind goldfish swimming around in a bowl full of cloudy Jell-O. The worst part is, they’ll be happy about it! I know I was. Sure, I groused and groaned with each fresh new Hell unleashed upon my Inbox by the Powers-That-(Shouldn’t)-Be, but I was happy to have a cushy government job that required no more effort than the simple capacity for withstanding a hideous assault of extreme stupidity on a regular basis. Eventually, however, even the most acquiescent of plebian slaves will reach a point where he or she realizes that they are nothing more than the little dutch boy, holding back the relentless Ocean Of Stupid with a finger stuck firmly in the proverbial dyke – and the waters are rising. It’s a losing battle, so you either give up, give in and wait for death or retirement (whichever comes first), or you simply get the frak out. I chose the latter, and I’m better off for it.
The second reason has less to do with being suddenly liberated from the slumberous chains of mundanity, and more to do with simply loving what I’m doing. I actually look forward to going to work now, which is something I haven’t experienced in a very, very long time. It doesn’t hurt that I enjoy the company of my coworkers, either. From the effervescent scorn of Mrs. Tiny to the laid back charm of the Gentle Rebel, the people I work with are eclectic, inclusive and – above all – they are interesting. I thrive on interesting. My editor is softly demanding, always setting hard and specific goals without employing the abhorrent practice of micromanagement, and the ever-present Tech Guru is always on hand to lend his expertise and share his passion for what we’re doing, and what we’re trying to accomplish. The other folks around the newsroom, from the infectiously perky to the jaded and cynical, all work together to create a sort of electric air about the place. Every moment feels on the verge of something explosive. Something primal and important crackles through the environment like a thousand tiny tendrils of lightning forking over everyone’s heads, putting them on edge and energizing them to power through the lulls and get to the next bit of breaking news. Maybe it’s not quite so grand as I’m picturing it through my Mary Tyler Moore glasses, but regardless of my own perceptions, it’s a damn sight better than what I’m used to.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about my job – the most mind-blowing and astonishing observation I’ve had in my past sixteen years on this planet – is that everyone is strangely competent. It’s a new experience for me, being able to communicate with people who understand what I’m saying and who I myself can understand without the need for having an English-To-Stupid travel dictionary handy. People click through the paper’s rather cumbersome content management system with the slick ease of oil on teflon, pausing only when the system can’t keep up with their frantic paces. If you ask someone how to do something, they don’t refer you to someone else or try to dazzle you with a buzzword-laden non sequitur – they simply answer your bloody question with both confidence and the faintest hint of bother. It’s refreshing!
Lastly, the third most probable cause for my sudden appreciation of time comes from the culture shock I’m experiencing that has everything to do with how differently a 123 years old, privately-owned corporation does business in contrast to the slow-moving, obtuse and deliberately misleading environment I’m used to. During my brief but informative orientation session, all of my bigger questions about working for the company were answered and defined in clear, concise terms that left no room for interpretation. The Hearst Corporation knows exactly what it wants from its employees, and it makes no effort to obfuscate its expectations. It’s demanding, but fair. Difficult, but rewarding. Honest, but…well, it’s just honest. After my miserable final experience with Beaumont ISD, that word is pretty important to me. I know exactly what is expected of me at all times, and I’m confident that exceeding those expectations will yield rewards in the months and years to come. While other media companies are floundering in today’s online world, Hearst is not only adapting, but excelling in blending the old ways with the new. My editors have made it clear that they’re open to new ideas and to trying new things to see what works and what doesn’t. The process is constantly evolving, and is doing so with such rapidity that I’ve already been involved in some of these changes in the short week that I’ve been at The Beaumont Enterprise. It’s an exciting challenge that the whole corporation seems eager to undertake, and I’m proud to be counted amongst their ranks.
In other news, there has been a bit of unpleasant business regarding Trey’s father that I’d rather not go into here, save to say that such unfortunate interactions are becoming increasingly tiresome. I long for the day when all interested parties come to the realization that every dispute, every heated discussion, and each single incident does no service to Trey. I continue to cleave to the silly hope that, in time, everyone will start putting the needs and interests of the child ahead of their own, regardless of their own pride or senses of justice. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who ‘won’ this fight or that one – because, invariably, Trey loses. Every time. I’ve never known a more sensitive and caring soul than the one that inhabits his 
energetic body, and every bit of unpleasant business with his father stabs like a rusty knife through my chest, dragging across my ribcage and tearing through my flesh and meat and bone. I can only imagine what it’s doing to Trey, although I don’t want to.
The only thing that bites harder upon my own soul than imagining his pain is the mournful thought that the damage is not imaginary, and I can’t bear to dwell on it overlong. In fact, now that I’ve reflected on the situation while writing this, I’ve nothing more in me to put to the keyboard today. Sorry to end on a downer, but sometimes that’s how things go. Maybe it’s a glass half-full/half-empty sort of thing, and I’m just sitting on the pessimistic side of the bar, which I find to be an altogether unsettling and intolerable state of affairs. I’m not a half-full/half-empty sort of guy. No, I prefer following the ancient wisdom of the great philosopher Pratchett, who once wrote: “There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!”
Today marks the annual parade of the twin forces of Annoyance and Distrust as they come marching through the streets and avenues that connect our lives. It is April 1st – April Fool’s Day, and I’m not over-exaggerating when I say, “Don’t Trust Anyone.” Certainly, don’t trust anything you read on the Internet today. The web has a long and messy history of April Fool’s jokes and with gags ranging from Gmail Paper and a site praising IE6 to the UK’s Guardian abandoning print for Twitter and Google predicting the future, the Internet has proven itself to be entirely unreliable every day once a year. Heck, considering Maxim’s prank on the Bush Twins, even print media is not immune to the giddy excitement of April 1st. My advice? Stay offline today, unless it’s to read Coquetting Tarradiddles, for I will never lie to you.
After my first bite, my spidey-sense tried to warn me that something was wrong. The flavor combination produced through the interplay of meat, cheese and flour was, for some strange and unknowable reason, oddly tangy. A bit sour, even – and, when dealing with dairy products, sour is never a good sign. As I sat there masticating my way through the sinewy grit of questionable fajita meat, my mind immediately flashed to a scene of Gordon Ramsay bursting forth from the kitchen and into the dining room to shut the restaurant down. Disgusting images from some of the better episodes of Kitchen Nightmares flooded my imagination as I sat there, contemplating how long some of the ingredients of my meal might have been left to rot upon some lonely shelf of a broken refrigerator. Still, I pressed ever onward through the slowly-congealing lactose nightmare, growing increasingly concerned with each new bite. Hunger motivated me, overriding the impulse of my instincts that were screaming at me to abandon all hope, yet still I kept going. And going. And going.
follow. Still, the woman at the Rebox continued talking on her phone while swiping and reswiping her rejected credit card. By the time she eventually found a card that would authorize her big spending, I was already dilated to ten centimeters and ready to give birth to the creeping Lovecraftian horror growing inside me. We barely made it home when I made a mad rush to the bathroom, where I spent the remainder of the evening alone and in pain, watching YouTube videos on my iPhone. It was a miserable experience, and I’ve since vowed to: 1.) Put down the fork the very second I start thinking about Gordon Ramsay, and 2.) Never eat Queso Flameado again. I suspect the second vow will be more effective than the first, but I’m not taking any chances. I’m also not going back to that particular restaurant again anytime soon.
After enjoying a recent Facebook-powered mini-debate over the Tea Party movement, I decided to write up a short and jagged little rehash of stuff I’ve already said. It should come as no surprise to regular visitors to my little corner of the Internet that I loathe the Tea Party movement, but what is probably less obvious is the fact that I don’t actually hate the teabaggers themselves. Not really. (Yes, it’s a derogatory term. No, I’m not using it like you think I’m using it – but more on that in a minute.) The problem with the Tea Party movement isn’t that it’s a bad idea. As anyone who has ever spoken with me on more than a cursory level knows, I’m all for protesting injustice, however one defines it. However, I’m in favor of true protesting, where consequence and reward are balanced on the razor-thin line of risk, where those so inclined to rage against the machine actually possess the courage of their convictions. Mailing tea bags to congressmen isn’t exactly a risky sort of behavior, and neither is gathering together with like-minded folk to stand around, chanting battle cries and waving semi-clever, homemade signs in the air. Those sorts of things may be part of an overall awareness campaign, but as a form of protest that expects real change, it is both anemic and absurd.
Actual protests come in the form of simply refusing to allow or engage in the activities with which the protesters feel aggrieved. When American colonists collectively decided that taxation without representation was unjust and wrong, they didn’t mail tea bags back to King George. They didn’t stand on the eastern seaboard to shout across the Atlantic Ocean and wave picket signs at the oncoming frigates of the British Royal Navy. What they did do, however, was refuse to honor the Tea Act. The Boston Tea party was as symbolic as it was practical. By dumping oodles of tea into the chilly waters of Boston harbor, the colonists triggered the British Parliament to pass the Intolerable Acts, which closed the port until the East India Trading Company had been repaid for their three shiploads of lost tea. The acts also installed direct British control of the Massachusetts colony, provided British officials in America with a legal escape from the colonies if they found themselves on the wrong side of the law, expanded Britain’s capability to house troops in the colonies, and expanded the borders of Canada. In response, the colonists did not merely scurry home to begin a frantic and furious campaign of angry tea bag mailing and furious sign holding. Rather, they decided to form the First Continental Congress, which eventually led to the American Revolution. Granted, this didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took time to get people on board, and perhaps this is the role that current Tea Party members believe they are playing – but they’re not. They aren’t anything like those early Americans, because the tea-mailing and sign-waggling todies we have crying for revolution today lack the courage displayed by their ancestors. Failing to truly risk anything in hopes of righting the injustices they so desperately claim to want to rectify removes the self-perceived honor from the movement, and places its members firmly on the sheep side of the divide between predator and prey – and its leaders are the wolves.
This is not to say that the movement’s goals are unattainable, but merely to point out the differences between the American revolutionaries and today’s teabaggers. The Tea Party movement could actually achieve its marketed goals through one swift and simple collective display of revolt by its members, if only they had the courage to do so: they could simply refuse to pay their taxes. In doing this en masse, the government would have little choice but to respond. And, while Congressional passage of some modern equivalent of the Intolerable Acts is not outside the realm of possibility, it isn’t very likely. In truth, the most probable response would be the repealment of the recently passed Health Care Reform – but not 
before quite a few Tea Party protesters found themselves sacrificing for the cause. Still, a few fines and a little jail time are far less damaging for modern day revolutionaries than the threat of execution on account of sedition was for members of the real Tea Party. Sadly, however, you won’t find the same level of commitment from today’s wannabe revolutionaries. No, they are content to make a stand by not making a stand at all. They will hold signs and banners and follow the talking points of TV pundits who nourish their fears as the teabaggers eagerly suckle their milk of deception directly from the glass teat. Then, even as they stage rallies and march upon Congress and their lunatic fringe turns violent, they will quietly acquiesce and pay their taxes. After all, it’s all well and good to stand up for what you believe in via a safe and controlled party protest – but risking their financial security and future stability for the sake of repealing ‘evil’ and ‘socialist’ health care reform? That’s taking things a little too far – and besides, they have bills to pay and mortgages to meet and obligations to honor, just like everyone else. Who in their right mind would lay everything on the line in hope of change, right? A true revolutionary would, that’s who…
So the Tea Party is what it is and, although started with good intentions, it has since been usurped by the very same forces the teabaggers claim to despise. It all goes back to the grand illusion of the American Dream: that hopeless bit of deception that motivates the majority of Americans to vote against their own interests and favor the 20% of the populace who control 84% of the nation’s wealth. It is this 20% who have bought the media, tucked the pundits into their pockets and are shoveling propaganda into the open mouths of the remaining 80% of us left to fight over the scraps. Most American citizens are struggling to claim their piece of the 15 or 16% that the wealthy have left, pitting everyone against each other in a grim and terrible race to merely survive. The trick of the wealthy, of course, has been to lead the majority of us down the garden path of not only believing that we can one day join the elite, but that many of us are already in their ranks. We’re not. When the current leaders of the Tea Party movement start going on about the middle class, try to understand that they are not talking about you. They’re not referring to the blue collar workers, the teachers, the retail employees, or the average American work-a-day cubicle slaves. They’re not even talking about the managers. No, they’re talking about the top 19% of the people who make up the American aristocracy, the upper middle class who control 50% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% dominate another 34%. In other words, they’re talking to people who aren’t you, but who they have convinced you that you are. If this sounds confusing, think of it like this: the people who stand to lose the most from certain governmental policies (Group A) have managed to keep the vast majority of the people who would benefit the most (Group B) from voting in favor of those same policies. The people in Group A (the wealthy) want the folks in Group B (that’s probably you and most everyone you know) to believe that they are, in fact, in Group A – that they are rich, that everyone they know is rich, and that the only poor people in the country are the ones looting grocery stores and smoking crack on the evening news.
The truth is, you are probably poor and just don’t know it. Certainly, the teabaggers think they’re rich. They think the Tea Party message is meant for them – and they’re right, just not in the way they think. The message is meant to deceive the majority of its followers through ego stroking and massaging their own sense of self-worth. No one wants to admit to being poor and, in today’s consumer-driven society where one’s value is determined by their buying power, it’s especially true that 
no one wants to be thought of as poor. After all, poor people – by the rhetoric of elitist propaganda – are the loathsome scum of society: the deadbeats, the ones looking for a handout who do nothing to contribute to society. However, what leaders like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh aren’t telling the people is that they see their very audience as belonging to this lower-tier. To the rich and powerful – to the top 20% of Americans – everyone below them are plebeian. We, the majority of American citizens, are seen by the truly wealthy as nothing more than peasants, as the poor working stiffs who toil our lives away in the service of our betters. We exist to help the rich get richer, to keep ourselves poor and in debt, and to never question the system. Or, if the air in the zeitgeist turns and the public begins to get the feeling that something is wrong, out of balance and unjust, then the powerful take those feelings of animosity and discontent and turn them back on the people themselves. They take the gun of the media and aim it into the crowd, firing off deceptive rhetoric intended to redirect the people’s anger back onto themselves, convincing them to vote against their own interests.
And this, I am afraid, is why I refer to Tea Party members as teabaggers. I’m not intending to evoke the sex act made infamous by a million fratboys playing Halo, but I am attempting to get a point across. Sending tea bags to Congress is not an effective form protest, because the lack of risk carries no significance. Teabaggers ranting on their Facebook pages accomplish nothing because such things demand no sacrifice or commitment, other than simply being angry. Going on to claim a connection to a historic event like the Boston Tea Party – an act of defiance that posed a true threat and real risk to its participants – while they do nothing that would impact their own security and happiness is offensive to those who study history, and who hold reverence for those noble early Americans who did risk it all so that we might have a better nation. I call them teabaggers because they have allowed themselves to be led by people and organizations who wish to exploit the public, rather than seek out their own answers through independent study and critical examination of the truth. The teabaggers have willingly participated in their own ignorance by allowing others to think for them, even as they believe themselves fiercely independent. They have surrendered control of their lives to the whims of the top 20% – and they’re happy about it. They’re thrilled. They, after all, are middle class. They’re in that top 20%, right? Right? Right?!
Wrong. Eighty percent of the populace is an overwhelming majority – and this is a democratic republic, after all. If people were truly voting in their own interests, then there would have been no tax-funded bailout of a dishonest and corrupt banking system, no Katrina debacle where the poor were left to die alone, and no extension of the American Empire in the middle east. There would be no outsourcing of our jobs, no union busting, no sub-prime mortgage deferments, no mass layoffs and no abuses of usury law. No, if the misled 80% of the populace were actually voting 
for what’s best for them rather than gleefully accepting the hideous lies of the pundits and the party leaders, then there would be celebrations whenever new governmental programs and institutions that actively work to protect the health, security and well-being of the poor in this country were put into place, because these sorts of redistributions of wealth are designed to actually help those less-fortunate citizens who are forced to contend against each other for a paltry 15% of the nation’s wealth. You know, 80% of us. You. Me. Almost everyone. The vast majority of Americans should be thrilled when new governmental programs are introduced to help those in need, but they aren’t. Instead, we have senior citizens surviving into old age thanks to Medicare who, rather than praising government’s involvement in their lives, are instead duped into protesting against ‘socialized’ health care. We have people one paycheck away from abject poverty who cry for deregulation and the privatization of everything. We have a nation confused by the cognitive dissonance that comes from being told one thing is true when, on some level, we know it is not. We have, in other words, the Tea Party movement. Ain’t life grand?
I’ve spent my overabundance of free time the past couple of days trying to figure out Twitter. I’ve written about this before, and maybe I’m just too old or uncool or whatever, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I know it’s useful for quick status updates about what you’re doing in the moment, and I used it myself for just that purpose when the family headed down Disney World way. I also had it linked to my Facebook status, so that I wouldn’t have to spend more time on FB than I absolutely had to. However, since delving a bit deeper into the arcane mysteries of tweeting, I’ve come to realize that there’s a whole world hiding beneath that obnoxiously cute blue bird – a scary and off-putting world in which I am an unwelcome and hopelessly clueless stranger.
It’s not that anyone has been hostile on Twitter or anything. In truth, people haven’t been much of anything to me on the service. Take a look at my Twitter feed and you’ll see that, apart from a few friends and associates, I don’t follow many people and not many follow me. I’m not looking to attract a horde of people to track my every boring thought, nor am I very interested in reading about theirs. No, the unwelcome bit comes from Twitter being a fairly closed community, where you must actively seek to build an audience through means entirely artificial and whorish. I’m not into that, as the things I tend to say have never been overly popular, even if a lot of people seem to be reading them. I’m not exactly the kind of writer who encourages a sense of reader ownership over what I write, unlike a lot of others in my profession. I’m more the opposite sort, the kind who talks to you rather than with you; the condescending, narcissistic prick who you either hate or love, or love to hate. I’m an elitist jerk most of the time, and I have no problems with yelling my opinions at anyone who doesn’t want to listen. Yeah, I’m that guy – but at least I don’t beat up kids on the playground or steal candy from old people. I have do have some scruples, you know. Still, with my propensity for shouting my thoughts at the heart of the world, you’d think I’d be a perfect fit for Twitter. You would be wrong.
The clueless part of me being a stranger in TwitterLand comes from me just not Getting It. I understand the basics of the technology, of how it works and why – but I just can’t seem to grasp what’s so damned great about tweeting. Maybe I’m just old and out of touch, or my life just isn’t filled with enough boring things to tweet about. I’m not sure what the reason is, but I do know that I feel conspicuous and out of sorts when roaming about in the fields of the Twitterverse. It’s strange too, because things weren’t always this way. I used to be hip to the latest and greatest in all things technological, especially when it came to communications. I was dialing into Bulletin 
Board Systems on my Apple ][ via a 300 baud modem decades before most of the world had ever head of the Internet. I embraced the anarchy promised by the dawning of the digital age, and I supported things like leetspeak (or l33tsp34k, if you’re so inclined). I was on local BBSs, long-distance systems and FidoNet. I used services like The Sierra Network (later The Imagination Network) to play games, chat, and fend off encroaching pedophiles in games of Boogers long before Nightline had ever even considered such a thing as a digital predator. I entered the world of the Internet via a 9600 baud modem and esoteric programs meant to translate TCP/IP stacks that are much more complex than the always-on connections we enjoy today. I used programs like Kali to convert TCP/IP to IPX/SPX so that I could play games like Doom and Descent with my friends. I used to know my way around the tech, the lingo and the quirks of the online world, but somewhere along the way, I must have lost my bearings.
I understand social media, I truly do. I use Facebook regularly (but minimally lately, although Boredom + New Phone = Facebook Frenzy), I have a MySpace page that I’ve neglected for well over a year now (like everyone else), and I write this blog. I have a grip on things like this, on using social media to connect with friends, family and my readers. What I don’t have a grip on, however, is something like Twitter. Since Brittany has been monopolizing our giant television whilst questing madly about the fantasy world of Ferelden in Dragon Age on the Xbox 360, I’ve been exploring this weird new world via my new iPhone. And, while I’ve used Twitter for some time now, I’ve only recently realized that I’ve been doing it wrong.
Logging into my Twitter account via a fancy applet on my phone, I found a much more complex and interesting society than I suspected would be there. Granted, I don’t understand any of it, but I can at least acknowledge its existence. I never knew, for 
example, about Twitter trends and hashtags, or how to track @triggered conversations. I’ve got a better understanding of these things now, of course, but I still don’t quite get them. Finding people on Twitter isn’t as easy as it is on a site like Facebook, so I didn’t spend much time searching out my acquaintances beyond those I already knew. What I did find, however, was a vast collection of people all around me who were frantically tweeting continuously throughout the day. They’re entering things like, “goin 2 git mah brows did” and “jist seed my ex an hims babymama”, or “they best b ova hea n get they brat b4 i call 911 police on they skank ass!!!!!!!” Clearly, I was out of my element.
In fact, I had the realization very early on that living in southeast Texas means never checking for Nearby Tweets unless you enjoy weeping for the future. I know Twitter feeds are supposed to be quick and informal ramblings about whatever is happening to you in the moment, but combining the mundanity of normal life with the bizarre protolanguage of textspeak and terrible grammar just rubs me the wrong way. It’s hard to get over just how obnoxious and terrible the crushing boredom of an average life must be when you sign on to Twitter and see it laid bare before you in 140 characters or less. It’s not something that I truly want to be a part of, but I’m afraid it’s a necessary evil in this brave new techno world of tomorrow, and I’ll have to force myself to penetrate the veil of stupidity and learn to walk amongst the plebeian horde of tweeting asshats if I want to succeed in life. It’s a little depressing.
Between working to master my Twitter skills and dipping my toes into the melodramatic antics of Final Fantasy XIII, I’ve been spending my time sitting around the house, doing as little as possible and being bored to tears. Mostly, when I’ve not been monopolizing the television myself, I’ve whiled away the time watching Brittany 
play through Dragon Age for the umpteenth time. She’s become obsessed with getting every achievement in the game, which often means playing through the entire thing a second, third, fourth, or ten millionth time. And, while it’s completely awesome to have a wife who enjoys a good game as much as I do, it can be frustrating when I’m itching to see what bizarre and freakish thing is said next in Final Fantasy. There’s just something terribly charming about a quirky Japanese game with dialogue translated into English and poorly acted that piques my curiosity, even though most of the “game” is spent watching overly long cinematics where the characters do as much time talking as they do making inappropriately provocative sighs and gasps between dialogue. It’s a fun time.
All week long, I’ve been comforting myself with the understanding that there are still plenty of days left to accomplish all of the chores I intended to get done over the break, but as the week presses on and I find the plethora of items on Brittany’s To-Do List looming out on the horizon like a thousand Japanese Zeros angrily zooming towards Pearl Harbor, I’m starting to get a little panicked. I’ve got oodles of things to do, but no desire or energy with which to accomplish them. Complete apathy is the tragic pitfall of absolute boredom, where the lack of physical exertion is so great that it comes around the other side and makes you tired, exhausted, and lazy. Hooray for the debilitating effects of cyclical lethargy!
I did manage to be a little productive and make it to the grocery store yesterday, though. I wanted to cook up a nice, huge iron skillet filled with Mexican Cornbread, since Brittany has explained to me that she hates Mexican Cornbread. No, I didn’t do it because I enjoy torturing her with abhorrent foodstuffs. I did it because my Mexican Cornbread is actually good, and I knew she’d like it. Besides, I’ve watched so many episodes of Kitchen Nightmares that I sometimes feel like pretending to be Gordon Ramsay, which is fine when I’m at home and preparing a delicious meal for my family, but it’s not so great when Brittany and I go out and I start ranting like a madman about how my potato is rubbery and the ingredients haven’t been cooked from fresh. Brittany says it’s embarrassing when I get on my soapbox and start yelling at people, but I ask you – how else will they learn?! So anyway, I went to the store, trudged through the aisles of confused shoppers and bewildered stock boys, gathered my provisions and made my way to the self checkout, where I waited. And waited. And waited. I hate the damned self checkout.
Eventually, the clueless waterhead in front of me managed to finally scan the last of his frozen peas and persuade the machine to accept his twenty-three bucks worth of crinkled one dollar bills, and it was finally my turn. I quickly scanned my items, entered the codes conveniently labeled on my produce, and hit the big green Pay Now button. Of course, it was then that I learned I’d left my wallet at home, which put my disdain over those ahead of me in a new light. Being an elitist bastard most of the time has its perks, but one of the giant drawbacks is the great and painful fall that comes from crashing back to the reality that sometimes, even I can be deeply stupid. It’s hard to admit, but it happens. I begged forgiveness for my foolishness, put all of my items back in the little plastic basket from whence they came, and asked the attendant to hold them for me while I drove home to get my wallet. I could feel his scorn.
Anyway, that’s been my life for the past few days. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about it more than I’ve had in living it, and I promise you that things will be more interesting next week. I start my new job this coming Monday morning, so I should have plenty to babble about in Tuesday’s entry. I’m hoping the wild world of publishing is more interesting than the soul sucking misery that was my life in a local 
school district, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that things get weird and wonderful very soon. If not, I may be forced to do something drastic and become an artist, where I’d at least be amongst the freakish and the bizarre. There aren’t many types of people in this world more delightfully strange and unknowable than artists, and starving ones are the best. I have high hopes that I would make an excellent starving artist, seeing as how I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. I could live out my days in obscurity and angst-ridden frustration before dying alone and naked, with a paintbrush in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Then again, maybe my hideous creations would find huge success in the modern art scene and I could retire to live a life of eccentric bliss in some dirty corner of a New York borough. Either way, I will either fill my life with the weird and wicked things of this Earth, or die trying – but right now, I have a room to clean and a yard to mow. Eccentricity will have to wait.
I spend some of my time over in another corner of the Internet, where a few writerly type folk gather together to exchange ideas, discuss events and sometimes fling insults across cyberspace like little yellow snowballs. It’s a good time. Recently, the topic of conversation there shifted to copyright law, theft, comic books and a new horror unleashed upon the world called a virtual library. It seems there’s a website out there on the interwebs that openly hosts copyrighted material for which it has no claim, then justifies the theft by using a little legal voodoo to massage and manipulate an absurd conclusion drawn from United States library laws. I will not provide a link to the site here for obvious reasons, nor will I mention it by name – but rest assured, it exists and it’s out there on the world wide web, providing free and unrestricted access to nearly seven million pages of comics. SEVEN MILLION!
sort of thing and helping themselves to locally-hosted copies of whatever comics they download from the site. However, I suspect that most people don’t bother with saving the files to their own hard drives – and why should they? The site is always there, and each comic is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If someone wants to re-read an issue, it’s a matter of clicking the mouse a few times and the book is right there in front of their looking balls. There are no late fees to worry about, no sitting on a waiting list for the next available copy to be returned, and there’s no need to send the comic back after you’re done reading it. It’s less of a library in the sort of sense traditionally referred to as Common, and more of an on-demand service that just happens to not have any licensing agreements with any of the publishers and artists they’re ripping off.
The professionals will be out of the game at that point, leaving art to the amateurs and the dabblers, the people who think that anyone can act because it’s just saying words, and that writing is easy ’cause they can spell good. If you want an idea of what the future of art and entertainment may look like under such conditions, try shutting off your television, putting down your books and switching off your iPod. Then, lock your browser in at YouTube and limit yourself to only the user-generated content. Don’t click the video clips from television programs or movies or music videos, and avoid anything professionally produced altogether. This will limit you to the future of amateur-created and populist-based entertainment. You know, stuff like this: the most viewed YouTube video of all time. I know it’s cute and all, but try imagining that this is the best you’re ever going to get. That cute kid biting that other cute kid represents the current pinnacle of achievement in user-generated content, and it’s all you have to look forward to in the brave new world of “free” information – all created, distributed and consumed by, for and of The Waterheads. This is as good as it gets, kiddos – and everything else is, well…
tragically ripped apart suddenly and unexpectedly when, all of the sudden, our protagonist’s superstardom is threatened by the tragedy of an unexpected overnight YouTube sensation that topples his throne at the Number One top spot. Later, in the pivotal climax of the film, everyone is shocked after the shocking reveal that the Asian girl was actually a double agent working for the evil forces of an intergalactic empire who, it is dramatically revealed in a dramatic revelation, seeded the Earth with human life millions of years ago in anticipation of their eventual return to enslave their new slaves called Hu-Mans. However, the girl is actually a triple agent who is having an affair with one of the aliens, but she is secretly in love with another character who has super powers and no one suspects anything, and he can turn into a shark.
This weekend, my wife and I went with our son to a local diner as a way to get an early, bacon and waffle fueled kick-start to our family fun Saturday. Things went well throughout almost the entire breakfast, with Trey using words like please and thank you to butter up the waitresses and flirt his way into extra syrup, but as the meal slowed and breakfast came to a close, our happy family fun was interrupted and brought to an egregious halt by the sudden and uninvited appearance of a needlessly concerned and woefully ignorant, blue-haired busybody. It was bad.
We were finishing up our eggs and munching down the last of our crispy bacon when she suddenly materialized next to our table like something out of a bad Star Trek episode, all leather-skinned and Shatner-haired. She’d apparently walked over at some point, after having noticed the Nintendo DS we’d brought with us and placed at the far end of the table, which she took as some sort of grave example of irresponsible parenting. Nevermind that no one was playing it, or that Trey and I had spent a great chunk of time pretending to give life to the sundry items scattered about the table, he preferring to play Mr. Salt to my Mrs. Pepper as we explored the wonders of condiments and waited for our food to arrive. All she cared about was the diminutive devil box we’d brazenly placed at the end of the table to corrupt and enslave all mankind. Apparently, she’d read “studies…”
We would soon discover, as she prattled on with the nonsensical, tongue-clucking verbiage characteristic of the righteous and the mindless, that she had ten grandchildren and so was a pretty good authority on the delicate science behind a toddler’s developing neural pathways, only she referred to such things as “their brain chemicals”. She approached our table with the best of intentions, I suppose, to warn us of the extreme dangers inherent in allowing a child to play video games. According to her unnamed studies, any time a child is put in control of a video game, “it goes through their eyes and rewires their brain chemicals in their heads” which, she would later elaborate, “gets in their chemicals and gives them a deficiency disorder”. Clearly, we were dealing with a serious mind.
Seeing as how Brittany doesn’t like it when I respond to people like this, I just sat there quietly and took it in, enduring the ignorance as my fingertips dug their way into the palms of my hands. I tried not to see the harm in listening to the old coot, as she seemed genuinely concerned with the evil horrors that video games would visit upon our beautiful child. However, she pushed it too far just before she walked away, when she launched an assault of implications attacking her ill-informed perception of our method of parenting. “You can’t just put a kid in front of a TV,” was the starter, followed by gems like, “Leaving them in front of a video game will hurt their brain,” and “You have to play with your kids.” The best part, of course, was when she patted Brittany on the shoulder and told her, “You’re going to have a long road ahead of you.”
Still. That’s what I kept thinking as I sat through the entire diatribe of ignorance and stupidity. Just stay still. Quiet. She’ll go away eventually, and hopefully before she tries to sell us something. Just wait her out. Bite your tongue. Hold it in. Murder is a crime, even when the weapons are logic and reason. Let her have her moment in the sun, basking in the warm glow of believing that she’s bringing the light of knowledge to the neanderthals who are poisoning their child’s brain chemicals with rock and roll music and video ping pong – what’s the harm? She’ll go away, wrapped in the comforting embrace of having done her Good Deed for the day, and we’ll go back to our business. Live and let live. Life goes on. Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. Let it be.
As she walked away, Brittany and I sat in stunned silence for a few moments before I looked my wife in the eyes and told her, “I didn’t say anything.” She sighed as she told me she was proud of me, then we went back to our breakfast and finished our waffles in relative silence. Shortly thereafter, of course, the ripple effects of the old woman’s tirade raced across the surface of my own brain chemicals and I grew ever more enraged, ex post facto. I began fumbling around for my soapbox, Brittany rolled her eyes, and I went off on a little rant of my own. It went a little something like this:
Ignoring the whole debate over whether video games are bad for children (ignoring because, regardless of how many genuine, peer-reviewed studies you show someone that prove the beneficial effects of gaming while dispelling the myths of their evil influence, people will always believe what they want to believe), I take great issue with the whole idea of “brain chemicals” and “deficiency disorders”. Why? Because it’s a crock. A sham. Balderdash, even. Hogswallop!
I’m not a big believer in the murky science of modern-day astrology called Psychiatry (not to be confused with Psychology), at least when it comes to the trend of over-diagnosing and subsequent medicating of so many children with so many so-called disorders. It’s hard to throw a baseball back over the fence these days without hitting at least one kid who’s ADD or ADHD and doped up to the gills. I hate psychiatry’s insatiable desire to define some sort of baseline for human behavior, a so-called level of normalcy from which all manner of ailments and afflictions spring forth and deviate like the fjords of an angry ocean. Trust me, there is no “normal” standard when it comes to human behavior and cognitive thought. Don’t believe me? Go ask an anthropologist. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
The wonderful thing about the human race is our great capacity for individuality even while participating within the structured framework of a complex society. Our brains, while fundamentally the same across all members of our species, are unique to each and every one of us. Our brain chemistry, our neural pathways, and everything about how we think is determined by an infinite amount of variables that are unique to each person: where we grew up, who our parents were, how we were raised, who our friends were, where we went to school, what we ate, what we saw, what we experienced – all of these things are different for every person, and each plays a subtle role in influencing how we think and perceive the world around us. There can be no normality under a system of infinite variety unless it’s imposed by external sources, aka The Shrinks.
Granted, there are obviously severe cases of minds debilitated by disease, where treatment and medication help rather than hinder – but I’m not talking about those right now. I acknowledge that the human mind is fragile and easily broken through abuse, neglect and inherited conditions, but what I’m referring to here is the escalating rate of non-crippling diagnoses, particularly in children. You know, the trendy ailments: attention deficient disorder, hyperactive disorder, or the especially popular and exceptionally trendy Asperger’s diagnosis for kids with few social skills. I will be blunt when I say that I doubt the validity of most of these diagnoses.
Why? Because there’s no reason for it. It’s not because of high fructose corn syrup, and the Jenny McCarthy-fueled autism fear of vaccinations has been proven to be junk science. No ancient meteor has crashed to Earth and unleashed alien spores into the atmosphere, cell phones aren’t giving off enough radiation to explode popcorn kernels and melt your children’s brains, and video games don’t poison their “brain chemicals”. There is no identifiable aspect of modern life that should result in the sharp and sudden rise of children with mental and developmental “disorders” – probably because most of the time there’s nothing wrong with the poor kids who are being diagnosed and labeled as different.
By all accounts, some of history’s greatest personalities probably had some sort of disorder. Charles Dickens was clinically depressed, along with other writers such as Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath, and Ernest Hemmingway. Beethoven was bipolar, and so were Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt and Vincent Van Gogh. What if Alfred Einstein had proven too inquisitive and troublesome (not to mention too slow compared to his classmates) and been medicated for his “condition” – where would modern science be? What about Nikola Tesla or Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates? What would the world look like without history’s ‘disordered’ loonies?
This is a relatively new idea to the world, the notion that there is a universal standard against which all others are judged – and that, for whomever deviates from it, there is promise of a cure. A treatment to get them back to “normal” where they belong. A way to make them better – to make people better, by making everyone exactly the same. Ticky-tacky. Drones. Boring.
I am thankful for the weird and the wonderful things of this world, including the hyperactive kids and awkward teen outcasts. I support the problem child in the back of the class who doesn’t bother raising his hand before asking difficult and dangerous questions. I encourage troubling behavior and difficult children, because those kids often grow up to be independently motivated and critically thinking adults, of which there are far too few in this world. I defy the idea that medications can treat these so-called childhood disorders, because I defy the very notion that there is such a thing as an ordered mind. People are human and alive and strange. We are all broken in our own twisted ways unique to our own warped lives. There is no standard. There is no normal. There are only variations of weird – or at least, that’s how it should be.
After having experienced life with a toddler for going on two years now, it’s difficult to remember exactly what my life was like before Trey came toddling into it. It was more serene, I suppose – but only in the sense that it was more boring. It’s not as if during the BT days (Before Trey), I oft sat in solitary seclusion, reflecting upon life’s mysteries from the banks of a quiescent lake with water of such majestic tranquility as to inspire splendiferous poetry in the hearts and minds of even the most hardened and jaded of thick-thinking brutes. No, mostly things were just boring. As the hideous and lunatic days of my first marriage came to a bitter and prolonged close, I was left suddenly adrift in uncharted waters, rudderless and alone. Days slipped by with a droning predictability that numbed my senses to anything that might have been truly extraordinary, and I simply settled into the mundane routine of a daily life that was hardly worth living at all. Sure, it was a life occasionally punctuated by points of interest, usually by girl-shaped things in the dark who were gone by the next day’s light, but by and large there was nothing of permanence or purpose or meaning. There were just days. Days, days, and more days, all stretched out before me like an impassable ocean of boredom from which there was no hope of escape. My future did not look bright.
sort of affair, except that it mostly involves Trey winning and the parents losing. As tensions rise and neither Trey nor Brittany are willing to surrender any additional ground, I invariably step in to play the role of Neville Chamberlain and start the appeasement process. For instance, I may offer to surrender twenty minutes of Nintendo time in exchange for a simple thirty seconds of Trey’s life spent trying to use the blasted potty, since he has both an aversion to going tee-tee and an incomprehensible affinity for storing urine. Seriously, the boy is like a camel storing water for a long trek across a hostile desert, only nothing Trey produces comes anywhere close to being potable. Rather, he is capable of holding his water for such prolonged periods of time, that when his bladder finally demands release, what comes out has had time to, let’s say…ferment. It’s powerful stuff, kids.
It’s been a little over two years since I nestled into a cozy little corner of the Internet to start up this oddly named and angry little blog, and most of the time has gone by in a flash. The beginning was rough, as beginnings often are, but with a little time and a whole lot of living, I eventually managed to ratchet down the fury and find a simpler pace. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I fell in love and started a family somewhere along the way, or that my frustrated little scribblings would start leading to bigger and better opportunities. And, while there are some things I still can’t talk about (things which I’ll leave to my creepy little cyberstalker to continue trying to ferret out, unsuccessfully), I can reveal one of them today: I stand on the precipice of a major career change.
Information Services department of the local school district in my mid-sized hometown Texas city. When I started way back in the year that saw the founding of Netscape, the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and the bizarre low-speed highway chase of a fleeing O.J. Simpson, I was a simple grunt nobody, working part-time as a college student. Eventually, I worked myself into a full time position and, as the Internet began growing into a viable communications tool, I launched the district’s first website. Since then, I’ve faithfully served as the district’s webmaster for the past decade and a half.
our brains to accommodate the continuous information flowing into us from every direction. There’s little need to commit anything to memory when you are connected to the web every second of every day and unremembered facts can be recalled with a few keystrokes to Google. Intelligence is falling while searches are rising, and no one seems to care. Soundbites replace discourse, Wikipedia replaces research and document checkers replace the need to know how to spell or how to write using anything even remotely approaching passable grammar. Gradually, we grow ever more dependent upon the beast we’ve created with each passing day, and there’s no end in sight. Eventually, one is reminded of the question many have asked, but few have answered: Are we the users of the technology, or is the technology using us?
populace is essential to the success of any democratic system, and I wanted to be a part of that process – but I think now that I can contribute more to my community and to the world at large by removing my voice from the internal rumblings of a Texas school district and placing it into an external environment from which I can influence change in a more indirect, but much more powerful way. It is to this end that I have decided to leave my career of sixteen years and launch myself in an entirely new direction as a journalist.
with whom you fight and laugh and tease as if you were truly related. I’ll be sad to say goodbye when the day comes, but like Dorothy said to the Scarecrow, there’s one person I think I’ll miss most of all: my secretary. She’s managed to become a second mother to me through the time we’ve known each other, and it’s difficult to imagine getting through a single workday without seeking her advice or council on some mundane or pivotal matter. She has, at times, been a stabilizing force in a whirlwind, anchoring me to safe harbor. At other times, she’s been the obnoxious thorn in my side that I can’t quite reach to remove. She’s made me laugh, yell, cry, spit and bleed. (Yes, bleed. It’s a long story.) I’ve grown close to her and her family and, like the Scarecrow, I think I’ll miss her most of all. And, because I enjoy teasing her, I hope she finally finds a brain…
Yesterday was a strange and tiresome day, filled from morning yawn to evening snore with all manner of oddity and perversion. For starters, after setting a new alarm tone before going to sleep the previous night, I woke yesterday morning under the unconscious delusion that I was, in fact, defusing a bomb. It seems that, for whatever reason, the rhythmic chirping of the new alarm I’d set somehow registered as a timed explosive to my sleep-addled brain, and I truly felt that our lives depended upon my ability to shut the thing down before it went off and sent fleshy bits of newlywed flying all over the room, splattering the walls and staining the carpet. So, when the alarm went off, I went into action. In the haze of twilight sleep, my arms shot out from beside the bed and began flailing around the nightstand as my hands searched for the bomb. What they found, however, was nothing more explosive than Brittany’s iPod dock.
It was of sufficient heft and armed with enough buttons and gizmos to at least feel like an incendiary device, at any rate. I frantically began pushing buttons and sliding sliders, growing more agitated and angry with each new bleep and bloop of the recurring alarm, but nothing was working. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t shut off the bomb. It just continued its incessant chirping, over and over again. Thankfully, just when the slight edge of panic began to give way to unbridled rage as I sought to smash the thing into a billion pieces, the veil of sleep lifted and I realized what I was doing and what I was holding. I laughed at myself for a moment, then returned the iPod dock to the nightstand and shut off the alarm. I got out of bed, got dressed, and headed off to work. Then, things started to get weird.
starters, the technician opened a drawer to reveal stacks of small plastic kits labeled Single Sample. I was told to select one of these ‘single’ cups (presumably because there is either such a thing as a Double Sample, or perhaps something more along the lines of Couples Skate Only night down at the roller rink), and hand it to the technician. I did, and she opened it to reveal a small plastic vial along with various bits and bobs of the sort of frippery that comes bundled in your average drug test kit, I suppose. Then, she told me to wash my hands, but not to use soap. I don’t know why it was important that I wash my hands before peeing into a cup, or the reasons behind prohibiting the use of soap, but I did as I was told and stuck my hands under the running faucet for a few moments. After that, she escorted me to the toilet.
before telling me to discard the excess into the toilet, which I was now suddenly authorized to flush. I did, and was then instructed to wash my hands, this time making full use of the available soap. I guess they reason that providing urine samples is a dirty and tricky sort of affair, and so they want to encourage you to wash your hands before touching other surfaces in the laboratory. It makes sense, I suppose. I still don’t know why they want your hands dirty before the test, though. The remaining bits of the procedure were all bureaucratic: sign a few forms, verify some facts, and get my stuff back. Finally, after finishing up my business with the drug test, I headed over to the dentist’s office for my final visit. Then, things started to get weird. Or, more accurately, painful.
I have been banned from eBay. Not formally or anything, but Brittany has made it clear that I am to never again click on the shiny ‘Place Bid’ button that beckons me with its siren’s song from across the glittering wires of the Interwebs. Apparently, or so my lovely wife claims, my insatiable desire to win at all things great and small would eventually lead to our eventual and inevitable financial ruin, should I ever be allowed to participate in another online auction ever again. I’m sure I don’t know what she’s talking about, however, because to my way of thinking, a little healthy competition is good for the soul. Take, for instance, my first (and last) experience with an online auction that took place a couple of weeks ago:
higher bid. Now, it is at this time that a seasoned eBay user (or anyone with common sense) would tell you that I should have just left the bidding process alone until the auction was almost over, in order to avoid over-inflating the price prematurely. I was aware of this and planned on doing exactly that when I submitted my first bid, but when I logged into the site later to find someone else’s bid trumping mine, it proved too much for my soft ego to bear, and I struck back with a retaliating bid of a few cents more. Then, they bid higher. Then, I bid higher. They went higher still, and I kept pace right along with them, adding a few more pennies with each passing click. Eventually, by the time the auction was down to its last few seconds, I was glaring at my monitor with a furious intensity that left me wild-eyed and maniacal as I kept my cursor hovering over the refresh button, clicking it again and again with the same incessant rabidity of a coked up lab rat hitting his ‘reward’ lever fifty thousand times a minute for a pellet of crack. At last, after everything was all said and done and I’d finally won my prize, I threw my head back and exploded into an unrestrained fit of cacophonous laughter that would put any mad scientist to shame. Victory was mine! MUAHAHAHA!
dentist friend lost his drill bit deep within a wall, he proceeded to fish it out with pliers and the drill itself, in much the same way as I imagine he’s prised loose the stubborn teeth of many of his patients. Watching him dig deep into the freshly-drilled cavity to wrest the stubborn drill bit from the dark recesses of the gypsum drywall made me wince with every squeak and scrape of his rusty pliers, and I began to seriously question my next appointment with the man. Seriously, it was like watching Steve Martin freak out on Bill Murray in Little Shop of Horrors, only the wall wasn’t enjoying it, thank goodness. Eventually, we managed to get one of the four cables pulled through the wall and I successfully crimped on a couple of ends. We still have three left, but I’m not sure if he’ll want my help again. After all, I left an awful lot of holes in his office…
The regular publishing schedule here at Coquetting Tarradiddles is pretty simple: two new essays each week, with one released on Tuesday and the other on Thursday. It doesn’t sound like a difficult thing to manage and, truth be told, it really isn’t. However, every so often Life meets up with Fate over a game of cards in the back room of some celestial speakeasy where anthropomorphized representations of the human condition get together to eat ambrosia and figure out clever ways to screw with mortals, and their little omnipotent games of chance almost always result in Interesting Times for us regular schmoes.
about, which leaves me with, well, not much to talk about. Instead, I will use the opportunity of today’s brevity to perhaps pass a little of my hard-earned wisdom onto you, my gracious and ungrateful readers. Heck, I’ll even strip out my usual verbosity and further truncate my ramblings into a simple list form for all of the web-obsessed waterheads out there who can’t imagine life ever moving slowly enough to warrant devoting more than five minutes to reading anything. See? I’m catering to the needs of others. I think I’m growing as a person.
too much faith in your TomTom will only get you hurt, or at least hopelessly lost. Apart from advising you to take phantasmic and non-existent highway exits, it will steer you towards closed roads, then completely deny any knowledge of recent construction as it quietly mocks your navigational acumen while it makes ridiculous demands for immediate u-turns every fifty feet for the next several miles. Left to its own devices and free from the scrutiny of a careful and untrusting driver, your average GPS is as likely to get you to your destination safely as it is to guide you down a snowmobile trail, then abandon you after your car gets stuck and you slowly begin to succumb to the elements and die from exposure. True story, sort of.
and painful procedure – especially when it’s a lunch meeting. An inability to properly control your facial musculature is probably perceived as some sort of a weakness by the people to whom you are speaking, and dribbling tomato soup down your chin whilst enduring the special horror that comes from suddenly realizing that your tongue has betrayed you and gone completely useless right in the middle of a very important and clever-sounding sentence certainly doesn’t help the situation, either. Still, if you manage to impress even under the anesthetic haze of a completely numb mouth that has you talking like a sedated Porky Pig with a lithium habit, you probably have nothing to worry about, even if they did notice what happened when you tried to bite into your sandwich…
Earlier this month, Brittany and I were almost killed by rancid chicken menstruations. Ok, maybe rancid is a bit too strong of a word, but using a term like “bad eggs” to describe what we ate late one night as a midnight breakfast doesn’t come anywhere near to balancing out the digestive misery that soon followed. The eggs themselves looked fine, they didn’t smell bad and, since I throw enough spices into my scrambled eggs to take down either a large cocker spaniel or small rhinoceros, they didn’t even taste bad. However, shortly after finishing our delicious breakfast-for-dinner, the wife and I spent the rest of the night attempting to battle the unseen eldritch forces of a gastrointestinal Dunwich Horror as we passed each other in the hallway, going to and coming from the bathroom – or, as it came to be known on that fateful night, the Necronomiconal gateway to the Dungeon Dimensions. It wasn’t pretty.
Of course, we survived. We were miserable and exhausted, but we survived. It wasn’t until the next day that we were able to confidently finger the eggs as the culprits behind our digestive misfortune, though. At first, we thought it might be the bacon, as we recently switched to a brand of the hickory smoked piggy goodness produced locally by the Zummo Meat Company. Much to my delight, however, we soon learned that the very delicious, very fresh bacon was not to blame. Instead, after inspecting the carton of organic large brown eggs from free range, free roaming chickens that Brittany had purchased the night before, it became all too clear just what had happened. We bought the carton on January 30th and cracked the first eggs on the 31st, but what neither of us knew at the time, of course, was that the eggs were well past their Sell By date at that point. About two and a half weeks past, to be more exact. It turns out that, stamped right there on the end of the carton was the phrase: Sell By Jan 13 10. I’m not sure how long eggs are supposed to remain fresh and safe to eat after their Sell By date, but I’m willing to wager that the amazing, edible egg goes bad sometime before two weeks later. Ours did, at any rate.
Amazingly enough, this is not the end to the story. After recovering from our brief excursion into the hideous realm of Salmonellaville, I made my way back to the store from whence the wretched things had come a few days later on February 3rd and found that, not only were there still plenty of cartons labeled with the same Sell By date of January 13th still stocked in the cooler, there were even a 
couple of cartons stamped with a date of December 23rd! The store in question is this Kroger franchise located in my charming hometown of Beaumont, Texas. I snapped a quick photo with my cell phone for posterity, although I could fit only one of the stacks of expired egg cartons into frame and maintain enough clarity to make out the dates. There were more. I was incensed and outraged, naturally, but I’m always incensed and outraged about something. I fought back to urge to yell at a manager, which I attribute to Brittany’s calming influence. She says I tend to “make a scene” – whatever that means. There are a lot of reasons why I always advocate shopping from local stores rather than national chains, and this is just one more for the list. Local stores can’t get away with practices like this, or else they could lose their entire business in one swift lawsuit. National chains, on the other hand, have pockets deep enough that they simply don’t care.
So, instead of making myself an angry nuisance at my local Kroger, I thought I would direct my attention here on the blog, where I can not only advise people, once again, to shop locally, but to also caution everyone to just be very cautious about those expiration dates in general. Then again, sometimes vigilance is not enough. For example, I found this story (linked to from a local blog), about a Sam’s Club in Lubbock, Texas that has been engaging in the insidious practice of re-labeling expiration dates. Apparently, the Health Department believes that permitting a store to artificially extend a product’s shelf life via the enthusiastic application of new stickers is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, so stores are allowed to re-label expiration dates at their own discretion. However, the rule is that the new date must be placed alongside the original date, presumably to alert the customer that they are buying old product. This particular Sam’s Club doesn’t seem to care about that niggling little caveat though, because they’ve simply been placing new stickers on top of the old ones and misleading customers into thinking they’re buying fresh products. The store claims that, as long as the food is cooked properly, it will be safe to eat even weeks after the original expiration date. Yeah, I’m sure it is.
The problem with our food supply is that nobody seems to understand that our food supply itself is a problem. The food lobbyists have successfully convinced our legislators that lax safety standards are fine and, taking things a step further, have somehow managed to shift the onus of responsibility onto the consumer, rather than the producer. ‘Sure’, the transnational food corporations seem say, ‘our meat is probably extensively contaminated by feces, but as long as you follow the rules about 
cooking it, the excrement in your food shouldn’t make you sick.’ Sadly, they’re mostly right. However, just because I can kill the e. coli bacteria swimming in the meat I buy from the store by heating it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable with the idea of eating a cow poop hamburger. The Frankensteinian concoction of assorted cow parts from assorted cows from assorted locations known as Ground Beef is, of course, the most infamous for harboring all kinds of nasty bacteria, most notably Escherichia coli. The sad thing is that all of this contamination is mostly preventable – except that taking proper preventative measures tends to too strongly impact the corporation’s bottom line. It’s cheaper to deal with lawsuits (and point the responsibility for not dealing with contamination at the customer) rather than take steps to provide us with safe and healthy food, so the companies simply don’t do it – and it’s killing us.
The image projected by the food companies concerning where our food comes from is one of agrarian wholesomeness, with pictures of quaint pastoral farms surrounded by green fields and wandering livestock, but nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the demands of modern society (of which the fast food culture shoulders most of the blame) have necessitated the growth of the Factory Farm. In these so-called farms, there are no open fields with scattered livestock. There is no happy farmer sitting in the barn and milking cows while the rest of his family harvests eggs by hand from the chicken coop. Rather, there are closed off, non-descript buildings housing hundreds or thousands of chickens either crammed into tiny cages or allowed to “roam” within the confined floorspace alongside the hundreds or thousands of other chickens crammed into the building. Cattle are allowed to eat grass as calves, but are then shipped off to feed farms that confine the animals and force feed them corn, which fatten the cattle faster, but which they cannot digest. Animals are loaded with antibiotics to help fight off rampant infections that spread like wildfire through the confined and unsanitary conditions, and they are injected with growth hormones and other artificial manipulations designed to augment their growth to produce a final product as quickly as possible. Then, the animals are loaded up and shipped to a slaughterhouse, where they are killed and cleaned with a severity of urgency that prevents any true cleanliness at all. Cows are slaughtered and skinned with feces coating their hides, and this easily gets into the meat. It’s an assembly line from there, butchering and packaging, then shipping the beef to market with little care or attention given to its safety.
If some superbug does eventually come along that will kill us all, I have a pretty good idea that it’ll start in our food supply. We, as the public, trust the food companies (and governmental oversight) to provide us with safe, healthy food. (Or, at least food that isn’t contaminated by an unknown and increasingly high number of pathogens.) It should not be the consumer’s responsibility to make up for the supplier’s ineptitude or carelessness. Instead, we should be allowed to have confidence that we’re actually getting what we pay for, rather than buying into an unknown variable in a foodie version of Russian Roulette.
I’m just happy that Trey didn’t eat any of the bad eggs, and that Brittany has now started checking Sell By dates with religious fervor. But I worry about the day that comes when even taking steps to cook our meat into boot leather may not be enough to kill whatever new, antibiotic-resistant bacterium has contaminated it. The solution, naturally, is to return to the smaller, independently run farms of yesteryear. However, as a solution this is sort of a non-starter, simply because no one can be convinced that the smaller, more costly way of growing our food is viable when faced with the insatiable appetite of modern culture. I think it is, but as with most things that cost more money, it just ain’t gonna happen. Always with the short-term thinking that comes from a public demanding an immediate and cheap benefit, the famous slogan, “Always Low Prices!” is the mantra, and quality and safety be damned.
Oh well, the best I can hope to do for Trey is to shop locally and buy organic – not for the nebulous and dubious claims that organic food tastes better (because it usually doesn’t), but because it’s healthier. Free range, free roaming livestock raised on a diet appropriate for the animal (ie: grass, not corn for cattle) that are kept free from growth hormones as well as the need for super doses of antibiotics are simply safer and healthier to eat. When the cattle haven’t been standing hip-deep in animal waste for most of their adult lives, there’s a lot less chance of feces getting mixed into the beef during slaughter or the butchering and 
packaging processes. Produce kept free from chemical pesticides not only keeps the outside of the food clean and safe, it also keeps the inside free from contaminates absorbed through the soil.
In a time when swine flu had people so worried that eating bacon would kill them, it’s amazing to me that the only time the public seems to get scared enough to be provoked into action is when the threat isn’t actually real. Apparently ignorant of the fact that eating pork could never give you swine flu, people stopped buying it in such numbers that the piggy lobbyists were able to convince the media and health organizations to start calling it H1N1 instead of swine flu. That’s right, after just a few weeks of the public not buying their product, the industry reacted. Granted, it reacted with its public relations department rather than have anything to do with food safety, but it was an indication that it is possible to scare industry into at least some sort of action, merely by not buying their products. If people truly demanded safer food, then all it would take would be a brief respite from buying the toxic junk that’s shoveled onto supermarket shelves and marketed as healthy and wholesome food. After all, we are what we eat – but what we’re eating is crap. Sometimes literally.
The other day, I stumbled across the news that South Carolina is now requiring that all subversives register with the state. There’s even a $5 filing fee and a $25,000 fine if you fail to register within thirty days of starting up your subversive organization. The logic, I suppose, goes something along the lines of, “You better let the state know if you’re planning to overthrow the state, otherwise the state will fine you a bunch of money before and/or after it throws you in the clink.” It’s a bit absurd and a bit laughable, but I’m sure it has some sort of purpose. However, while this action is clearly aimed at somehow thwarting terrorism through the inexplicable application of unnecessary bureaucracy, it’s still pretty darn funny. Maybe South Carolina is as afraid of Islamic extremists as it is of the army of undead waterheads who follow the likes of Glen Beck across the country, teabagging their way from sea to shining sea. Maybe the Palmetto State truly is worried that people are going to rise up and wrest control of the country from the clenched fists of government, but there are much better ways of pacifying a rebellion than threatening to fine the revolutionaries if they don’t let the state know about them ahead of time.
Revolutionaries aren’t typically intimidated by fines and fees, although it might help to control the meeker sect of the aforementioned teabagging variety of freedom fighter. I suspect that, for them, the revolution extends about as far as it takes to go from a fun party atmosphere of like-minded waterheads to tear gas and rubber bullets being fired into the crowd from a faceless horde of masked cops in full riot gear. Threaten their upper middle-class lifestyle and the teabaggers quickly back down, so the $25,000 fine seems like a proper deterrent to their antics. That, and requiring that they register with the state or face the fine may perhaps prove to be a master stroke of legislative genius. Then again, it could just be new stupid shoveled onto piles of old stupid.
I give the Tea Party people a hard time not because I merely hate them, but because I loathe them with an intense 
and unholy passion rivaled only by the furious and unstoppable force of a collapsing supernova. I loathe them because they are the flotsam cast off from the vox populi, the alienated detritus of modern society, unified only by their collective desire to set the world right by setting it backwards, by retarding the social development of the nation until we’re back in the good old days of Donna Reed and Jim Crow. Back when people knew their place, and the American Dream still held the luminous shimmer of hope and promise it once had before the illusion crumbled into the blood-stained dust of an inescapable nightmare. In short, these people don’t want to tear down the government to rebuild something new or something better – they just want things back the way they were, back when they believed in something and thought that what they believed in mattered.
Teabaggers want a return to the golden days of yore, when WASPS ruled the nation and a white man could grow up to be anything he wanted, as long as he wasn’t too regional or his name not too ethnic. Teabaggers want the prosperity of post-war America without the harsh reality of WWII life, when sacrificing and giving of yourself was vital to the war effort. Back then, people rationed everything and went without at home so that our troops wouldn’t go without on the front lines. Today, of course, the closest we get to self sacrifice is slapping removable magnetic bumper stickers on our cars and bitching about the price of gas. Never mind that the wars of today are born of corporate greed rather than national security, and that no single deployed troop is actually fighting to protect our freedoms, regardless of what the propaganda is telling us. Our freedoms aren’t threatened by Islamic extremists or even by Osama bin Laden himself; they’re threatened from within. Every time a person doesn’t vote, freedom dies. Every time a teevee pundit wins a victory over the airwaves and claims a new recruit in the audience, freedom dies. Every time we pass laws to limit the free and open exchange of ideas, freedom dies. Freedom is falling dead at our feet all around us every single day, yet few seem to notice and ever fewer seem to care.
Teabaggers are so concerned with parroting the pundits’ talking points that they’ve become blinded to the true threat to our republic. America is not becoming a socialist state, no matter how badly people like 
Rupert Murdoch want you to believe it is. No, if anything, America has been heading towards a corporatist oligarchy for decades now, and people are somehow okay with that. And, with the recent changes to campaign finance law combined with the continued apathy and willful ignorance of the governed populace itself, things will only get worse. Eventually, we may finally see an end to the days of the two party, Republican/Democrat system as we slip closer and closer towards a fully corporation-controlled ‘democracy’. Vote for the Wal-Mart candidate! The representative from the Disney corporation! The esteemed gentleman from Taco Bell!
I wouldn’t mind the teabaggers so much if they had cried out sooner, as that would indicate at least the merest scintilla of independent thought. As it stands now, however, they’re just rats jumping ship on the neo-con revolution that proved to be as disastrous for the nation as every sane and sensible person predicted it would be. For years, the teabaggers stood idly by and let reformation after reformation slide past, restricting and limiting our freedom with every congressional vote and Presidential signature. The Republicans stay quiet when their man in Washington is raping the Constitution, and only speak up when a Democrat usurps the office to continue the same behavior. Likewise, the Democrats yell bloody murder when a Republican is stripping us of our rights, then fall mute when Barrack Obama starts doing the same thing. It’s down to the old Us vs. Them mentality, and it keeps everyone distracted and blinded to the truth.
None of this is to say that I’m against a good revolution, however. In fact, I’m of the belief that the whole system has become so corrupt and gone so off-mission from the original ideas of 
the Constitution that we ought to just take off and nuke it from orbit, just to be sure. Burn it all down, (figuratively, of course…a sort of metaphorical burning involving no actual fire whatsoever, thankyouverymuch), then rebuild it – this time with a knowledge of the past and our present, with an eye towards the future. Then again, what do I know? Maybe the corporation-driven future oligarchy will come closer to a true Utopia than man has ever before achieved. Perhaps our enslavement through technology will somehow enlighten us and enrich our lives in ways my luddite brain cannot imagine. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see.
But for now, I’ll shut up. I’ve given you enough of a rant for one day and besides, I’ve been over this ground before. For whatever reason, (today’s essay having been prompted by South Carolina’s stupidity), these themes tend to creep back up in my mind like insidious little cognitive monsters, and I have to slay the paper tigers here before I lose all control and start wandering the streets, muttering to myself and making random children cry. The South Carolina law is absurd and even comical, but it probably will quiet at least some of the impotent discontent coming from the Tea Party folks and anyone else who has a similarly anemic version of revolution. Of course, it won’t do anything to stop the true revolution when it finally comes, though. I hear it will not even be televised…
The geek half of the Internet (the remaining 50% being divided equally between bored housewives, cheating husbands, ambitious business majors and porn) is abuzz this morning with news of yesterday’s decision by the seventh circuit court of appeals to uphold the decision of a Wisconsin prison banning its inmates from playing Dungeons and Dragons. It seems that some murderer by the name of Kevin Spacey Singer filed the appeal after the prison’s big, bad warden stormed his cell and absconded with his entire collection of game manuals and whatever other D&D ephemera he’d managed to squirrel away while serving his sentence. The appeals court decision cited a concern that the playing of D&D somehow mimics the power structure of a gang and, as unlikely as it sounds, could eventually produce some sort of rabble-rousing collective of spotty-faced dungeon masters that would threaten the safety of other inmates, presumably through the use of an imaginary vorpal blade of +2 summoning or perhaps by way of a particularly nasty die roll. The reasoning behind the judgment doesn’t actually stand the test of reality, of course – not when you compare the real world stat sheet of your average gamer to that of his in-game alter ego, but I suppose the court had to figure out something to say that was a bit more technical than sticking out their tongues and going “Neener-neener! You’re in prison, you twat. It’s not supposed to be fun!”
Of course, given the dubious past that D&D has endured at the wringing hands and flapping gums of an ignorant media since it started gaining national popularity back in the late seventies, perhaps the prison officials as well as the appellate court 
judges genuinely believed in the potential threat the game might bring to prison security. After all, Dungeons and Dragons has fostered controversy since it was first released to the world in 1974. And, in the knee-jerk reactionary way characteristic of fundamentalist religious groups everywhere, the Christian’s were first on the scene, accusing the game of everything from promoting devil worship and witchcraft to providing the illicit thrill of interspecies erotica to an entire generation of impressionable young boys who might catch a glimpse of a harpy’s half-bird/half-human breasts and later grow to be sexual deviants who traffic in porn and can’t have sex with their wives without fantasizing about the nipples of a crudely drawn mythological creature. It was all a bit silly back then, but then again, most reactionary waves usually are.
As the game continued to gain notoriety, people like the ever-lovin’ blue eyed Jack Chick exploited the parental fears of millions of church going Christians by penning such tracks as Dark Dungeons, which portrayed Dungeons and Dragons as a tool used by devil worshippers to recruit the fresh and tender souls of the youth into the dark and 
dangerous world of black magic and witchcraft. Nevermind that your typical D&D spellbook consists of about as much magical instruction as it takes to roll a handful of oddly-shaped dice across a dining room table, but people like Chick managed to convince mothers and fathers everywhere that allowing their children to play D&D would quickly lead to the rest of their short lives being spent in service to Beelzebub, casting magic missiles at babies and participating in ritual human sacrifices down in Eugene’s basement after school. It was a fear no less absurd and unfounded than the same mass hysteria that fueled the persistent and non-existent threat of poisoned Halloween candy or the Salem witch trials, not to mention travesties of justice found in both Kern County, California and the McMartin preschool fiasco. Still, sensationalism begets sensationalism, and soon the media had the entire country convinced that playing Dungeons and Dragons was how the devil got inside you.
First, there was the sad case of James Dean Egbert, a sixteen-year-old child prodigy who was attending Michigan State when he tried to kill himself. He sneaked into the university’s steam tunnels one night with a bottle of quaaludes intending to shuffle off his mortal coil, but instead merely passed out and woke up the next morning to go hide out at a friend’s house. The student newspaper published a story on Egbert’s mysterious disappearance, after which his parents launched an exhaustive search for the boy, including hiring a private investigator by the name of James William Dean. Dean conducted his investigation and somehow came to the conclusion that Egbert had fallen under the evil thrall of Dungeons and Dragons, which Dean claimed led directly to the boy’s death. It was decided that, having become obsessed with the fantasy world of the game, Egbert had became lost in the university’s labyrinthine steam tunnel system as the result of using the underground corridors for a delusional real-life version of a D&D quest.
None of this was true, of course, and it later came out that Egbert was alive and well, and living in Louisiana. Unfortunately, (and perhaps because he thought he’d killed himself back in Michigan, but later woke one day to the hideous realization that he was just in Louisiana), Egbert eventually succeeded in ending his life by shooting himself a full year after he’d supposedly 
gotten lost inside the tunnels and died while trying to slay imagined dragons. The private investigator eventually revealed the truth that D&D never played a part in Egbert’s death, but by then the damage was done. The media had run with the story, quoting speculation as fact and spreading rumor and gossip as undeniable truth, paving the way for people like Rona Jaffe to exploit with her novel, Mazes and Monsters. Later made into a TV movie starring Tom Hanks, the story was loosely based on James Egbert’s disappearance and helped to turn a simple game meant as escapist entertainment for nerdy social pariahs into an evil conduit of sin leading directly into the fiery home of the Son of Perdition himself. But it didn’t stop there.
Almost ten years later, after a guy named Chris Pritchard, along with two of his friends, murdered his stepfather and tried to murder his mother in a bloody attempt to get his greedy hands on a $2,000,000 inheritance package, the media quickly disregarded his simple motive of trying to turn a quick buck and instead shifted blame towards the fact that Pritchard and his buddies had played drunken, stoned games of Dungeons and Dragons before the murder. This was back in the late 
’80s, when it looked like the fervor of D&D was beginning to die down. However, never content to let a good story go untold, the talking heads on the teevee screen insisted on connecting the murder with D&D. It didn’t help that Pritchard and pals played out their fantasy quests in the steam tunnels beneath North Carolina State, either, which immediately flashed the public’s mind back to James Egbert’s disappearance from a decade earlier. Pritchard was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1990, but was later paroled in 2007, presumably on account of good behavior. However, I think there’s more to it than that and, although I have no evidence to validate my theory, I suspect that it was the mastery of arcane magic he gained from years spent playing Dungeons and Dragons that gave Pritchard the +20 bonus to INT he needed to roll a 3d8+2d6+1d4 and successfully cast Gygax’s 8th Level Spell Of Sentence Transmogrification, thereby reducing his life sentence to a mere seventeen years. But, like I said, I can’t prove anything.
Thankfully, the hysteria is all but gone today, and playing Dungeons and Dragons has finally become socially acceptable, if not socially condoned behavior. It’s still an awkward thing played by awkward people, but because three decades of awkward children have grown up to be awkward adults with disposable incomes, advertisers have learned to exploit the geek demographic. In fact, while I may tease the tabletop gamers with their multisided dice and strange disconnect from reality, the truth is that I always wanted to play D&D. I tried, at any rate. Back in the ’80s, when I was in middle school, I 
bought the game manuals and studied the rules, and sometimes I even gathered a few willing friends together to give it a go. I even went through a phase of collecting and painting miniatures, although I never actually used any of them in a game. I never, as it turns out, got around to playing one single game of Dungeons and Dragons, or any other tabletop RPG, for that matter. Each and every time I got together with friends and tried to play, we all felt too stupid and silly about pretending to be heroes and wizards to get any further than gathering around the table with a pizza. And, while we’d always eat the pizza, we would quickly give up on the game entirely, leave the table behind and switch on the television to spend the rest of the night playing Nintendo and talking about girls. That’s how I grew up, anyway. It was fine to pretend you were a ninja in a videogame, but gathering around a table to speak in broken Elizabethan english while pretending to be knight in shining armor was going too far. The type of guys who did that were the sort of blokes who sat around dateless on a Friday night, rolling dice and doing math for fun – and we weren’t about to become those losers. No, we were the sort of fellas who’d sit around dateless on a Friday night, thumbing control pads and fingering fire buttons for fun. It was totally different. We weren’t losers. Totally different.
Getting back to the motivation of today’s essay, the appeals court decision to not allow inmates to play Dungeons and Dragons, I can’t help but wonder whether the idea is really as silly as it sounds at first glance. Sure, a room full of D&D players is hardly a terrifying gang, but the guy who filed the appeal to overturn his prison’s decision is, after all, a convicted murderer, and I can’t seem to muster up any sympathies for a guy who is in 
jail because he killed someone. Sure, he may have spent his life playing D&D, but that doesn’t mean he gets to keep playing in jail. Prison, the last time I checked, wasn’t supposed to be some kind of reward for social outcasts, providing food and shelter and allowing them to engage in their favorite hobbies without the need to worry about pesky things like bills and rent. In a lot of ways, such an inviting prison atmosphere would be a hardcore gamer’s dream scenario, when you stop to think about it. With all of their basic human needs provided by the state and paid for by the taxpayers, these lucky bastards get to whittle away the years of their lives playing a game that removes them from the reality of prison just as much as it removed them from the reality of the outside world before they were busted? I don’t think so. That’s a bit like busting drug users and convicting them to a prison sentence filled with a lifetime of free and unrestricted access to the pharmaceuticals of their choice, isn’t it?
Then again, maybe letting the inmates play isn’t a bad idea, after all. However, I think we need to think bigger and be more inclusive of people with life-consuming hobbies. Seriously, why stop at Dungeons and Dragons? Why not throw a little World of Warcraft into the mix to entice the roughly 2.6 million Americans who are currently obsessed with the game into committing a crime so that they can be locked away in prison to spend every waking moment running a cartoon avatar 
around the fictional land of Azeroth? It’s not like they’re doing much better on the outside, preferring as they do to spend more time with their make believe lives than their real ones – PLUS, locking them up would have the added bonus of freeing up a lot of good paying jobs in this abysmal economy. Throw some money at building a crapload of new prisons to house the teeming horde of unwashed masses flowing into them on a daily basis, and everybody wins. The gamers’ old jobs open up for other hardworking Americans to fill, and new jobs are created to manage the expansive new prison infrastructure. In fact, a regular cycle of exponential growth could be expected as new games come out every year, with periodic explosions in inmate populations whenever new expansions to popular games are released. Call it an addendum to the Stimulus Package, have Blizzard throw some money behind a politician to champion the cause, and this sucker could be on the books in a couple of years. It’s brilliant, I tell you! BRILLIANT!
Some folks have commented to me recently concerning our excursion to Disney World, and each of them has invariably asked the same question: “Why didn’t you take a plane?” The easy answer would be to say I don’t like flying, but that’s not entirely true. I have no real problems with airplanes other than simple annoyances that are fairly easily dealt with or at least temporarily endurable for the short duration of the flight. One of these things would include the hilariously inept and ineffectual security measures put in place after September 11, 2001 that make our flights neither safer nor more enjoyable, but that do seem to have the curious effect of irritating every single passenger so far past the point of intolerance that they come back around the other side as docile cattle, willingly being herded through checkpoints of steadily increasing invasiveness. And, armed with their Ziploc bags and unshod feet, the passengers walk in single-file confidence as machines bleep and bloop and give the guards virtual reconstructions of their naked naughty parts while falsely believing that any of it does any good. It’s a theater of delusion in which I want no part. Then, of course, there are the more mundane aspects of air travel, things like: lost luggage and mishandled baggage, infuriating and inexplicable delays coated in the saccharine-laced rhetoric of smiling automatons and, of course, the flight itself. I’m sorry, but unless I’m on some intergalactic space voyage to a distant star and totally dependent upon the ship’s life support systems to shield me from the terrible vacuum of outer space, I don’t really want to breathe the same barely-scrubbed, recycled oxygen as a whole plane full of people who are farting and burping and coughing their way to Orlando. And don’t even get me started on the toilets…
But none of this has anything to do with why we didn’t fly to Disney World. Sure, I dislike flying in general, but I’ve no real gripe against airlines. I just think that flying should be reserved for occasions when you simply must arrive somewhere quickly and don’t have time to drive, or at least reserved for the mundanity of business travel. For vacations, though? Forget it. Part of the fun of traveling is the actual travel, which is a concept that is becoming more and more foreign to today’s impatient vacationeer. For most people today, it’s all about the destination rather than the journey, the manifestation of the Need-It-Now generation’s inability to appreciate anything outside the scope of their own experience. Today, vacations are planned online, with itineraries scheduled by computer and passed down to the traveller like the pre-packaged, processed experiences they deserve. No one wants to travel the roads anymore, or explore the countryside to find hidden gems of curiosity and wonder. No, all that matters is how quickly they can get from point A to point B, and how soon they can get started doing the activities the computer printed out for them.
All of this has led to the steady decline of one of the great American traditions: the roadside attraction. Most people regard 
driving any real distance to be more of a nuisance than anything else, seeing interstate highways as a way to get to their destinations, rather than making the drive be part of the vacation itself. Granted, the interstate highway system itself was one of the first nails in the road trip coffin, but they did far less damage to roadside attractions than the commonality of air travel today. When you’re driving along on an interstate, you still have the option of taking an exit to find a Mystery Spot or a World’s Largest Something-Or-Other, if the mood strikes you. Billboards still taunt and tease you with exaggerated promises of wondrous sights to behold “Just 20 miles south of Exit 237!” The claims of the advertisements generally don’t hold up to the reality of the often cheap and kitsch-filled attractions themselves, but the bait and switch nature of the propaganda is all part of the fun.
Roadside attractions used to go hand in hand with any vacation, back when people would drive rather than fly. The interstates came along and diverted much of the tourist trap business, but the towns were still there and so were the attractions, even if there weren’t quite so many as there were before. Eventually, as air travel became more popular and affordable, most of the smaller operations closed up shop altogether, and their particular contributions to the vacation memories of visitors were lost forever. This website, for example, has a list of just a few of Florida’s Lost Tourist Attractions. The tourist trap may not be completely dead, but its body is barely twitching.
Even some of the more famous attractions like Hobbiton, USA in California have hit on hard times, although the state of Hobbiton might have more to do with the original owner’s passing than anything else, especially with the recent resurgence in popularity of all things Tolkein. One would think that, thanks to the Lord of the Rings movies, the place would be enjoying a nice upturn in visitors, but most of the reports I can find suggest that Hobbiton has been closed and all but abandoned.
Other destinations are doing better though, like The House On The Rock in Wisconsin. Its prominent role in Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods, has certainly helped its reputation, although most attractions aren’t so lucky as to have a writer of Gaiman’s stature feature them in a story. In fact, the significance of Neil’s contribution to The House On The Rock’s tourist dollars is evidenced by an e-mail he received last week, inviting him to help plan an American Gods anniversary celebration at the venue. Rock City in Georgia hasn’t received quite the same level of attention from its mention in the same novel, but with a slogan as catchy as “See Rock City!” appearing in everything from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Homestar Runner’s Strong Bad, they hardly need it.
The original idea we had when planning our trip to Disney World was not to stick strictly to the interstate to funnel ourselves to the mouse house as quickly as possible, but circumstances forced us to do just that. We’d planned on stopping at various 
roadside attractions along the way, be they tourist traps, historical landmarks, or state museums. We didn’t care what we saw, as long as we saw something from which Trey could take away a happy memory. We did manage to visit the Florida Caverns State Park on our way back, but missed being able to stop at Battleship Memorial Park in Alabama. I wanted to take him aboard the USS Alabama to see the famous battleship in person and onto the USS Drum to experience the claustrophobia of a WWII-era submarine, which are things I remember doing as a little boy. Granted, he’ll get more out of the experience when he’s a little older, but I still enjoy giving him as many experiences as I can now, as often as I’m able. I prefer choosing attractions that have some sort of educational value, but finding spots that are just plain fun is fine by me. It beats taking him on vacation to sit at a relative’s house and keep himself busy by not touching all the No-No’s, at any rate.
This weekend, for instance, we’re taking a short road trip to Houston to visit relatives and take Trey to the Children’s Museum of Houston. Along the way, I’m planning to stop by the San Jacinto Monument so that Trey (and Brittany) can learn a bit about the most important battle ever waged in the continental United States), as well as pay a visit to an alternate battleship, the USS Texas. I’m not sure if we’ll manage to squeeze everything into one weekend, but it’s nice to have goals. Trey’s mood however, will ultimately determine just how much – or how little – we get to see and do.
There’s a lot to see out there along the highways and byways of America, but too few among you are bothering to stop and pay a visit. If you’re a habitual flyer, there’s little I can do other than point in your direction and jeer, as you’re likely to be exactly the sort of waterheaded, Wal-Mart shopping mushbrain that wouldn’t listen, no matter how loudly I screamed at you. The journey is the destination, or at least is should be. It used to be, at any rate. A vacation was just as much the time spent traveling to someplace as it was the place itself, and the world was a little bit more magical for everything that seemed to be in it.
Today, all of the little spots of mystery and wonder and, primarily, the specific kitsch of Americana are dying off at an alarming rate, leaving America’s roadsides as little more than barren wastelands punctuated by shopping malls and big box superstores. When the country starts preferring the same 24-hour shopping experience they get at home to, say, the thrilling experience of visiting the campy wonder of a barely-live action witch trial at the Salem Witch Dungeon, then we lose a bit more of the charm and wonder that comes from local curiosities.
As the great American landscape becomes nothing more than something to look down upon while whizzing over at 500 miles-per-hour from thirty-thousand feet, there is less and less of a need for local flavor, and less demand for tourist attractions. As such, we’ll continue to condense vacation experiences into singular destinations, eliminate variety and inconsistency, and make everything predictable, safe and mundane. And, while this may be holiday heaven to your average vacationeer today, it all seems rather hellish to me. In fact, as these roadside wonders disappear and their lights go out one by one, I’m ironically 
reminded of something a fictional character from a theme park ride once said in a movie. Perhaps, as unlikely as it sounds, the Pirates of the Caribbean had it right all along, or at least Captain Jack Sparrow did when he said, “The world’s still the same. There’s just less in it.” Yeah, less and less. Every day.
Yesterday marked the beginning of my thirty-fifth year on this good, green Earth, yet I don’t really feel all that much older. I definitely don’t feel any wiser, which is no great shock considering that I’m already the Smartest Man Alive and have been for quite some time. No, if anything, all I feel is a little bit more tired and slightly more rundown, with just a hint of smug satisfaction that comes from having been through my life thus far and not having surrendered to its various afflictions and miseries. Not that it’s been all bad, mind you, but in my experience, whenever life is at its best is when some unexpected turn of vicissitudinous woe leaps from the murky depths of wretchedness and slaps me across the face like a wet herring. So, it is with a substantial level of apprehension that I approach my future, considering just how great things are right now. Past experience has conditioned me to expect the bottom to drop at any moment…
I don’t want to dwell on all of my life’s ups and downs, though. Not today, anyway. I’m sure that every person reading this has experienced their own share of life’s blessings and curses, and I don’t want to reopen any old wounds that some of you may have finally had scab over by now, nor do I wish to pick at any of my own crusty platelets, either. Rather, I’ll simply relate the events of yesterday quickly and cleanly, then leave you before things take a turn for the unnecessarily introspective. Besides, thirty-five isn’t so bad. Sure, it’s on the back side and sliding towards forty, but it’s still a birthday. After a few more years, my birthdays will become ‘Glad you haven’t died, yet!’ days, and I’ll likely sink into a deep pit of depression from which the only escape can be found in the lush leather seats of a flashy sports car – but I’m not there yet!
My day started with a delicious breakfast prepared without my intervention by my lovely wife’s very own hands. This by itself is no great or astonishing thing, seeing as how she’s taken to cooking most of our meals since we decided she should be a stay 
at home mom for a while, but because this was my birthday breakfast, everything seemed a bit more special. After breakfast, we lounged around the house alternating between watching movies and playing Rock Band until it was time to go get Trey from his father’s, who had graciously offered to return Trey early as a way of making up for bringing him back late on the day we left for Disney World. We picked him up, paid a brief visit to Brittany’s sister to drop of some Mickey Mouse Club ears to her daughter and husband, then hopped back into the car and drove to the mall. I needed a haircut and, since I apparently left my new supply of disposable contacts back in our hotel room at Disney World, I wanted to stop by the eye doctor’s office and buy some more.
I never made it to the doctor’s office, however. While I busied myself straining to make painful small talk with the unhappy cosmetologist that was aggressively cutting my hair with a suspicious and disconcerting level of enthusiasm that made me feel like I was playing Judge Turpin to her Sweeney Todd, Brittany and Trey meandered away in the direction of the cookie stand so that the little guy could choose the coolest, most awesome cookie cake for my birthday. For whatever reason, he declined choosing the cookie with the electric guitar in favor of one with a couple of love birds looking at each other whilst heart shapes flitter about in the sky overhead. He explained to me that one of the birds was me, the other was himself, and Mama was the floating collection of hearts.
I’m not sure what to make of any of this, though. Considering the fact that I am clearly more accurately depicted by a cherry red electric guitar than a sappy love bird, I can’t help but think that Trey was either lured by the siren’s call of extra icing, or 
that he is simply unaware of how awesome I am. Then again, he might have just wanted a design with two of the same thing on it so that one could be him and one could be me, with Mama playing some sort of ephemeral role as a benevolent and omnipresent heart-shaped entity signifying eternal love and support. Of course, it’s entirely possible that he just allowed his toddler mind to latch onto the first cake he saw that had a lot of icing, which he undoubtedly planned to smear all over his face as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, since he wanted that opportunity to present itself as quickly as possible, he made it clear that taking the time to go by the eye doctor’s would be a tragic mistake, so we skipped that particular spot.
Before I found them at the cookie stand, they had already bought me a birthday present and an oversized card, both of which I would receive later, after we were finally back home. We ate dinner, then Brittany carried the cookie over to our dining room table and jabbed a whimsical candle into its center. It was shaped like a question mark, which Brittany intended as a subtle jibe to my increasing elderliness, but that I quickly turned into yet another Dark Knight reference when I put on the Joker voice and complained about the Riddler decorating my cake. Yes, sometimes I am a geek. Sometimes.
We ate the cookie and I opened my card and present, the latter of which was a game for the Nintendo Wii called Toy Story Mania. The game is based off a ride by the same name at Disney World, although the home version is considerably less 
disturbing than its big brother. In the ride at Disney World, you put on some 3D glasses and sit in a little car that drives itself to various screens, where you then use a canon to launch different projectiles at the digital cast of the Toy Story movies. It’s a fun ride and Trey enjoyed it, which is why I thought the home version would be a fun thing to have. With visions of he and Brittany and I all playing together just like we did back at Disney World, I popped in the disc and started playing. In this version of the game, you simply point at the screen with your Wiimote, then push the A button to launch pies or darts or eggs at targets placed around the scene. It’s fun, but it does not entirely recapture the spirit and feel of the original, much more masturbatory version found at Disney World.
In the ride itself, you see, you tug on a little cord with a ball at the end to launch your projectiles which, thanks to the excellent 3D effect, seem to shoot straight from your cannon and fly off towards whatever target you’re aiming at. This all sounds well and good in theory, but in practice, the whole thing translates to a furious and steadily increasing stroking motion that has you tugging on the cord faster and faster as you play the game, trying to outscore your opponent by simply firing your cannon more often than they do. The whole thing ends with a finale that encourages you to jerk the little cord as hard and as fast as you can, until the ride comes to a climactic finish in an explosion of confetti accompanied by a well-timed burst of air. The whole ride seems to scream inadvertent sexuality, but maybe it’s just me. Still, if you ever get a chance to take a spin on Toy Story Mania, do yourself a favor and put in a little quality time with a Shake Weight, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the ride’s required motion. Acclimating yourself to the repetitive movements just might make the difference between being the elated winner of your ride car, or its pitiable and ill-prepared loser!
Of course, the home version – as I’ve said – is considerably less thrilling than the actual ride, but it’s still a lot of fun for a bit of family entertainment. After the game, we played with trains a little and read a story before climbing into bed at the end of the 
night. It may not have been a particularly exciting birthday filled with all manner of diversions and debauchery, but it was nice, all the same. Better than nice, really. It was small and intimate and, most importantly, it was a day spent doing family things with my family, which is perhaps the best present I could ever receive. I’m glad I made it to thirty-five for exactly two reasons, and they are the last two things I think about before I fall asleep at night, and the first faces I see when I wake in the morning. Their names are Brittany and Trey, and I wouldn’t trade the worst parts of my life today with any of the best parts of all my yesterdays, if it meant they wouldn’t be in my life. I couldn’t wish for anything better than what I have right now.
Then again, I’ve always wanted a Porsche…
The worst part about a terrific vacation isn’t when it ends. No, the worst part comes several days after it’s over, when you’re back in the real world and wistfully remembering how much fun you were having exactly one week ago, while acknowledging just how much fun you’re not having right now. It’s the curse of a great holiday to miss it when it’s gone, yet we must remember that such passing misery is but a small price to pay for those brief annual glimpses of joy that vanish from our lives just as quickly as they came flittering into them.
It’s tempting to put our yearly excursions upon shiny golden pedestals of awe and wonder, then spend the rest of the year gazing upon their glory while trying to figure out how to get back there again, but life should never be about your next vacation. Instead, life should be made up of hundreds upon thousands upon millions of little moments that at least equal, if not surpass, any we may experience while on holiday. So yes, I had an amazing time at Walt Disney World with my new family, but even as I mourn the passing of that happy week and return to the soul-crushing mundanity and relentless monotony of the real world, I can’t help but think that real life isn’t all that bad, after all. Sure, by comparison it is bleak and repetitive and woefully predictable, but a little normalcy never hurt anybody. And, while I’m more of a fan of the weird and wicked things in life than of anything commonplace, even I can admit that it sometimes feels good to be at least a little normal. Just a little.
There are, of course, some things I will continue to miss regardless of how positive an outlook I try to have on things. Trey, for instance, will never be three years old and at Disney World again. This is a small thing, I admit, but in the larger context of my time with the little guy, it takes on a bit more significance. These past twenty or so months with Brittany and Trey have been 
the happiest of my life, and I’m talking a delirious sort of happiness. I realized this during the vacation, at some random moment on some random day when we were doing some random activity. I reflected on my life and where it’s been, where it’s going and where it is now, and I discovered that I am gloriously, incalculably, and overwhelmingly Tom-Cruise-jumping-on-the-couchingly happy. And, the worst part about being happy with how things are right now, is the hideous certainty that comes from knowing that right now doesn’t last forever. I’m not very good with change, especially when I like how things are. But, since I know that the persistent march of time is, well, persistent, there’s not much I can do about the future other than to simply appreciate what I have right now.
With every day that passes, Trey grows a little older and leaves a little bit more of his baby self behind. Soon, he’ll start school. Later, he’ll abandon Mickey Mouse and Thomas the train. Eventually, he’ll discover girls, grow up, move out, and start his own journey through adulthood. I don’t like to think about all that, though. Not right now, anyway. Sure, I’m excited about all of the milestones he’ll pass as he grows through life, but I’m just not looking forward to the horrible time when it’s all going to be over. I don’t want to think about him not wanting to play trains with me, or to take little trips to silly places with the family, and I especially don’t want to think about that dark and inevitable time that will come that will find us waving to him from our driveway as his car pulls away towards college and the start of his life without us in it. No. I don’t want to think about that.
Instead, let’s talk more about Disney World, shall we? One last time, before I put it to rest until we go back next year. Only, what more is there to say, really? There are anecdotes to be sure, but at what point does this blog stop being a collection of essays and starts becoming a travelogue of my vacations? Hopefully not today, and not with this essay. This is the last gasp of my Disney World bibblebabble for now, but I couldn’t shut the book without mentioning at least a couple more things.
First, there was what happened at a fountain in the Magic Kingdom. The previous day, at another fountain in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, I’d given Trey a handful of coins to toss into the water as he made various wishes. Brittany and I educated him on the ancient and absurd ritual by showing him how to throw a coin into the water as we shouted out a wish, then he followed suit by mimicking us at first, then by making up his own desires. The next day, while Brittany stepped into a shop to browse for souvenirs, Trey and I sat down next to a fountain across the way. He asked for some “monies” so that he could make more wishes, so I grabbed the camera like the obnoxious tourist and proud father I am, and handed him a coin. I started filming just as he threw the glinting metal into the frigid water and shouted, “I wish for Kris!”
Other highlights from the trip include the insane security guard who chased our car down on foot after I flagrantly skirted Disney Law by entering my resort behind the previous guest, rather than stopping to wait for the little gate to close behind him before inserting my own room key to raise it again. Then, there was the tour guide we encountered when we visited the Florida Caverns State Park on our way back home, who threatened Trey with jail time while he flirted with Brittany and kept pronouncing the word “rocks” as “wawks”. Later, there was the world’s slowest gas pump at Florida’s scariest gas station, which stole eleven minutes and thirty-seven seconds from my life as I filled the Jetta’s fourteen gallon tank with fifteen gallons of gas after the pump’s automatic shut off failed to automatically shut off. But, beyond all these things, perhaps the most significant event (as far as my parental ego is concerned, anyway) happened on our last day at Disney World.
We’d taken Trey back to Disney’s Hollywood Studios so that he could watch The Little Mermaid stage show. He’s developed a strong fondness for the movie, along with “mermaid and her friends”, so we’d hoped to buy up a few plush toys he could play with back home. We found an Ariel with no problem, then discovered a plush version of her fish friend, Flounder, with relative ease. However, when it came time to find the “friend” who is arguably Trey’s favorite among all The Little Mermaid characters, the crab Sebastian was nowhere to be found. We eventually gave up the search at the Studios, and moved our noble quest on to the shimmering souvenir mecca called Downtown Disney.
shoulder. “Wait,” she said, “let me go see if I can get permission to sell that one.” She walked away and I spent the next several minutes wandering around the pretty princess section of Once Upon A Toy, pretending to be interested in several items of a pink and frilly persuasion in an effort to avoid further confrontation with the male clerk. After a little while, the girl appeared from around a corner with a large smile on her face. As she walked towards me, she lifted up her hands and gave me a double thumbs-up. “I had to ask two different managers,” she said, “but I got permission!” She went behind the counter and produced a small stepping stool. “We need to hurry though, before the first one I asked finds out.”
more stop for a quick pretzel and some ice cream before getting on the road, but as soon as he was able, he tore open the package and pulled out every character, strewing them across the back seat of the rental car. He fell asleep with his new friends all around him, and we drove off of Disney property for the first time since we’d arrived. (I’m not counting the McDonald’s excursion. Let us never speak of its horror again.) It was time to go home.
Well, the Great Exodus From Texadus is over and we are back from the magic of Walt Disney World, left to wallow in our misery and warm gulf coast air. You know you’re almost back in Texas when you pass into the hideous stain of Louisiana, traveling west along Interstate 10. The smell of refineries begins to permeate the air and the odious stench passes into your soul through your nostrils, even as it concurrently settles on your body like a death shroud, seeping into your skin and settling itself deep into the warm and squishy parts of your favorite bodily organs. Breathe deep, and you get the cancer. Touch your flesh to any exposed surface, and you get the cancer. Drink the water, cancer. Eat the food, cancer. Hell, just thinking too hard about such a gangrenous carbuncle of a state is enough to make you sick, so if you have to pass through it, at least do it quickly. Don’t linger.
However, it’s not like things improve all that much when you get into east Texas, mind you. My particular corner of The Lone Star State is as much of a whore to the whims of industry as is Louisiana, with the only difference being that we’re just happy to not be Louisianians. We live in Texas, after all, where we at least have decent roads. The only roads with passable surfaces in the whole of the wretched Pelican State are in and around the casino areas, while the rest of the territory languishes in potholes and poorly implemented, Lightning McQueen-styled blacktop resurfacing jobs. They’re bumpy and broken and bad, and it doesn’t help that nine out of every five Louisianians have no clue how to operate a motor vehicle. For your average Louisianian, speed limits and turn signals are things that happen to other people, while abusing the gas pedal and leaving the high beams on at all times are standard operating procedure. I couldn’t have been more thrilled at any two points in our trip than the rapturous elation I felt upon crossing the Louisiana state line both going to Disney and coming back. It truly is a terrible place to experience, unless you limit yourself to air travel and minimize your exposure to the natives by confining yourself to the New Orleans french quarter, where 98% of everyone there comes from somewhere else.
Aside from my disdain of passing through Louisiana, the rest of our vacation was an enjoyable time filled with the magic of childhood innocence and wonder, along with a heaping helping of muscle strain, endoskeletal fatigue and plain old exhaustion. It was also cold – bitterly so at times – yet we soldiered on in our bundled clothes and with our chapped lips, and we gave Trey 
a vacation that he will never forget. To his great credit, he never once got whiny or threw a temper tantrum, and was instead the perfect model of perfect perfection that anyone could ever expect from a toddler. He thanked us constantly for every little thing we did, kept telling us how glad he was to be “home”, and only ever managed to get pouty whenever his father called to talk to him. However, one can hardly blame a kid for not wanting to gab on the phone when there are theme parks to explore, and his mood generally bounced back fairly quickly. Mostly, he ran and played and jumped and danced and climbed and laughed and was, in a nutshell, enjoying being a kid. And we were enjoying it right along with him.
Early on in the vacation, it became apparent that Trey had developed a curious fondness for The Little Mermaid, to the extent that we held nightly viewings of the subaqueous superstar at the end of each day. We’d shuffle back to our “hotel house” after a long day of walking (or, in Trey’s case, being carried) and collapse into the bed for all of five minutes, before Trey decided that it was bath time. Once the bathing was done, we’d put on our footie PJs (Yes, I have footie PJs. Don’t you judge me. They rock!), make an always-exciting trip down to the vending area to refill our ice bucket, then amble back into the room and climb in the bed for a late night snack while we watched “the mermaid movie” for the ten bazillionth time. It was, in a word: enchanting. I think those nights with the three of us piled into that bed, eating junk food and watching movies probably make up my happiest memories from the entire vacation. Trey was handing out liberal doses of sweetness and hugs and kisses, and it was just a great way to end the great days we were having together as a family. I loved it.
Of course, the trip didn’t always go quite so smoothly as I might be making out. It is me I’m talking about here, and everyone knows that something always goes freakishly wrong with anything I ever plan. And, now that Brittany and I are together, the particularly unlucky version of luck we both seem to share has combined into one loathsome entity of an 
indivisible and inescapable horror the likes of which only the imagined lovechild of Ann Hodges and Henry Ziegland could potentially rival, and even then it’s unlikely. For example, both Brittany and I possess a negative amount of whatever esoteric stuff it is that allows normal people to navigate from point A to point B. It’s not that we have no sense of direction – it’s that we have less than no sense of direction. Even armed with a GPS, a substantial chunk of the trip was spent with me being yelled at by an angry little device with a deceptively friendly name. Tomtom, I have come to learn, does not like you deviating from his scheduled routes. Not one bit.
We also have a terrible time ordering food. It always comes out wrong, if it ever even comes out at all. Fortunately, this specific deficiency in the delicate art of food acquisition was not much of a problem at Disney World. Unless, of course, you count our experience in the Prime Time Cafe at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Trey was the only one in our three-person party to eat all of his food and receive a Clean Plate Club sticker, while the waiter force-fed Brittany her vegetables in the time-honored parental tradition of The Airplane as I skated by on my charm and my ability to hide my unwanted food. Granted, the whole idea of the Prime Time Cafe is to be transported back to a 1950s dinner at Mom’s house, so being humiliated by the waiter disciplining you for not eating your vegetables or for having your elbows on the table is all part of the schtick. Still, it’s always funnier when it’s happening to someone else, rather than yourself. At least, I think that’s how Brittany was feeling as we were all laughing…
Naturally, even our best laid plans often crumble beneath us. Having missed our reservation for a character breakfast upon our arrival (due to our unforeseen delay in leaving Texas), I secured us another reservation at another venue that had an opening for the next morning. Trey was, quite naturally, very excited at the idea of meeting his favorite Disney characters – 
and he remained excited, right up until any of them came within five feet of him. Once the enormity of their freakishly large plastic heads invaded his space, it was instant shyness mixed with apprehension and fear. He was more than happy to shove Mama and I into harm’s way, however, so most of the pictures we took with the characters have one of us in them rather than Trey. All was not lost, though. Near the end of our trip, we had one more character dinner at the Liberty Tree Tavern in the Magic Kingdom, and Minnie Mouse was successful not only in achieving direct body contact with Trey, but she also managed to give him a hug and a kiss, as well. Victory!
It should be noted that Trey did not have a single bathroom-related accident the entire time we were gone. He might have come close on one occasion, though. We were standing in yet another interminably long line to meet more characters that Trey insisted he wanted to take a picture with, but from whom he would invariably retreat into cowering docility once they punctured the sacred space of his personal bubble, when he suddenly announced a dire need to “Go more teetee again!” Regardless of the fact that we’d already made significant headway in the lengthy serpentine cattle pen leading to the characters, we forced an immediate extraction to the nearest rest room, where Trey then proceeded to regale the various visitors to the ladies room with his own special version of an all-nude review as he stripped down to nothing in order to pee. He does this. We’re working on it.
And finally, I’ll wrap today’s essay up with a note of caution to anyone planning a vacation to central Florida. If it gets cold and rainy, or hot and rainy, or in any and all other ways just generally too unpleasant to be outdoors, do not – under any circumstances – consider, even for a moment, going to the world’s largest McDonald’s PlayPlace. Oh sure, it might 
seem like a good idea at the time, and you may have seen it featured on the Travel Channel, but nothing can prepare you for the lurking horror that is the reality of a visit to the terrifying place. Now, during non-peak times, this might actually be a pretty nice place to visit, at least as far as a McDonald’s goes. It’s got a “bistro gourmet” menu featuring all sorts of fancy-sounding (and surprisingly decent looking) foods like various sandwiches and pastas, but we didn’t get to experience any of this finer fare. No, what we finally ordered when we eventually managed to locate the cashier counter, was nothing more exotic than the standard McDonald’s NotFood that you can get anywhere in the world. Of course, that was only after we managed to get inside the building, which we could only do after we navigated the unnavigable parking lot.
In a strange twist of fate, the world’s largest McDonald’s PlayPlace also features the world’s smallest and most infuriating parking lot in existence. It didn’t help that we arrived at the peak of the lunch hour rush, but the behemothic size of the building was definitely not proportional to the Lilliputian parking lot. To make matters worse, just when I thought I’d finally found a parking space, a claptrap version of the Partridge Family tour bus pulled in ahead of us, taunting me in that special way that only the Baptist Tabernacle Church Choir can. They puttered down the impossibly narrow lane in search of a parking space that couldn’t hope to contain the girth of the aging vehicle, before finally forcing me into a sixteen-point turn in order to avoid hitting them as the driver attempted to coax a thirty foot bus into a ninety degree turn. Luckily, a space opened up that I was able to pull into, or else I think we might still be there right now, stuck between that terrible bus and whatever car was certain to drive up behind us at any minute.
The evil did not end in the parking lot, however, and it didn’t even end with the food. No, the real pain was to begin upstairs, in the world’s most poorly designed toddler play area. It was one of those big, plastic hamster-trail type of deals, with opaque plastic tubes running hither and yon that little kiddos enjoy climbing through and exploring. The only problem was that the network of tunnels was so vast and so hidden, that no parent had any idea where his or her child was at any time. The most 
any of us could do was to simply wait while in view of the two exit points and hope that our children would come spilling out at some point. After a time, however, any parent begins to grow concerned over the welfare of their child as they linger in the hidden tubes of the PlayPlace for far longer than they should. We get worried, then we get stressed, then we get nervous and upset. Then, if you’re Brittany, you start to freak out a little and, if you’re me, you start trying to pretend that you’re not also freaking out a little. Eventually, you spot a bit of a familiar coat through one of only a handful of portholes made of transparent plastic that have been fiendishly scattered about the tubing with a miserly distribution, and you breath a little easier. Then, you try and yell over all of the other kids who are playing and ignoring all of the other parents who are, in turn, yelling at their own children who are ignoring them, and so forth and so on…
IF your child hears you, and IF he’s agreeable to the idea, you MAY be able to talk him down to one of the exit points; that is, IF he’s even able to hear you over the discordant cacophony taking place all around him. Fortunately, Trey did hear my pleas and honored them, although I made sure to sweeten the pot with the promise of some video games if he came down the slide. Once he’d made it to the exit, I scooped him up and we all went out into the game area, where we could actually see Trey playing. However, just to keep the travesty going, none of the machines dispensing point cards (the new version of tokens and quarters) were accepting debit cards. And, as Trey grew increasingly impatient with my repeated attempts to find a working card machine, I spied an ATM machine at the bottom of the steps.
Having found a way around the debit card problem, I jaunted downstairs to withdraw some cash to bring back up to the card machine so that I could finally purchase some points that would enable Trey to play some of the games I’d promised him he 
could play. However, after a ludicrous terminal fee was applied, I could only withdraw increments of twenty dollars. So, I withdrew twenty bucks and, after deciding that I was ready to leave this horribly overcrowded and obnoxious McDonald’s as soon as possible, I then took my twenty dollars and purchased a single small soft drink for which I then had to wait to pay in a queue for at least ten minutes, while a bewildered pack of little old ladies busily counted out seventeen dollars and forty-seven cents in loose change ahead of me. Eventually – finally – I was able to run back upstairs and shove a ten dollar bill into the gaping maw of the point card machine, and Trey was finally able to play some games.
Naturally, we found the most expensive, point-consuming games in the arcade very quickly, and tried to steer him towards those. Fortunately, one such game is a favorite of his back home, and involves a simple motion seat and large screen to simulate roller coasters and various exciting scenarios. This was a few hundred points a pop, and we’d gone through the credits and were making our way back out of the door and into the scary parking lot in no time. Hooray!
Much more happened on our little easterly excursion, but I’ve run too long today, already. I’ll fill you in on some of the more exciting things with Thursday’s essay, things involving copious amounts of Trey cuteness and the bizarre behavior of your average native Floridian. After that, I should finally return to some good, old-fashioned, hate-filled ranting starting sometime next week. See you real soon!
I’m taking the easy way out tonight. Throughout our time here, I’ve been sending tweets to my Twitter account about what we’ve been doing. So, instead of writing a lengthy blog after a long and rewarding – but tiring – day, I think I’m just going to post the relevant tweets from the past couple of days and leave it at that. I’ll be back next week with a more detailed retelling of the wonderful time we’ve been having on our first family vacation, but until then, head over to http://www.twitter.com/UncleJeet/ for live updates, if you’re so inclined.
I’m afraid I don’t have much energy to devote to much of anything tonight, creative or otherwise. Regrettably, the long drive sapped the entire family of our residual strength and we’ve spent the past twenty-four hours running on little more than fumes. Once we were finally able to get on the road after the unfortunate eight hour delay we were forced to endure, we made an arduous sixteen hour journey across the country, through the nation’s bowels of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas before finally settling deep into The Great American Urethra, otherwise known as the state of Florida. Every wannabe stand-up comic may have already made the Florida-as-penis joke far too many times than I’d like to explore, but the joke is a cliche because it’s true. The state is a giant, flaccid phallus that dangles off the edge of the country and metaphorically pisses the waste of North America into the warm and salty waters of the Atlantic Ocean, only nobody really cares because, well, it’s Florida! The country, after all, likely has low expectations of a state that brought us both pregnant chads and a governor named Jeb. And, let’s face it, aside from Disneyworld and NASA, the best Florida ever had to offer died with the cancellation of The Golden Girls.
Disneyworld. It’s a great place that, while fiendishly managed by malevolent corporate greed designed to rape its customers on every level imaginable, still manages to engender feelings of warm and fuzzy goodness from me and mine. Judging by Trey’s initial reaction to the place, for example, he’ll likely harbor a deep adoration of it for many years to come. When we first passed under the Walt Disney World gateway and pulled onto the 47 square miles of Disney property, he made his face smile so hard that it came around the other side, looking angry. Seriously, by the time we parked the car, he was so excited that I was certain he was about to Hulk out from pure joy, and I started watching for signs that his skin was turning green. Thankfully, it wasn’t – but that was just the start!
usually faster than taking Disney transportation (well, with the exception of the monorail, providing it doesn’t catch on fire), but the Magic Kingdom is an exception. When you drive to the Magic Kingdom, you don’t actually park at the Magic Kingdom. Instead, you park at the Ticket and Transportation Center, then board a tram to take you from the parking lot to the TTC itself, before finally choosing to depart for the park via boat or monorail. It’s a multi-step process that is annoying when you’re arriving and downright soul-crushing when you’re leaving. After a day of constant walking whilst carrying a child who somehow manages to increase his specific gravity with every step you take, the last thing you want to do at the end of it all is stand in more lines – and there are always lines. There are lines for everything: to get into the park, to leave the park, to buy food, drinks, clothes and toys. There are lines for the rides and lines for the shows, lines for the toilets and lines on the roads. Lines, queues, turnstiles and wraparound rat mazes funnel hundreds of thousands of people through a resort complex twice the size of Manhattan – and it works. It’s annoying, but it does work.
husband and a couple of other guys to come join her. Naturally, I could not let this slide, so I began yelling at them as we approached. I elaborated as we got closer, but their lack of response to my skillful display of unrepentant rage seemed to indicate that they simply weren’t impressed. Once they started speaking to each other, however, it became clear: they didn’t speak English. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact language, but it was of the eastern European variety, not that it matters. I’m fairly certain that cultural differences don’t allow for flagrant abuses of accepted social conventions like not cutting in line. Whatever country they were from, they were pricks, regardless of whatever language it was they were speaking.
me Daddy, sans the Kris. We toured Mickey’s house, and he met the famous mouse and his girlfriend. We rode Goofy’s roller-coaster and saved the galaxy with Buzz Lightyear. We were passengers onboard several trains, from the steam train that surrounds the park and the linear synchronous motor-propelled PeopleMover of Tomorrowland, to the train of a 1970s-tomorrow called the Monorail and the “crazy train” that Trey calls the parking lot tram. We walked into the Haunted Mansion and walked out as soon as Trey decided he wasn’t as into it as he thought he’d be. We watched a 3D CGI film called Mickey’s Philharmagic and laughed as Trey reached out to grab a phantasmic Donald Duck, or when he jumped in his seat as droplets of water jumped off the screen and splashed onto his face. We took part in a massive street dance-a-thon with a few Disney characters and a couple thousand other people, and we took a quick tour through the candy store. But mostly, I watched Trey having the time of his life, and I smiled.
I know it’s Monday and I’m posting ahead of schedule, but there are extenuating circumstances. You see, in an unfortunate turn of events, we were unable to leave this morning as we’d originally planned. In fact, it’s going on two o’clock now and we still haven’t left, nor do we expect to for several more hours, owing to the fact that Trey is still with his father, presumably somewhere in the skies above Colorado right now. Unfortunately, despite having made and agreed to plans months in advance that he bring Trey back home by ten o’clock this morning, his father is citing airline difficulties as the reason for the delay. However, a quick check of the Denver International Airport (DIA) website seems to indicate that there are no such delays. There was one slight delay of one flight due to maintenance issues, but if he had tickets to that flight, one could reasonably conclude that he would have actually boarded it whenever the maintenance was completed. No, instead he has told us that he was moved to another airline entirely with a departure time roughly five hours later, regardless of the fact that there are several flights from multiple airlines leaving earlier, and none of them are showing significant delays. A quick call to DIA confirmed all of this, as the representative advised us that there was no reason he would be moved to a noon flight, rather than simply board his original airplane after the slight delay. Of course, his refusal to supply the flight number of what he claims was his original flight makes a lot of this mere speculation on my part, but I’m left questioning the need for secrecy on his part, assuming he harbors no intent to deceive.
observe a father behave in this way, to the detriment of his son. If the travel delays were genuine, I might be more forgiving, but there just seems to be no evidence that they are. Instead, it appears as though Trey’s father is merely doing what he wants to do, regardless of what he agreed to in the past, or even what’s simply in the best interest of his son. If I’m wrong and he would supply his original flight number so that the delay could be verified, I’ll happily recant my negativity, although some animosity will remain simply because he was aware of his obligation to return Trey early this morning, yet made no allowances for delays by trying to leave a bit earlier – like, say, some time last night.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and our grand plans to welcome in 2010 involve nothing more than junk food, our pajamas and whatever random movies on Netflix and Zune seem vaguely interesting. Trey is in Colorado visiting his father’s side of the family, but whilst one may think us eager to go out on a baby-free night of celebratory bliss, we’re just too damned tired. The holiday season took its toll on both our bodies as well as our house, and we’re busily spending the next few days in a frantic clean-a-thon before heading out to Disneyworld next week. I think I’m mostly to blame for the chaotic state of disarray of the homestead, although I’m loathe to admit it. I hardly feel any guilt about it, of course, seeing as how the lion’s share of clutter was a direct result from the Christmas extravaganza Brittany and I put together for Trey. Yes, I went a little overboard – but it was our first Christmas together as a family, and I can’t be held responsible for the egregious scattering of various toys and boxes simply because I was overemotional about the whole thing. Trust me, I’ve already paid the price for my enthusiastic over-giving. I had to put everything together!
large chunk of plastic and found a small card inside that appeared to be assembly instructions. There were eight large pictures accompanying each of the eight steps, and once again I was confident that I could blaze through the assembly process with ease. And, again I was wrong. It turns out that the small card I found was actually some sort of addendum to the existing instruction manual that was itself buried deep within a hidden corner of the box. So, after following the addendum’s instructions thinking they were the actual steps of full assembly, I was actually skipping ahead in the process and bypassing some important steps that would later prove to be rather vital. However, I eventually got it all sorted out and the Smart Cycle Extreme! was finally assembled and ready to go. All that remained was to plug it into the television, which seemed simple enough. Again, the confidence. Again, the failure.
Smart Cycle Extreme! and discovered the confusing idea of motor skills when trying to peddle backwards. He eventually figured it out, of course, and the rest of the day was spent with him migrating from the train table to the bike while scattering every single one of his other presents in the widest area of distribution possible. We didn’t bother cleaning anything up beyond the wrapping paper, and instead spent the next few hours just letting him play with his new toys. Eventually, we piled into the car and headed to my sister’s for a family dinner and to let Trey spend more time with his cousins, but from the time we arrived back home until the moment he left to go visit his father, he was playing. Playing and playing and playing.
It’s only been four days since my last entry, the usual number of elapsed hours between the Thursday of one week and the Tuesday of the next, but it feels like so much more. Granted, the Christmastime Extravaganza kept us hopping, but there’s something more to it than that. Something elusive and transient, yet somehow concrete and permanent. It’s the relativity part of time defined through example and negated by experience. In a way, the period between Christmas Eve and today passed in the blink of the proverbial eye, yet there seems so much temporal distance between the two points that I almost can’t remember the days as having come around at all. It’s a strange and fascinating study in perception to consider time flying while it also stands still, and the only way I can describe it is to tell it.
who isn’t Karen Carpenter and, since I’m no Calista Flockhart myself, the 3+ hours of the journey to Palestine, Texas were, shall I say, less than ideal. Granted, the vehicle would probably seat three children much more comfortably than three adults (or, as it were, two adults and one enormous car seat), but the close proximity of child-to-child would be a recipe for inharmonious disaster of the ‘Will you stop touching me?!’ variety, if ever there was one. No, I would recommend no more than two people of any age be sequestered away into the rear seat of a Ford Edge, unless the idea of threatening to turn the car around every five minutes is appealing to you. It’s either that, or spend your entire trip shouting to the back seat and promising to give someone something to cry about whenever you get back home.
sister and brother-in-law were meeting us at the station to take the journey to the North Pole together as a family. I found a suitable spot and ended up sitting across from an old childhood friend of mine, who also happens to be my dentist. We exchanged hellos and introductions just before the conductor climbed aboard to announce that we were about to get underway. A few seconds later, he walked back into our car, shouting my last name and asking us to get off the train…
and Trey-shaped blurs, but not for lack of effort. A few minutes later, Santa Claus climbed aboard the train just before we left the North Pole and began traveling back to Texas. As we clanked down the tracks listening to music and singing Christmas carols, he eventually made his way onto our car, flanked by his elite elf guard. He handed out bells to all the children (which is significant if you know the story), and Trey eagerly grabbed his and began shaking it with unbridled enthusiasm. His cousins joined in, and soon the car was filled with the ringing of bells mixed with piped-in music and the discordant sounds of dozens of adults singing various Christmas carols off-key and with missing words. Trey and his cousins were jumping around ringing their bells and shouting incomprehensible phrases through the shining teeth of their smiles. It was, in a word: madness. And, in another word: magical.
our car like an angry Herbal Essences waterfall. The trip home was a slow one, punctuated by the shrieks of either high winds or my mother as she grabbed hold of her seatbelt with one hand and prodded my father to slow down with the other. We eventually arrived back home sometime around two-thirty in the morning, with an entire evening’s worth of preparations left undone. It was, needless to say, a very long day that culminated in an even longer night, followed by another day that was longer still. Nevertheless, it was a fun time that Trey will not soon forget, and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
‘Tis the day before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring except me clicking my mouse. As I write this, it’s early morning and I have only a precious few minutes until the clock strikes ten and all the little portals to Hell otherwise known as Retail Stores begin opening their doors for the final shopping moments of the season. Fortunately, I don’t have very much left to buy, unless you consider everything to be a lot. Oh well, I’m sure the crowds won’t be all that bad. Right? Right?!
Christmas Eve is just around the corner, and we’re booked solid straight through from now until the famous fattened elf retires his red suit to the armoire for another year and joins Mrs. Clause in the infamous* North Pole hot tub for some well-deserved relaxation on Christmas Day. Tomorrow, we’re taking Trey for a magical ride to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus via a roundtrip journey on The Polar Express.
In actuality, we’re driving back to the very same train station of indescribable clandestinity that gave us so much trouble back when I drove the family up to meet Thomas The Tank Engine. Fortunately, I’ve uncovered its hidden location and feel confident that we will arrive both on time and in good spirits. The night promises to be a fun-filled outing, complete with Christmas magic, some tasty hot chocolate and, of course, a little quality facetime with jolly old Saint Nick himself. After that, we’re driving the three hours (give or take) back home before going to bed and waking up the next morning for the insanity that is Christmas Eve. It will be a day filled with last-minute shopping and the fighting of uncooperative crowds, followed by family dinner, then church, and then family dinner continued before wrapping up with, well, wrapping up. Presents, that is. Christmas joy. Parental nightmares. Some assembly required…
Mostly, the whole sordid affair sees me confronted with a box, some wrapping paper bearing a whimsical design and a hateful disposition, and lots and lots of tape. Tape is so integral to the process, in fact, that I see the entire gift wrapping process as a grand challenge that can only be overcome with a furious and unchecked application of indecent amounts of the self-adhesive sticky stuff. First, I get a good look at the box and size up my opponent. Then, I measure out what I think is a proper amount of paper, but that soon proves to be either woefully inadequate or wholly overabundant. Either way, I measure incorrectly and the only difference at the end is how much extra cutting I have to do with the scissors, and how much tape must be sacrificed for the cause.
wherever he happens to be when we wake him up in the morning. The boy believes in taking the migrant approach to sleeping.) Unfortunately, since neither I nor anyone in my family is skilled in the arcane art of knitting, we weren’t able to get his name knitted into the fabric – but the stocking is his all the same, and we’ll find someone to knit his name into it next year. Brittany also received the stocking that my grandmother made for her years ago, back before I met her and when she was still my future wife. My grandmother was blessed with both foresight and determination, and she made sure to knit two blank stockings for me before she passed: one to be filled in with the name of my wife and one to bear the name of my first child. And, as Brittany is now officially part of the family, she has hers. Granted, some slight surgical procedures had to be performed upon it to remove the taint of the Nameless One’s blight from the sacred yarn, but since Brittany’s name should have been there to begin with, it was a fairly painless procedure. We’ll find some talented seamstress-type to knit the right names onto the stockings soon enough, but it won’t happen before Christmas. Unfortunately, while I do know someone who’s pretty handy with a pair of knitting needles, I’m not too sure someone nicknamed Hellchick would be the best person to approach for this sort of thing. That, and I’m pretty sure she hates me a lot…
that great. Still, a little elbow grease and the deciphering of some haphazardly translated foreign instruction manuals is a small price to pay for watching his eyes dance when he smiles as he opens his presents and plays with his new toys. However, there are miles to go before we sleep, and miles to go before we sleep – and Brittany just sat down behind me to get a head start on the gift wrapping. And, judging by the fits of sighs and muffled expletives, I think she wants my help.
In an effort to get Trey excited about the holiday season, we’ve taken to the practice of watching a Christmas movie with him every night, an endeavor which has proven to alternate between being mostly rewarding and occasionally infuriating, depending on the film. When the nightly movie is something like the 1964 TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or 1969’s Frosty the Snowman, I can easily slip into the long-ago mindset of my younger self by watching Trey gaze at the screen with the same childlike wonder I once had myself many, many moons ago. The old pangs of Nostalgia kick in and from the first moment a Burl Ives-shaped snowman waddles onto the screen to tell the tale of a red-nosed reindeer named Rudolph, or when the familiar rasp of Jimmy Durante’s throatnotes cut through the air, invoking the spirit of Frosty like husky musical pleas to the ancient jotunn goddess Skadi, my eyeballs are glued to the screen. There’s something magical in those old television specials that eludes modern filmmakers’ efforts to recapture – an intrinsic something that makes them stand apart as classics in a field of abject failures. It is with these sorts of lesser-than dregs of abysmal filmic failure that my Christmas joy is transformed into quiet misery and inescapable pain. Case in point: the Delaney & Friends Cartoon Productions 1997 offering titled The Littlest Angel.
This unfortunate version of The Littlest Angel is a gross retelling of the original 1946 children’s book of the same name by Charles Tazewell. If you’re familiar with the song The Little Drummer Boy, then you’re already familiar with the basic storyline of the book. As in The Little Drummer Boy, a child gives a modest gift to the baby Jesus that the child believes inferior but that the Lord ultimately embraces as the most worthy. Replace the drummer boy with an angel, and you have the basic outline of The Littlest Angel. (Interestingly, The Little Drummer Boy was originally titled Carol of the Drum and was written by Katherine Davis in 1941, but wasn’t popularized until a new arrangement was recorded by the Harry Simeone Chorale in 1958. Given the similarities between the two stories and the fact that The Littlest Angel was first published five years after Carol, but twelve years before Drummer brought the story into the consciousness of the general public, I’ll let you decide who ripped of whom.) The Littlest Angel first came to popular attention as a Hallmark Hall of Fame production in 1969 starring Jody from Family Affair along with Herman Munster, Felix Unger and the “The Hi-De-Ho Man” himself, Mr. Cab Calloway. I haven’t seen this version, but I’d be willing to bet an original signed recording of Minnie the Moocher that it beats the angel-lovin’ pants off of the horrible twenty-five minute cartoon I endured earlier this week.
The only version of The Littlest Angel that appears in the Netflix “Watch Instantly” catalog is the shameful production distributed by Family Home Entertainment (f.h.e.) that Brittany stumbled upon while browsing the Children’s section. Given that the production company behind this anemic version of the story is credited with only three other films, I can’t help but question f.h.e.’s decision to distribute this ghastly piece of animated crap. Don’t get me wrong, though. Family Home 
Entertainment was responsible for distributing (on VHS and Betamax) some of the most cherished animated fiction from my childhood with shows like Transformers, ThunderCats, and G.I. Joe. Without f.h.e., I wouldn’t have ever known the bitter pain of watching Optimus Prime’s glowing blue eyes dim and go out as he died, or been permanently scarred beyond all reason while I watched in horror as his signature red and blue paint job inexplicably faded into the deathly hues of a concrete grey as he slipped beyond the veil of whatever passes for a giant transforming robot’s mortality. It was heavy stuff for a nine-year-old, and a film that my friends and I considered high art at the time – and it did it all without the emotionally uplifting aid of Megan Fox’s jiggling boobies. (Take that, Michael Bay!) Still, even taking all of my childhood goodwill into account, I can’t help but hate f.h.e. for distributing The Littlest Angel, and I may never forgive them. Not ever!
What makes the movie so damned awful has nothing to do with the cheap animation, although it is suitably amateurish and just plain bad. It’s not even the lamentable voice acting, even though Paulina Gillis basically just rehashes her work on the Super Mario Brothers Super Show by voicing the littlest angel as a slightly masculinized version of Kootie Pie Koopa. No, what makes The Littlest Angel so abysmal is that the basic premise itself is downright hideous. Whereas The Little Drummer Boy innocently features a little boy who wants to play his drum for Jesus, The Littlest Angel is all about a freshly-dead four-year-old boy who is forced to romp about the hallowed halls of a Heaven that is as filled with iniquity as it is with snobbery. All of the other angels are depicted as judgmental, arrogant asshats who are both condescending towards the littlest angel and disapproving of his very existence in their otherwise peaceful (yet oppressively duty-filled) afterlife.
To add insult to injury, the littlest angel is also terribly alone. And since, according to the film, he is the only child in all of Heaven, one can’t help but wonder what happens to all the other children of the world when they die. However, after watching the film and bearing witness to the virulent perdition it calls Heaven, I’m not sure who to feel more sorry for: the littlest angel 
who is condemned to suffer illimitably as the only underclassman in a place that can be most accurately described as a divine middle school governed by a ruling clique of cruel and pernicious bullies, or the rest of the world’s dead children who are, presumably, either haunting their relatives back on Earth as ethereal specters or partying it up in Limbo with the rest of the troublemakers that didn’t qualify for a ticket on the fun-filled express train to an eternity of unyielding wretchedness. It’s a tough call.
Not content to basically destroy the general perception most Christians have of Heaven, the film goes on to make things even worse. The littlest angel is depicted as a klutz of the highest magnitude and a tiny excuse for an angel who can’t even fly, and whose halo is a few sizes too big for his head. He’s constantly pissing off the other angels by accidentally bumping into them or disrupting choir practice, and generally behaves like – surprise – a child, right up until he is confronted by the Understanding Angel. (Yes, the Understanding Angel. And no, I’m not making this up.) The understanding angel gets the littlest angel to confess that he is unhappy in Heaven, although the revelation comes as little surprise to an audience who is already equally as unhappy for having endured the miseries of the film thus far. The understanding angel learns that the littlest angel misses a box he had back on Earth, a box in which he kept his most cherished childhood possessions. He confides to the understanding angel that, if he only had that box, he would be happy again and would start behaving like a good little angel. (It should be noted that the littlest angel never does anything that could be considered as ‘bad’ by any standard. Clumsy, yes. Inept at flying and halo use, certainly. Childish and playful, no doubt. But bad? Hardly.) The understanding angel characteristically understands, and the littlest angel is allowed to reclaim his box from Earth.
Inside the box are simple items: some skipping stones, an egg, a dog collar and a seemingly immortal butterfly who comes fluttering out when the box is opened. The boy is ecstatic and, with his innate lack of talent somehow bolstered by his newfound enthusiasm for being dead, he starts acting like an ideal angel. He can suddenly fly properly, his halo stops falling off of his head, and he stops pissing everyone off. Everything is great, at least until God announces that he’s going to be popping a Jesus-shaped bun into Mary’s virginal oven…
The Heavenly Host is called upon to provide gifts for the new baby, although exactly how these ephemeral artifacts from the spirit realm will be transported to the physical realm of the Earth goes unexplained. All of the angels pile up various treasures and trinkets in the center of some sort of grand hall that eventually plays host to a giant, translucent Hand of God. The littlest angel frets over what to give the baby Jesus, so he goes to various angels asking for help, all of whom either turn him away immediately or simply dismiss him out of hand. Eventually, he settles on giving the only thing he has in his possession – his beloved box. So, he flies over to the big hall and plops his shabby wooden treasure chest of boyhood trinkets down on the floor amongst the other, much shiner presents. He is immediately ashamed.
The other angels, being the vicious little sanctimonious bastards that they are, point at the pitiful gift and make fun of the littlest angel. The poor little guy is shamed and embarrassed and even terrified that his gift is worthless and that God will reject it. In fact, so filled with self-loathing is he that he soon speeds himself back to the treasure pile in an attempt to reclaim the gift before the Lord can see it. Of course, just before he gets there, a giant glowy hand appears and reaches for the box as the booming disembodied voice of God confirms that the littlest angel is too late. The Hand of God opens the box and all of Heaven holds its breath as the other angels await His reaction.
Naturally, God loves the gift because its contents are from the Earth and from men, both of which His Son is born to be King. The Lord is thusly pleased with the gift and proclaims it superior to all the rest. The littlest angel is redeemed and the other angels quickly fall in line and start pretending to like him again after God miraculously transforms the pathetic box into the giant, shimmering star that shines above Christ’s manger, signaling the birth of God’s Son. And with that, the film is over.
I shouldn’t think that I would have to go over all of the points concerning exactly why this movie is so awful, but I’ll point a few for you, anyway:
the scene with the understanding angel, the movie flashes back to the littlest angel’s life and clearly shows a stereotypical middle-American, two-story home. Somehow, probably through some unexplained supernatural and Godly folderol, the events of the movie take place about 2,000 years before and after the events of the movie. It makes a sort of sense that doesn’t to somehow conclude that a child born in the present could not only witness the birth of Christ, but also contribute to it by forming the fabled guiding star from his little wooden box – but such is the nature of God’s work, I suppose. Mysterious ways and all that.That’s all I have the stomach for right now. I was going to go into more detail concerning the theological shift that has taken place since the popularization of the notion that people become angels when they die, but I don’t have the energy right now. Besides, I don’t want every essay to devolve into a bitter rant about the willing cognitive dissonance of the religious just because I’m exposed to it ad nauseum during the Christmas season. I do, however, want to caution anyone who might see this innocent looking title and decide that their kids might enjoy it: learn from my unenviable experience and avoid this odious piece of animated offal at all costs. It is twenty-five minutes of sanity draining inanity at the least, and potentially damaging to your child’s fragile understanding of his own theological and existential dilemmas, at worst.
And yeah, I know that you’re sitting there shaking your head at that last sentence. However, just because Little Johnny doesn’t know what existentialism is doesn’t mean that he won’t be horribly affected by a soul-crushing depiction of an insidious and miserable afterlife that no one in their right mind would ever want to experience. Seriously, you’d do less damage to your child if you screened a double feature of Silent Night, Deadly Night and Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter on Christmas Eve than you would if you made him suffer through the horrors of even five minutes of The Littlest Angel.
Brittany and I wanted to take Trey to pick out a Christmas tree at the first of the month, but time and the elements conspired against our efforts, culminating in the grand and whimpering anti-climactic fury of an impotent snowstorm that covered our cars and not much else on the first Friday in December. The residual effects of the great blizzard of aught nine here in southeast Texas left the area soggy, damp, moist and muddy, with a nice haze of perpetual precipitation that has busied itself by alternating between a light haze, a dense mist and an impenetrable blanket of fog over the past several days. This past Sunday, however, we were finally faced with both clear weather and a delightful dearth of familial obligations with which to otherwise occupy our time. So, we piled in the car and headed towards the Land of Canaan known as The Christmas Tree Forest!
For those who do not know (which is probably everyone), the aforementioned forest is actually just a small patch of highway real estate located in the parking lot of a local computer shop, next to a large hardware store. To adult eyes, it may simply look like any other roadside vendor set up to exploit the season by hocking his annual supply of amputated coniferous evergreens upon a generous and gullible public – but through a child’s eyes, it is a deep and recondite forest filled with giant trees of unquestionable mystery and wonder. Trey was excited from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning and learned of our lumberjack plans for later in the day, and he made no effort to hide his elation. And by that, I mean that he mostly spent the day hopping up and down in one of several spots as he chanted various inscrutable mantras that were punctuated only by occasionally recognizable words and phrases, most of which involved either a Christmas tree, a famous magical snowman, or a reindeer named Rudolph.
Having decided to shop locally rather than heed the assorted pleas to reason inflicted upon me by various friends and family members who urged me to simply buy a tree from an established chain of retail outlets (honestly, it’s like they don’t even know me at all), I was pleased to find that the local businessman still had a rather nice selection at this late stage of the game, even as I was happy to note that it was obvious most of his stock had already been sold. (Take that, Smiley Ball Devil Store!)
The whole of the experience went by fairly quickly, and can best be summarized by the following sequence of events:
We spent the rest of the afternoon bringing the tree inside and decorating it with several hundred lights of an increasingly festive variety. In my befuddled past, I did my best to accommodate the lunatic sensibilities of my image-obsessed ex-wife and endeavoured to provide her with an elegant, party-ready Christmas tree complete with a unified theme and mood lighting. Now that I’m a parent, however, I don’t do themed trees, nor do I think any parent should. Meticulously decorated trees adhering to a unifying aesthetic of one central theme are very pretty to look at, but they don’t belong in the homes of parents. Such soulless intricacies are for single people or childless couples looking to impress friends through the artifice of their own mass-produced creation, or simply for vapid families devoid of love and creativity. No, when a child is present, a Christmas tree should be a rather ghastly sort of creation, the strange and delightful Frankensteinian result of the confusing and often wondrous way that a child views the world. There should be placed upon its branches a fierce and defiant hodgepodge of ornamental decoration that reflects the interests and traditions of every member of the family, from all stages of their lives and with a complete disregard for cohesive thought. It should, it other words, be fun!
‘Family!’ by highlighting just how eclectic and weird all families truly are, and any parent with a delicately trimmed tree is either lying to the world with every insincere ornament they purposefully hang upon its branches, or they’re simply delusional. Either way, they are more concerned with image than with substance. You know…phonies.Trey fell asleep early last night, after his weekend of excitement. We’d spent the day before at his cousin’s birthday party, where Trey was able to climb and jump and fall “Like Wezio!” all day long, and Sunday’s excitement of the Christmas tree proved too much to bear. He was running on fumes by seven o’clock and out like a light before eight. He eventually woke up sometime later though, just before Brittany and I climbed into bed. He wanted a drink and we’d promised to watch a Christmas movie, so Brittany set about finding something appropriately short on Netflix. Unfortunately, what she chose was a little straight-to-video cartoon from 1997 that was animated with a budget of five dollars and a sackful of idiocy. It was called The Littlest Angel and it consumed twenty-five minutes of my life I’ll not get back in a hurry. It made Brittany cry by pulling on her Mom-centric heartstrings, though – but I think I’ll save the details of that insidious development of misguided holiday cheer for Thursday’s essay. Cheers!
After Tuesday’s essay, I planned on writing something a little lighter today, perhaps with some froth on top and maybe some cheerful sprinkles, like some sort of literary version of a coffee house barista serving up joy, one cup at a time. Unfortunately, I remembered that the only thing I hate more than coffee is a coffee house, and the only thing I hate even more than a coffee house is the perky and annoying barista behind the counter who takes your order with disapproving scorn and then sets about brewing up a single-serving batch of paint-by-numbers java in one of three infuriatingly pretentious quasi-Italian sizes. And, as is so often the case when I sit down to write these little tarradiddles, my good intentions transformed into seething hate and disappointment before I could type even so much as the first damned predicate. Consequently, I bring you today’s essay in the amazing technicolor of my angry dreamcoat. Enjoy!
I think I am most often driven to prickled anger by nothing more than simply being awake and walking around in the world. Frustration is the root cause of it, more than anything else. Frustration at how happy and content most people are in living simple, mundane lives of little consequence and even less meaning, and the special sort of frustration that comes from knowing that most of them actually chose to be members of humanity who live their whole lives moving less in this world than the scant shovelfuls of dirt it takes to bury them when they’re gone. We live in a world populated by people bound by the invisible shackles of purposeful enslavement that they themselves allowed to be clapped upon their wrists and slapped around their necks, all in exchange for a life less demanding of all the things that should make life worth living. Life is intended to be a series of insurmountable obstacles that we all strive to overcome by taking risks and conquering our foes in whatever hideous forms they take. It is supposed to be filled with wonders so unimaginable that they drive us towards either genius or insanity and leave our mouths agape in awestruck amazement. It is supposed to be dangerous, but rewarding. Terrifying, but blissful. Unforgiving, but fair. It is not supposed to be filled with sacrifice, acquiescence and fear – and it is most definitely not supposed to be safe.
I spend my days walking with the undead, the zombie-like hordes of seething masses who have lived for nothing and who will die for nothing long before they ever realize that they’ve stopped breathing. Don’t get me wrong, though. I know that living a life of causes and crusades isn’t for everyone, and that simply surviving this world and enduring the ordinary struggles of an ordinary life is a noble thing in itself.
The parent who sacrifices his or her dreams on the altar of their family’s happiness is an unsung hero in my book, and I do not wish to denigrate anyone who has made the choice to put someone else’s life ahead of their own. It’s a choice I’ve made myself, to an extent. Still, it is a sad and miserable status quo that sees this sort of life as the standard against which all others are measured. The family man who locks his dreams away in a dark and hidden place in his heart so that he can go to work and sell his soul to unimaginative people with small minds and big ambitions day in and day out, all for the sake of the infinitesimal paycheck he brings home to his family is the epitome of average. He is most of us, the everyman, and he lives the average sort of life that has become the goal for which the less fortunate strive to reach and that the truly elite look down upon with dismissive scorn and derision. Maybe he is you, or maybe he was your father or your brother, or the kid you teased at school. Maybe he’s the kid who teased you. Maybe he’s me. Maybe he’s all of us…but why?
It’s almost as if the voice of the universe itself creeps into our bedrooms late at night when we’re young and whispers discouraging words into our delicate teenaged ears, spelling out the rules of the world and dissuading us from pursuing the dreams that would give our lives meaning. And as the years of our lives tick by, we remember those words and we listen to them. We listen to them and then we obey them – and as we obey, we give in a little and we give up a little until, on some sad and lonely day decades later, during the twilight years of our lives between the time that our Sun was at its zenith in a sky full of promise to the very last nanosecond before the flickering flame of our lifestuff is permanently extinguished and we leave this world for good, do we finally get it.
The thought comes at us like a demonic locomotive, spitting fire and tearing down heavy iron tracks leading off to infinity in one direction and back towards the moment we were born in the other, steaming faster and louder and angrier
with each passing moment until it’s finally right on top of us, billowing sulphuric smog from its hellish smokestack and scraping our heels with its jagged metal cattle catcher. And, just before it finally overtakes us and we’re dragged screaming beneath the grinding horror of its undercarriage to be shredded betwixt track and wheel, we realize that we are already dead. That we’ve always been dead, at least since that very first time we each listened to that very first doubt in the back of our heads, whispering terrible lies that crippled us before we ever began to truly live. Familiar lies they are, to anyone who’s ever heard them. To everyone.
Fortunately, the universe smiled on me in the quizzical way it has of making things worse before they get better. I had to endure the pain and misery and lunacy of a life I shouldn’t have been living, before I could understand and appreciate
the life I was always meant to have. I had to virtually extinguish my career before I could truly ignite it, and I had to come face-to-face with all of the choices I’d made, good and bad. I looked back and saw a youthful life filled with hope and promise until it was nearly snuffed out by the artificial demands of an unforgiving society. I thought I needed to grow up, to throw out my childish dreams and get busy being a responsible adult. I thought I needed to let go, to give up…to die. So I did.
Thankfully, it didn’t last long. With my marriage aborted, I was suddenly free to rekindle the lost fire of my youth at a time when I was old enough to know that I’d lost it, but still young enough to have a chance at getting it back. I was one of the lucky ones, to have my life dashed upon the jagged shoreline of regret at the most opportune moment. Others aren’t so fortunate, realizing their undiscovered regret when it’s far too late to do anything about it. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you aren’t. Maybe you will be. Maybe you won’t. Maybe all that matters in this life is the hope that it can be better, that we can all hold onto our dreams long enough to see at least a few of them come true until we finally understand that love’s the only thing in this world worth a damn.
immune to the disapproval of others. I hold allegiance to no one, and none hold command over me. I take without asking, I speak without censoring, and I walk in the restricted places of the world. I speak harsh words and sometimes demand more of those around me than I do of myself. I am not humble. I swell with pride at a job well done, and learn without apology for the mistakes I make along the way. I believe the world is malleable, and everything in it can be bent to the will of Man. I hold fast to hope, when all hope should be lost. I cheat without remorse, preferring to believe that rules apply only to those willing to be limited by them. I win, even when I lose. Most of all, I survive. I endure. I go on.
Most of all, succeed in everything you do. Failure is a part of life, but you only lose when you accept defeat. Fail until you win, then keep on winning. Question authority. Question everything, then fight against it. Always fight, with words and deeds and fists. Life will make you bleed, but it can only break you if you choose to stay broken. If a bully kicks sand in your eyes, kick rock salt in his. And remember –
Embracing the dynamic spirit of the American dream and throwing caution to the wind, I recently decided it was time for a change. Just a little change, mind you. An insignificant one at best, but substantial enough to raise the eyebrows and lower the expectations of those around me, at least so far as their perception of my age is concerned. I didn’t set out to take a few years of the clock and pursue that most elusive and costly of American ideals by chasing the dragon of eternal youth, but what I did to myself seems to have had that effect. Like I said, it was a minor thing and nothing to write home about, but even the tiniest of pebbles and all that…
I shaved. That’s all. I didn’t go under the knife for cosmetic surgery to reduce the signs of aging, and I didn’t inject botulism into the sensitive folds of my delicate epidermis. I merely grabbed a razor and cut away the facial hair that has defined my face for a solid decade now. I don’t know why I did it, other than the fact that I found myself standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror one morning, freshly showered and preparing for the day when it dawned on me that I was tired of looking at my beard every day. A few moments of quiet contemplation brought out the realization that facial hair has become quite trendy of late, especially amongst the vapid wasteland army of the hipster crowd, not to mention the ever-growing throngs of men so emasculated by society that they cling to their whiskers like scruffy life preservers drifting along in an ocean of estrogen, sensitivity and regret.
The beard, the mutton chops, the soul patch. The cop stache, the youth pastor goatee, and the permanent five-o-clock shadow. All of these variations on the theme of A Man serve as outward signs of masculinity, but all are nothing more than the 
vestigial whispers of something long ago lost and all but forgotten in this hideous contemporary world of the now in which we all live and work, and try to love. The role of the man has changed in this brave new era of politically correct behavior and marketing-driven expectations. Teamwork is the name of the game today, and the rules are simple. Everyone is equal, no one is special, and success comes from the equal cooperation of every member in the hive. Never take anything, always ask permission. Never initiate, always participate. Never conquer, always negotiate. Don’t hit, don’t punch, don’t kick. Don’t fight. Accept. Fall in. Follow.
However, traditions of blood die hard in the deep, dark places of a man’s soul and these new ideals of a defeatist and apologist society come at a price. We all know something isn’t right, that the world around us is slightly off-kilter and teetering on the precipice of something we can’t identify or even see – but it’s there. It’s all around us, in the soft and doughy eyes of a bleating hipster struggling to assert control over his body and live a life he’s never known and that was never really his, anyway. He wears ironic t-shirts and retro clothes that harken back to a time of unclean men doing unclean things, a time he has neither known or ever understood, but that he senses was somehow better than our time is now. He grows his sideburns long and styles his hair with expensive products designed to make it look disheveled, unkempt and natural. He strives to be a man of the past in outward appearance, whilst still willfully accepting the unnatural order of the day. He is a hypocrite, a poseur, and a liar to both himself and everyone around him. He is the modern man.
The teenager stricken with the blight of puberty cultivates his facial hair as it bursts forth from the baby fat of his face in splotchy patches of horrific irregularity. 
He tries the mustache first, perhaps toys with a goatee, and eventually returns to shaving once his girlfriend tells him how awful he looks. Later, once completely free from the shackles of adolescence, he goes to college and “finds” himself. Typically, this involves lots of alcohol and innumerable sexual encounters of random and delightful frequency until he figures out who he is and what he wants to do with his life. In a perfect world, this young man would subsequently set goals and formulate plans, then spend the bulk of his adult life working to realize his dreams. In the real world, however, he usually just gets an MBA and becomes an enormous douche.
Not all facial hair is some sort of unconscious reaction to emasculation and cognitive dissonance, of course. Sometimes, a guy just looks better with some scruff than without. I know I did – or at least I thought I did – for years. At first, the beard existed merely to help deflect some of the Kiefer Sutherland stares I’d receive from random strangers as I went through my days. Later, though, it just became part of my face. Time slipped past and I grew so used to it being there that going without it seemed foreign. I didn’t think it made me look older, although I knew that without it I looked younger. I didn’t even think it attracted women, as the fairer sex seems to have an aversion to body hair that no doubt comes from the demands of a still-sexist society, but for which I have no complaints. No, the only reason that the beard stuck to my face for so many years was because it had already been there for so many already. It was a part of me and I of it, until I finally realized that I forgot what my face looked like without it.
So I was standing there in my bathroom, staring at my face and thinking, and I understood that I was part of the problem. I 
was another bearded guy in a growing crowd of bearded guys, and I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to associate myself with the connotations that facial hair brings with it. I wasn’t trying to find my lost manhood or assert my masculinity over an increasingly feminine world. I had simply grown used to something I’d had on my face for years, and that I’d originally put there to help make me not look like someone I’d never met. It was stupid, and I was stupid for having done it. And, with a razor in one hand and a can of shaving cream in the other, I amputated the wretched thing from my face. I felt free. In control. Confident. Wise.
Unfortunately, I also looked like a twelve-year-old boy with freakishly long legs and an overactive growth hormone. Everyone around me instantly commented on it, taking care to stress how much younger I suddenly looked and about how I had a baby face with great skin, smooth and fair and hairless. Trey even commented on the whole thing, scrunching up his face and grabbing my chin with his little hand. “Where’d your chin go?” he asked, puzzled and genuinely confused. “Where’s your brown chin? You cleaned it and throwed it in the trash?”
Out of my entire circle of friends and family, only my wife insisted that I didn’t really look any younger. Bolstered by the numerous reactions I had that expressed the contrary view, I protested and insisted that I did, in fact, look like I was twelve years old. “No, you don’t,” she said, rolling her eyes and sighing. “At best, maybe you look thirty.”
That’s still almost five years gone, so at least it’s something. Still, so loathe to admit defeat am I that I challenged her to prove that I looked any older than seventeen. She suggested we go to a store so that I could try to buy a pack of cigarettes. If I got carded, I’d win a massage. If I didn’t, she’d win gloating rights. I accepted the challenge!
I lost the challenge. Horribly. I had to admit that I was wrong and that she was right. I had to accept the sad fact that I am constantly aging and have been for some time, it seems. Brittany, however, will always be eight years younger than me and, currently, still looks as though she’s about fifteen years old. She denies it, of course – but she still gets carded all the time, to the extent that some places suspect a fake ID and run her though the paces before letting her buy so much as a lottery ticket.
I’m not sure if I’ll let the beard grow back or not. I know that shaving every morning is a pain in the ass, and I’m already tired of doing it. I also don’t like the idea of shelling out hundreds of clams each year on razor cartridges and shaving cream, although Santa Claus can remedy that by bringing me a straight razor for Christmas. Still, I hate being part of any type of trend to such an extent that I’ll probably endure the daily shaving for the foreseeable future, or at least until the facial hair fad dies down a bit. It seems you can’t throw a Schick these days without hitting at least fifty goatees and thirty or so chin straps, so until the men of the nation start walking around bare faced again, I’ll probably keep my mug whisker free.
And you never know – that guest spot on 24 might finally materialize one day, and I want to be ready. It’s about time the world learned the seedy truth behind Jack Bauer’s long-lost love child, and with a clean shaven face and a little All-American charm, I could be that bastard! Oh yes. I could.
I was giving thanks last week, all last week and to no one in particular. It was just a general blanket sort of thank you to the universe at large, I guess. Mostly, it involved me not doing any work whatsoever, hence the lack of new essays right here at Coquetting Tarradiddles. I did eat a lot, however, which turned out to be sort of like work after the fourth trip to the leftover pantry. Fortunately, gratuitous mastication seems to somehow indicate gratitude around this time of year, as long as dead turkey flesh and various casseroles are involved. In any event, I was otherwise occupied and I slipped out the back door when it came time to post last week’s essays. I’m back today though, so be thankful!
Today is the first day of December, which means that Christmas is only twenty-four days away. I’d like to say that I have all my shopping done and am happily enjoying the festive Christmas spirit – but I’d also like to say that I’m a golden god who pees rivers of 24-caret glory. Some things just ain’t true.
In all seriousness, I’ve no idea what to buy anyone this year, save for my blushing bride. All she wants, she tells me, is a new HDTV for the bedroom
and an Xbox 360 of her very own to go along with it, no doubt due to her overwhelming obsession with the game Dragon Age. I’m not sure if it’s healthy to feed this strange new addiction of hers, but I might risk it. Infusing a bit of geek into her personality has positive side effects after all, not the least of which is an increased ability to recognize my bizarre variety of references. When I jokingly suggested we name our child James Tiberius, for example, she immediately burned my soul with hate-lasers shot from her angry eyeballs and made it clear that she would never give birth to Captain Kirk. Never ever. (No, she’s not pregnant. Not yet, anyway…)
I also helped get her over her strange aversion to the word ‘frak’ by subjecting her to enough episodes of Battlestar Galactica to erode her misgivings concerning the curious lexicon employed by the battle-hardened last survivors of the human race as they flee from the genocidal rage of an endless army of really hot robots. She just needed to get the first one out of of the way, I think. After all, the first fraking is always the most difficult, but after a couple more really good fraks, you kind of start to like it. In fact, she’s even admitted that she’s begun to enjoy the show. Geekdom is a slippery slope, however, and there’s a fine line between the harmless fun of, say, wearing a ‘Miskatonic University’ t-shirt and the hideous consequences of spending all your free time roaming the fantasy realm of Azeroth looking for a Night Elf to penetrate with your Axe of +2 Sexterity. I only pray I haven’t set her down a terrible path…
Speaking of the Xbox 360, this time of year is generally known as the Gaming Season, where all of the top AAA titles come out all at once,
competing for your attention and hard-earned dollars. One such game came out a couple of weeks ago, called Assassin’s Creed 2. And, despite all logic and reason, I was forced to pay for it out of my own pocket. Despite knowing someone in the upper echelons of the development team, and despite having had to endure his incessant onslaught of mockery and gloating as he enjoyed pointing out that his game rocked, I was not sent a free copy. Nevermind that I predicted the game’s entire storyline the moment I found out about its setting, or the fact that I’m generally such a damned swell sort of fella, or that I introduced him to Terry Pratchett; I was given no preferential treatment. Instead, I had to schlep to the store and buy it like all of the other plebeian mouthbreathers of the world. The shame was almost unbearable. Almost.
I’m happy to report that the game does indeed rock, although I have to admit that I don’t think as highly of it as does Trey. He, in fact, loves the damned game. He demands that it be playing on the TV whenever he wishes to watch it, and goes so far as to walk across to room to pick up the 360 controller and bring it to me, insisting that I “Pway da Wezio game!” The character you play is named Ezio, and the majority of the game (at least while Trey is watching) is spent maneuvering him to climb up the sides of tall buildings in renaissance Italy, looking for boxes of treasure to loot before jumping off of the roof to fall several stories into the soft safety of a well-placed bale of hay. Trey will walk up to the screen and talk to Ezio, pointing out boxes of treasure and suggesting buildings to climb. It’s all very cute, especially when he and Ezio get involved in a lengthy conversation about “hay buggies” – but it has led to one curious and potentially catastrophic side effect: Trey has started climbing.
He’ll scale the Mount Everest of our bed and announce to the world that he is “dooding it wike Wezio!”. He runs at breakneck speeds as fast as his little three-year-old legs will carry him, then suddenly turns, heads towards me and leaps into the air to come crashing down into my lap in a fit of laughter and giggles.
“I joomp in da Kwis hay wike Wezio!” he shouts, before hopping to the ground to repeat the whole spastic process all over again. It’s quite cute and charming, but in the back of my mind I can’t help but think about him attempting to scale the brick walls of my home before jumping off of the roof into a phantasmic bale of hay that exists only in his mind’s eye. Fortunately, he doesn’t play outside unattended, and so far he’s shown no signs of being able to scale the textured sheet rock of my home’s interior, so he’s safe for now. I am, however, planning to hold both the game’s publisher responsible as well as my heartless, uncaring “friend” who worked so hard to bring the game to life, should any unfortunate accidents occur as a result of my three-year-old suddenly thinking he’s become a fifteenth century Italian assassin who’s running through the streets of Venice and ascending the ogee arches of St. Mark’s Basilica before plummeting down into a conveniently-placed wagon filled with hay. You have been warned, Ubisoft! (You too, Chuckles.)
In other news, I changed the water pump on my car this past week after the metal beast subtly indicated to me that it was in distress by exploding coolant all over the engine whilst Brittany and I were waiting in line at a local fast food joint. The smell of burning anti-freeze does not blend well with french fries. Make a note.
I’ve also started putting out the Christmas decorations, which is something I mostly skipped last year on account of the hurricane and various other goings-on. This year, however, I’m decking the halls like Chevy Chase…and having just about as much luck. One of my main lawn decorations suffered a mysterious injury between now and the last time I put it up, and repairs are required before I can unleash its air-blown glory upon the neighborhood once again. Also, Brittany’s very-cool-but-insanely-heavy-and-huge apothecary table is sitting right where the Christmas tree is supposed to go, and the space ain’t big enough for the two of them. So, rather than assemble my grandmother’s antique artificial tree in the (now apothecary table-filled) window as is tradition, I think we’ll be putting up a real tree this year. We’ll just have to settle for a slightly shorter tree than I’m used to, which we’ll proudly set up on top of the table.
Trey has never had a real Christmas tree, and since nothing says Christmas like a slowly dying coniferous evergreen in your living room, I think he deserves one. I hope he’ll enjoy it more than the artificial tree, and the fact that it will be standing atop the apothecary table brings with it the added bonus of presents elevated from inquisitive toddler hands that might otherwise be tempted to execute a pre-emptive strike on Santa’s bounty before Christmas morning. My parents always had a natural tree for Christmas, and there’s something about the scent of a pine tree mingling with the distinctive smell that comes from the slightly heated plastic of bubble lights that always makes me feel like I’m a kid again. One whiff and I’m ten years old and eagerly anticipating waking up on Christmas morning, hoping there’ll be a brand-new Apple ][ computer waiting for me under the tree. I’ll never forget that Christmas, and I hope that I can give Trey the same sort of vivid memories from our celebrations together as my parents gave to me.
Then again, my cell phone runs a better version of The Oregon Trail than my old Apple ever could, so I’ll have to keep up with the times and get Trey something current and just as exciting to him as my old beige monstrosity was to me so many years ago. I can’t imagine what sort of holographic, microchip brain implanted, augmented reality version of The Oregon Trail that may exist for whatever super computer will be around whenever he hits the big 1-0, but I do know that I’ll probably still die of dysentery before I even make it to Fort Laramie – but at least I won’t have to flip the floppy disc to side 2 when I get there!
Brittany and I were not married on October 24, 2009, at least so far as Barbara Ann Radnofsky would have us believe. Babs is running for Texas Attorney General on the Democratic ticket, and she’s just announced that Texas banned ALL marriage way back in two thousand and five, when the Lone Star State of Stupid passed a constitutional amendment intended to ban gay marriages. It turns out that there’s a little clause in the amendment that reads, “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.” That’s right – in an effort to rule out potential massaging of the language and prevent things like civil unions and domestic partnerships, the state of Texas has ratified itself into a corner. It cannot technically grant legal marriages to anyone. Anyone!
Hyperbole aside, the reality of this situation is that Barbara Ann, not content to revel in the passing fame of her Beach Boys-inspired name, is just playing politics in her race to the AG throne. The amendment was passed under the current attorney general, a Republican by the name of Greg Abbott. And, while Costello was unavailable for comment, Abbott’s spokesman said that the attorney general stands behind the amendment and later went on to confirm that Who is, if fact, on first base.
This is one of those sound and fury type of stories, the kind that stirs up a lot of fervor before sinking slowly beneath the undulating waves of the public consciousness. It’s playing party politics and fighting for sound bites, while yet another candidate starts up their campaign on a platform of change. Has anyone ever stopped to consider that every damned candidate runs on this same platform, yet nothing ever actually changes? Well, not for the better, at least. When the natural order of things is to atrophy, change only seems to bring about ruin and decay. And, while freedom slowly erodes like the disappearing beaches of Galveston island, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Same shit, different day. We go on.
So, in its attempt to ban the innocuous right of marriage to anyone who doesn’t meet the guidelines of the predominant religion, Texas has accidentally banned all marriage in the great state of big cows and even bigger piles of steaming bullshit. 
Of course, this little jumbled misstep of legalese will likely be corrected toot sweet, but it would be interesting to see it challenged at least once before it goes away, sort of like rubbernecking a horrible traffic accident. No one will benefit from it, but it will be hard not to look away. I know that if I’d been married to my NottaWife in 2005 rather than 2003, I certainly would have put it to the test. If there were a way to simply erase that miserable and lunatic experience from my life’s story by taking Texas up on its offer to negate my misplaced union, I’d have been all over it like nerds on a Lambda Lambda Lambda charter – sure, I’d be getting what I wanted on a technicality, but at the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters?
Like I said, it will be interesting to see if any currently-in-process divorces are affected by this news. All it takes is one enterprising attorney to convince his client that he can secure her marital property by using this clause to render the marriage void to kick things off. Further still, what’s to stop a mother from citing this clause to prevent a custody battle for the children of the family? If there was no legal marriage, then the father has little claim on the children that were produced during the non-recognized marital union. It’s a long way down a slippery legal rabbit hole, and I’m not sure I really want to see what’s at the bottom. Things could get very ugly for a lot of people if even one case results in a divorce-upsetting precedent, so Texas should get on the ball and fix things quickly.
But, of course, that won’t happen because to do so would be for the current AG to admit some sort of fault or incompetence, which simply won’t do when there’s an election coming up – and there’s always another election coming up. No, the 
situation won’t be remedied until one of two things happen: either enough time passes that people forget about the oversight in the amendment and it can be quietly corrected, or a high-profile case using the restrictive clause results in a legal precedent that upholds the notion that all marriages in Texas since 2005 are illegal and unrecognized, thereby causing all of us newlyweds to hop the border and quickly get married in an adjoining state. If so, it’s likely that a place like Lake Charles, Louisiana may soon become the rival to Las Vegas that it’s wanted to be ever since it opened up its very first casino. Just add a few Quick-E-Weds and throw in some drive-thru annulment centers, and we’re off to the races! Jackpot!
The lesson that everyone should learn from this – but that nobody who hasn’t already done so will – is that stupidity begets stupidity. Attempting to prevent gays from marrying each other is stupid, and has resulted in a stupidly drafted stupid amendment that is being stupidly challenged by an ambitious lawyer who’s milking the stupid publicity for all it’s worth. Why is the idea of homosexual marriage so scary to so many straight people? Are the gays going to move into your neighborhoods and start recruiting for the other side? Are you scared you might lose your spouse to their hedonistic lifestyle of same-sex monogamy or, perhaps worse, yourself? It can’t all be based on the simple mythology of a 2000-year-old religion that encourages us to murder rebellious children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) and celebrates infanticide (Exodus 12:12), can it? Surely, Christians make concessions to modern times to forgive the Bible some of its more…colorful passages, so why not let this whole gay thing go, too? After all, Christians don’t sacrifice many lambs at Sunday morning church these days, if they even go. A lot of them are at work, busily flipping burgers or selling blue jeans as they dishonor the Sabbath and refuse to keep it Holy. If selling fried ebola patties and sweatshop clothing on God’s special day is fine by the churches, then why not let gay couples tie the knot?
No, it’s not just religion. Religion is part of it, certainly – but it’s merely something to hide behind to justify simple bigotry and intolerance for anything a person dislikes. It’s not that person being a selfish and ignorant, hate-spewing bastard 
if God told them to do it, after all. It’s not his own fear and insecure paranoia over the fact that he might be homosexual himself that drives someone like Fred Phelps and the entire congregation of Westboro Baptist Church to picket funerals with “God Hates Fags” signs, is it? It can’t be, not if Jesus himself said that gay lovin’ was a no-no! They’re just bringing God’s Word to the sinning masses. It’s not about hate, it’s about spreading God’s message of peace, love and understanding – and eternal damnation if you happen to be a squishmitten-licking lesbian or enjoy sticking your pee-pee in the pooper-shoot of a mangina. You know, because what one adult consensually does with another adult’s naughty bits behind closed doors is what defines them as human beings and members of society. Yeah, and I have a bridge to sell you…
I would love to live in a world populated by people. Not gay people or straight people, or black people or white people, just regular old, ordinary people. Good people who do good things and bad people who do bad things or – more accurately – good people who do bad things and bad people who do good things. We all have a little good and a little bad churning away inside our braincases, and it’s up to us to decide what paths we wish to take as we journey through life. If I’d lived in Biblical times, I wouldn’t have stoned my NottaWife to death simply because she grew to be an adulterous spouse, even if I wanted to and even if God told me to, because she might eventually go on to do good things. It might not be likely, it might not even be remotely plausible – but it’s always possible. The world is filled with good people who’ve done bad things, just as it’s peppered with bad people who have done good things. Just because Person X belongs to Group Y doesn’t mean that everyone in Groups R, S, T, L, N and E should hate them. If that were the case, then we’d have a world overrun with bigotry, hatred and violence – not to mention the fact that no one would ever solve anything on the Wheel of Fortune. Let’s not live in that world.
Of course, this whole legal problem in Texas raises an interesting point concerning who among us has the right to grant marriages. Since the amendment was driven by beliefs birthed in religion, then even if the state has inadvertently banned marriage as a legal institution, Brittany and I are still married in the eyes of God, aren’t we? Since we were wed in a church by a man of the cloth as a religious observation, then what the courts say doesn’t really matter to us, does it? We’re married and we know it, as do all of the other heterosexual couples who’ve tied the knot in Texas since 2005. Then again, if the legality doesn’t matter…then why should it matter?
Oh, yeah, because we want the legal protections (and restrictions) that come with being legally wed – but if we can separate the religious from the legal when it comes to heterosexual marriages, why can’t we do the same thing with homosexual ones? Let the religions of the world argue over what’s morally right and wrong, and let them grant or deny marriages as they see fit – the government won’t interfere. If homosexuality is a sin and God can’t abide it, then let no church marry any gay couple. I have no problem with that, I assure you. Just let the courts grant the same legal – and non-religious – status to gay couples as the rest of us have access to. Who does it hurt? Nobody.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong and the gays will end us all. I mean, there are signs, after all. Just look at rise of metrosexuals and the entire Axe product line. If a loofa can be disguised as a “Body Detailing Tool” and sell a million units to testosterone-filled, waterheaded frat boys from sea to shining sea, then maybe there is something to that whole slippery slope argument…
Brittany and I are taking Trey to Walt Disney World in January, and I couldn’t be more excited about the trip if I were jumping around in stacks of cash with bells on and a naked Eliza Dushku cheering from the sidelines. He’s at the perfect age for his first trip to the “Happiest place on Earth” (note: Yes, I know that’s Disneyland’s tag line, but Disney World is better. Deal with it.). Everything will be truly real and amazing to his wide and eager eyes, and there’s no end to the childhood magic that Walt Disney World (WDW) can evoke. It’s no secret that I love WDW, but my excitement for the trip has been slightly spoiled by the unsavory realization that Disney is greedy, vicious, and manipulative bunch of bastards. Well no, I knew that already – but this time, they’ve gone too far.
The Disney company may be family-friendly and it might bring joy and happiness to millions of people across the globe, but there’s no doubting that it is, in fact, a corporation – and therefore, it exists as a parasite to the populace, latching onto the wallets and bank accounts of its victims before sucking every last nickel, dime and penny from their unfortunate coffers. This, of course, is not news and it’s not even an indictment against Disney itself. It’s simply a fact of life when living in the brave new world of corporate greed and omnipresence.
I’m going to skip the usual anti-corporate sentiments today, in favor of straining my brevity muscles to keep things short and to the point. Regular readers will know that charting a course through the brief and the concise is unnatural territory for me, so I beg pardon for any missteps I may take along the way. Now, with that handy disclaimer out of the way, let’s cut through the wet meat and sloppy tissue, and grind straight down to the crunch of milky bone and the tender mush of the soft and squishy marrow that lies beneath. It is time to rip the ears off the mouse and expose its demon horns. It is time, my friends, to talk of money.
To those unfamiliar with WDW, allow me to illuminate the inner workings of the 47 square mile monument to consumerism and the corporate sanitation of reality. It’s a great place to escape to, as the Disney “Imagineers” have created an oasis of peace and happiness in the middle of otherwise miserable Floridian swampland. You arrive, park your car, and shut out the outside world for the duration of your stay. You check in to you hotel, and check out from reality for a few days. It’s a nice arrangement, and it’s one of the primary reasons I love the place so much. However, WDW doesn’t exist as a public service, but is simply a means to an end, by which the Disney company can realize their goal of making more money than both God and the Devil combined. We’re talking lots of money. Oodles, even. This is where the ugliness comes in.
Mickey will fleece your wallet from the moment you arrive on property, to the last second before you leave – and the longer he can keep you on his land, the more moolah he stands to make. Think of the 30,500+ acre monstrosity as one giant casino: the longer you’re there, the more money you’re losing. Just like in Vegas, the house always wins – even the Mouse House. Especially the Mouse House.
Disney couches their looting of your bank account through offering various services that seem enticing and beneficial, but that are actually designed to wring as much blood from your stones as possible. For instance, Disney implemented a new service recently called Disney’s Magical Express Transportation. With this service, Disney will pick up both you and your baggage from the airport and provide transportation to the Disney resort – but what makes it special is that Disney will claim your luggage and deliver it to your room while you’re enjoying your first day in the parks. When you’re done at the end of the day, you simply hop onboard the Disney transportation system of buses, boats, and monorails and travel back to your hotel, where you’re already checked in and where your bags have been delivered directly to your room. It’s a nice, convenient and free service – but it’s designed to trap you on Disney property. Without the need to rent a car, you find yourself ensnared in Disney’s World and unable to leave. And, once you’re there, you are entirely enslaved to the WDW Economy, where a can of cola costs three bucks and dubious cafeteria food can easily set you back a cool fifty clams. Everything is more expensive at WDW than in the outside world, but once you’ve become acclimated to it, the costs start seeming normal and – amazingly – sometimes even reasonable.
While I’ve known all this for years, (as does anyone who understands that a company exists to make money), I didn’t quite understand just how far Disney would go to extract the contents of your wallet. Earlier in the week, I discovered that Disney is no longer content to merely suckle at the teat of your bank account via symbiotically beneficial programs and feel-good family entertainment. No, in this desolate economic climate, it appears that Disney has sunk to new lows in their efforts to separate its customers from their money, and has simply started lying to them. Lying and deceiving and attempting to trick people into paying for something that they neither want nor need, simply because Disney can. It’s disheartening, but it’s true. Here’s what happened:
I went online to book our vacation package at disneyworld.com, like I’ve done countless times before. This time, however, I was acquiescing to Brittany’s request that we not stay at a luxury resort, because Trey would have more fun at one of the more whimsical and kid-approved value resorts – plus, it would save us money. I gave in, and decided to book a room at Disney’s Pop Century Resort. However, when I attempted to do so, I was greeted with the following message: “The Resort or Resort Category you requested is unavailable for the dates and party size selected. An alternate has been provided.” I then tried other value resorts before electing to search the entire value class itself, but each time I received the same message. The value resorts, it appeared, were not available for the four nights that I was looking at. I decided to try another week…
And that’s when I figured out what was going on. When I attempted to change the dates of my stay, I accidentally forgot to change the arrival date. Instead, I merely changed the departure date and extended my stay by an additional eleven days. The surprising thing was that the value resorts were suddenly available. All of them. Every single one. I had not altered my arrival date, so I didn’t understand how the resorts that were previously booked solid for the four nights I wanted were suddenly available simply because I’d added more nights to my stay. Those same four nights were still there, although now there were rooms available. It didn’t make sense. Not, at least, until I searched again.
I went back to my travel dates and simply added one more night. Suddenly, one of the value resorts opened up: the All-Star Movies Resort. I added another night. Amazingly, another value resort became available, this time the All-Star Sports Resort. Finally, after adding three more nights to my original stay, Disney’s Pop Century Resort opened up for booking. Keep in mind that none of these hotels have a minimum night stay, or at least they don’t indicate it in any way. In fact, when Brittany and I evacuated to WDW during Hurricane Ike, we paid for our room at Pop Century on a night-by-night basis, since we never knew when exactly we’d be coming home. Clearly, something else was at play here.
When I first tried to book my stay and Pop Century wasn’t available, the website offered me three alternate choices: Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort for $2,874.06, Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa for $2,941.62, and Disney’s Wilderness Lodge Resort for $2,176.60. I can’t help but suspect that the last choice was intended to be most attractive to me, since I’d searched for value resorts and probably didn’t want to spend a lot of money. The strategy seems simple: tell me that my choice of inexpensive resort is unavailable, then provide three counter-offers, of which only one is close to what I originally wanted to pay. The same strategy held for my other searches. Apparently, Disney has calculated their calculations and decided that a family staying at a value resort for only four nights is not worth it for their bottom line. The family simply isn’t paying enough for their hotel to make up for the fact that they’re only there for four nights. If they were to stay longer, Disney could get more money from them and offset the inexpensive price of the hotel by the amount of money they’d spend in the parks on food and souvenirs. Either pony up for a pricer hotel than you originally wanted, Disney seems to be saying, or add more days and you can stay in the cheap places.
The insidious part of this whole scheme is that the website outright lies to its users by telling them that the resort of their choice is unavailable. It’s a complete fabrication. The rooms are there, they’re vacant, and you can pay for them on a night-by-night basis, if needs be. It’s just not as economically sound of an investment, as far as the Disney company is concerned. If you call a representative, you might be able to schedule a four night vacation package at one of the value resorts over the phone with some wrangling, but it’s clear that the Disney company is loathe to provide such an option to its customers. However, instead of simply enacting a minimum length of stay mandate, it chooses to mislead and deceive its customers into paying for something that they don’t want or can’t afford. It’s sad and it’s ugly, and I lost a little of my misplaced faith in the company after I first clicked the Find Prices button on their website.
Today’s essay was originally going to be about a subject near and dear to my heart but, for whatever reason, I don’t feel like writing about how hard rock and heavy metal could heal the world right now. (No, it’s not as preposterous a thesis as it sounds, except that it is. Only, it isn’t.) Currently, I find myself mired in the miserable funk of an exhausting depression for which no one cause can be either blamed or cited, and that has transported my consciousness to an ethereal plane of nihilistic hopelessness. Ok, so maybe it’s not quite as dramatic as all that, but whatever you think of my prose, the end result is the same: I’m in a bad mood.
I suspect exhaustion, more than anything else, is most responsible for my current unenviable state of mind. My days begin indescribably early and are filled from morning piss to nightly collapse with an incessant barrage of Stuff To Do – and it never stops. Each day repeats the cycle anew like some ghastly Ouroboros of infinite obligation, and with each revolution, the serpent consumes just a bit more of my soul. I’ve described my mornings before, so I’ll just summarize them here. I wake up and get dressed, then wake Trey and get him dressed, then I drive Brittany to work. Afterwards, Trey and I go have breakfast before I drop him off at day care and then drive onward to my office. There, I spend the next nine hours toiling away in the metaphorical salt mines of the modern workaday world before I can finally leave the soul-crushing mundanity behind and head out to retrieve my family and bring them back home.
However, lest you be misled and suspect that my day ends when I return home and turn the key in my front door, understand that my work is only just beginning. We come in and I immediately switch on the computer to begin my assault upon the keyboard as I hammer into existence one of these little essays. I type it up, publish it, and then it’s time to eat. We cook dinner, we have family time, and Trey becomes my shadow. I mean this in the most literal of all the metaphorical senses: he becomes my tied-at-the-hip, inseparable and wholly indivisible, little Trey-sized shadow. And, while I wouldn’t have it any other way, his insistence that he always be at my side only adds to my list of Stuff To Do.
If I want to sit and relax for a bit, I have to callously endure the plaintive sobs and sniffles coming from his room as he repeats the same phrase with an indefatigable and heart-wrenching tenacity, “Where’s my Daddy Kwis go? Come in Tay’s woom, Kwis! Come pway wit Tay in da Tay’s woom, my Daddy Kwis!”
I, of course, cannot truly capture the pitiful desperation in his quivering voice as he repeats the lines over and over like a mournful mantra in some arcane summoning ritual designed to invoke the ancient spirit of Daddy Guilt. It works, too. I can’t stand to hear him beg for my attention, so I rarely let him cry for very long. I’ll go into his room and we’ll play with his cars and trains and helicopters. I’m transformed into a three-year-old boy, playing make-believe alongside him, watching plastic and die-cast metal come to life before my eyes. It’s great fun and I treasure every minute we have together, but it’s not rest. It’s not relaxation. It’s not downtime.
That has to wait until later, after Trey has gone to bed and after I’ve spent even more time at the keyboard, willing even more words into existence for another project I’ve been working on. Eventually, when the prose stops flowing or my eyelids start sagging too low to make out the letters on the monitor, I’ll stumble over to my chair and finally start to unwind from the day’s activities. I might read a book, maybe watch some TV or play a bit of a video game for a few minutes, but I don’t ever last very long. The blissful release of sleep lures me to my bed with its Siren’s promise of rest and relaxation. I’m usually out before my head hits the pillow.
Apart from that, my mood is constantly deflated by the usual suspects of other people. Or, to be more descriptive: other, stupid people. Stupid people are everywhere, in every occupation and at every level. They surround me almost every waking moment of my life, and I find myself beset on all sides by the inequities of the moronic and the tyranny of the tiny minded. Everywhere I look, I see little people trying to pass off mundane knowledge as acquired intellect, and generally succeeding. This is because stupidity is contagious and self-replicating, and so it spreads from host to host quite easily, hopping between moronic minds like a mind-flaying Illithid hungry for its next meal. (Yeah, get that reference. I dare ya!)
Because human beings are social creatures, we like to cluster ourselves in groups of like-minded people (or, as is the case here in the deep south, like-skinned people), where the great virus of stupidity takes hold and gestates, spreading its ugly influence throughout the populace. We surround ourselves with people who talk like us, think like us, and who believe in the same things we do. It’s the herd mentality that drives us into communities and fosters the victim-based beliefs of most middle-class Americans. We must find people like ourselves, then join together as a team to rage against some other group. Democrat versus Republican, Liberal versus Conservative, Christian versus Non-Christian, White versus Black, East Coast versus West Coast, CONTROL versus KAOS, Hogan versus Klink, Munster versus Addams, and on and on and on…
But this isn’t news, and it isn’t new. Philosophers have been discussing this sad sort of behavior since time immemorial, and I’ve no epiphanies to share with you on the subject. All I can say is that, if I am forced to endure the inane ramblings of pseudo-intellectual free market capitalist zealots who fancy themselves great, liberated thinkers for any length of time, I start looking for heavy weaponry. It’s not that these sorts of people are stupid, per se (although they are); it’s that they just can’t see past their own short-sighted ignorance to understand anything beyond their own highly limited sphere of experience.
It’s like the ultra-conservative, overweight Christian who blames his girth on genetics while condemning homosexuality as a sinful lifestyle choice. While he’s probably right about the “heavy gene”, (as there’s a genetic marker for just about everything), he won’t accept the probability that there might also be a “gay gene”. It’s the proverbial wanting to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants to reap the benefit of having a genetic causality behind his weight that excuses his inability to put down the fork, while continuing to hold fast to his outmoded religious belief which insists that an interior decorator with a sense of style and a penis is of the Devil. It’s cognitive dissonance at its best, which is the hallmark of stupidity.
These same sorts of people tend to travel in packs, pooling their collected worldviews together like a hivemind of hideous, non-thinking automatons. They’re your MBA losers with their neophytic, jargon-filled bibblebabble and your middle management schmucks with their motivational posters and powerpoint presentations. They’re the audience of the talking 
heads on the teevee, their brains eagerly absorbing whatever putrid and nonsensical bile their celebrity leaders are telling them, like a perverse mass of obedient little sponges. Their thoughts and opinions are dictated by who they’re listening to at the moment, or who’s book they’ve just started reading. They speak excitedly about things they don’t understand beyond what limited knowledge they’ve been exposed to, yet they think their ideas are novel and absolute and brilliant. These sorts of people are, to put it bluntly, as children playing with toy guns. They don’t understand that their anemic understanding of the world doesn’t arm them with real bullets when it comes down to an intellectual gunfight. Not even when you show them the bright orange tip on the end.
So that’s my life: endless obligations combined with near-constant exposure to intolerable stupidity. It takes a toll. Sadly, I know that I’m not special or unique in this regard. There are a lot of people out there – some that read this very blog – who are themselves entangled in a similar situation. We take turns plugging our fingers into the leaking dike holding back the Tsunami Of Stupid that threatens to wash over the world and drown us all, but it comes at a steep price. Like the little Dutch boy before us, we each must stand alone against the cold and the night, hoping against hope that help will come in the morning. It never has. It never does. It never will…
The perilous landscape of daycare is fraught with danger at every turn. There’s the big kid who steals the bouncy balls from smaller kids, then laughs with delight as they cry bitter tears of crestfallen shame. There’s the stinky kid, whose parents believe that baths are things that happen to other people, and then there are kids like the boy with the perpetually snotty nose, the girl who’s discovered the childhood art of gleeking and so goes about misting everyone with her saliva, and the guy in who sits in the corner eating paste and licking his shoes. It is not a place for the timid or the easily infected, as all manner of disease and malfeasance run rampant through the echoing corridors of any given daycare facility. Recently, and sadly, Trey fell victim to one of the most pernicious and omnipresent forces of darkness that daycare buildings harbor like unseen bacterial terrorists: he came down with pink eye.
The honeymoon is over. I know this not simply because another Monday has dawned over a new week like a searing nuclear blast of fissionable suffering (as Mondays so often do), but because Brittany and I spent Thursday night through Sunday night wrapped in the warm embrace of our official Honeymooning period. During this time, we enjoyed the sights and sounds and all the best that New England has to offer. Or, we took in the rustic pleasures of Austin, TX or the cosmopolitan glitz and glamour of industrial Houston. Our exact destination depends on who you ask and which lie we told, but truthfully we never left the comfort of our own home.
It was an innocent little stretching of the truth, the harmless spinning a tale of honeymoon travel in an effort to shut out the noise and confusion of a loud and obnoxiously interfering world. I kept my cell phone on for emergencies and to talk to Trey, but beyond that we told everyone we were leaving, then we closed the door, turned the lock, and disconnected ourselves from the grid for a few days. It was a pleasant sort of withdrawal from reality, and we spent our days together under a familiar roof. It was our honeymoon after all, and when everything that we planned on doing was going to – *ahem* – take place indoors anyway due to the oppressive necessity of numerous indecency laws, it didn’t make much sense to travel to some distant place that we wouldn’t even bother leaving the hotel room to see.
And that’s all I have to say about our consummatory activities, strictly speaking. Just know that our marriage is safe from any papal dissolutions, and lets leave it at that. Apart from these personal goings-on that I am choosing to skip over entirely on account of them not being any of your business, we spent the days lounging around the house in our fat clothes, watching movies and playing video games and generally being as gluttonous and as slothful as possible.
Brittany made some not-so-delicious pan fried chicken on Saturday, but rectified her culinary misstep by preparing some very delicious pan fried chicken on Sunday. And, while the less I comment on the former, the more likely I am to keep all of my favorite appendages intact,
I will say that her tenacity to perfectly pan fry dead chicken legs was admirable. She went through twelve legs on that first batch, all of them coming out either burned or undercooked or both, and she never once gave up. Well, after she ran out of legs, she did – but she was right back at the store the next day and frying up more legs that afternoon. These turned out – thanks to a properly functioning temperature probe (otherwise known as a thermometer) – golden brown, fully cooked and scrumptious. I whipped up some gravy from the oil in the pan, and sauteed some fresh spinach. And, although I made the gravy too thick and added too much nutmeg to the spinach, everything turned out well and we had a great meal. After that, it was back to the living room and my enormous television.
Earlier last week, a little game was released unto the world by a company called Bioware. The game in question is Dragon Age: Origins, and it has completely enthralled my bride. When not otherwise occupied this weekend, we took turns playing the game, me controlling my noble human warrior and her taking the reins of her scruffy, homeless elfin warrior goddess. It’s a fun game, filled with all the trappings of a traditional role playing game: dwarfs, elves, mages, and the occasional ogre or dragon. If you’ve played one RPG, you’ve played them all, but Dragon Age plays with the best of them. I’m enjoying it a great deal, but not half as much as Brittany is.
Her warrior elf, born in humble beginnings and betrothed to a husband murdered on her wedding day, travels the countryside making friends and saving kittens and helping old ladies cross the street. In contrast, my human character is of noble birth, which means that he travels the countryside making snide remarks at those he finds inferior to himself (which is everyone) and killing anyone who disagrees with him. He’s also sleeping with a nubile witch of the wilds who’s just as pestilent and mean-spirited as he is. It’s fun to watch our different play styles unfold, she playing her alter-ego much as I play mine, in that we’re both essentially playing ourselves projected onto the polygonal avatars of the game world. She helps lost children find their way home and stop crying, whilst I dismember and murder their parents for being negligent asshats. Fun times!
In the movie-watching department, we watched three films that warrant mention, and one television show. First up, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a very long movie, filled title-to-credits with giant robots, explosions, and Megan Fox looking hot. While it wasn’t a bad movie, it certainly wasn’t very good, either. However, in an effort to give proper credit where it’s due, if I were the target demographic for this film – that is to say, if I were a twelve year old boy – I would most likely declare Transformers 2 to be the most awesome movie ever. It has everything a growing boy could want: giant robots punching each other, crude bathroom humor and clumsy sexual innuendo, and lots and lots of boobies jiggling about in slow motion. Cinematic genius when you’re twelve and have a penis, not so much if you’re thirty-four and have been neutered by marriage. (I joke, Brittany! I joke!)
Next, we watched the reboot of V. I didn’t expect much from this, as I’m usually fairly hateful of reboots in general, but they did a really nice job with the pilot. It covered a lot of ground that it took the original miniseries several hours and at least fifty-three commercials to go over, and they did it with style. Granted, the interior of the alien mothership looked a lot like an Spartan’s idea of interior decorating fueled by an Ikea-themed shopping spree (rolling swivel chairs on a spaceship? really?), but the pilot showed a lot of promise. They’re sticking with the alien reptile idea of the original seres and infusing it with a little David Icke inspired paranoia, all while finding work for former Firefly cast members. They need to play things a little carefully though, and add in the Whedonverse cast sparingly. After all, once they throw a little Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres into the mix, the show will be destined for greatness – and cancellation. Hey, at least it’s not on Fox…
Finally, we wrapped things up with two romantic comedies. Yes, I know. I have a general No Go policy when it comes to enduring such meaningless tripe, but I let it slide on account of it being our honeymoon. Brittany first subjected me to the witless horror of The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a film whose only redeemable quality was that it had the good graces to finally give a proper nod to Dickens in the final reel. Apart from that, it was filled with predictable plot twists and anemic humor, while Matthew McConaughey lays his southern Georgia drawl on thick and pretends he’s not from Texas. Michael Douglas materializes every now and again to give the film much-needed shots in the arm, but in the end even his star power fails to elevate Girlfriends from the miserable depths of the romcom basement.
The second romantic comedy up on the chopping block was The Proposal, which was another horrible movie made passably entertaining through exactly two things: Betty White’s indefatigable charm and Sandra Bullock’s naked body. I’m a huge Betty White fan, and I’ll have words with anyone who would claim she is anything other than a national freaking treasure. She’s in good form in The Proposal, echoing bits of her Delores Bickerman character from Lake Placid (another film that she, along with Oliver Platt and Brenden Gleeson, saved from mediocrity). The story is typical romcom fare, in that it is without merit and completely unworthy of any discussion whatsoever. Still, there’s a brief out-of-shower scene where Bullock is hiding her naughty bits with nothing more than a horizontal forearm and a well-placed hand that temporarily makes a married man forget he’s watching a chick flick. It’s brief and tasteful though, so don’t get too excited. It’s safe to go ahead and fall asleep after she puts the towel on, in other words. Nothing more to see here. Move along.
That, more or less, was our honeymoon. We’re taking Trey to Walt Disney World in January though, and we’re already planning our romantic New England getaway for next October, so we’re pretty happy with having taken some time off to just lounge around and relax for a little while. I know this essay is dropping on Monday, but don’t get too worked up about me possibly returning to a five day publishing week. I know I said to wait until after the wedding and the honeymoon, but the sad truth remains that the return on investment I get from Coquetting Tarradiddles is too one-sided to warrant devoting five days worth of time and energy to. Not while I’ve got other literary pans in the fire that need tending, and certainly not while all of you lecherous bastards keep on reading my words but never clicking my ads. I’ll stick to Tuesdays and Thursdays for the time being, thank you very much.
However, since I’m a generous sort of guy who feels the need to fulfill his obligations wherever he can, you’re getting three essays this week. There’s this one today, which is really to make up for only publishing on Tuesday of last week, then I’ll return to my regular schedule with another essay tomorrow, followed by another on Thursday. We’ll see how things go and, if you’re all really good little girls and boys, I might just switch to a thrice-weekly schedule in December.
Up next: How Trey turned me into a criminal!
It’s picture pages day here at Coquetting Tarradiddles, and I’ve got a dozen or so wedding photos to share with the quivering horde of my readership. I’ll (try and fail to) go light on the prose and heavy on the visual aids today, so let’s get started. For the less net-savvy amongst you, remember that you can click on any picture for a larger version. The first photo up for viewing was taken after the ceremony, during the interminable period of posing that follows any wedding, where the same smile must be replicated without end as the infinite combinations of interchangeable people are interchanged and combined before the blinding strobes of incessantly exploding flashbulbs and plaintive requests to ‘hold that pose and say cheese!’ People say it’s a long journey to the altar, but this is misleading. The longest journey is, in fact, walking away from the altar, as friends and family are arranged around you in every possible order in a twisted photographic version of a jumbled Rubik’s Cube. Eventually, owing to the expense of film in the past and now, presumably, to the limited battery life of digital cameras, the voracious appetite of the photographer is sated and the wedding can proceed to the reception.
Fortunately, while myself and my groomsmen (and eventually my sister and brother-in-law, my mother and my two nephews, my godson and other assorted peoples) were busily engaged in complex negotiations with Trey involving bribery and extortion as we attempted to persuade him that wearing tuxedos is cool, Brittany and her bridesmaids were sharing the delicate and dainty confines of the bridal parlor with the photographer. So, while I was cramped into a tiny, antiseptic office space with nearly a dozen other people all occupied by a crying, half-naked toddler who seemed convinced that dress pants would burn his skin like a crucifix to a vampire, Brittany and her gal pals lounged in the luxury of soft velvet and hair product. During this time, makeup was applied, hair was styled, and various snapshots were captured by the photographer’s lens. Here is one of them:
Ah, now this is more like it! Here we have a lovely photo of my blushing bride-to-be as she enters the home stretch of all her lounging and pampering and trashy romance novel reading before the ceremony. Only moments after this photo was taken, the oppressive dictatorial rule of the church’s wedding coordinator would see Brittany and her bridesmaids out on the showroom floor and strutting down the aisle like effeminate versions of John Travolta, sans paint cans.
The organ swells, the gathered crowd stands, the doors fly open and the bride emerges. The mood is serious and reverent, all eyes focusing on her beauty and grace as she glides mysteriously down the aisle, floating between the pews and the golden hues of autumnal foliage that adorns them. In the distance, I stand in silence as a vision in white slips slowly into focus. (And I do mean slowly. My contacts were giving me no end of grief that day, as the congregation would later witness when my sensitive ocular organs were aggravated beyond tolerance by the um…dust…or whatever it was that got in my eye as we were saying our vows. Yeah, dust. That’s the ticket!) As the haze clears and the bits and bobs of detail begin to come into focus, I see my bride and I go gooshey. Fortunately for my masculinity, the photographer chose this precise moment to either neglect the pythagorean theorem or intentionally abuse it in a brief but inspired examination of the concept of depth of field. Either way, I’m blurry and Brittany is in focus, right down to her brass-knuckled Hello, Kitty tattoo. Meow!
You approach a large cake protected by the spot-welded plate armor of a thick layer of fondant that proves utterly impervious to the assaults of mortal men as you attempt to deftly cut away a small and modest wedge only to eventually resort to violently hacking away at it like an enraged Norwegian berserker armed only with a silver cake knife and a burning grudge against pastries…
You answer the same question over and over again for the culturally illiterate attendees of your reception who have no idea that your cake topper is actually
an action figure playset of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her star-crossed lover Angel that has been hot glued together and set in a position of honor on top of the bride’s cake. Of course, if any of your guests do know of Buffy and Angel, then you’ll have to answer follow-up questions concerning just how much neither you nor your bride resembles either character. For the record, Brittany is an amalgamation of 15% Willow and 15% Tara blended into 70% Anya. She’s a sweet, bookish sort of girl who says whatever’s on her mind in the most sarcastic way possible, and could turn evil and flay you alive if you piss her off. For my part, I’m about 40% Spike, 20% Xander, 20% Giles, 10% Wesley, 5% Riley and 5% Angel. I’m an irreverent and narcissistic smart ass who routinely spazes out and makes a fool of himself, but ultimately comes through in a pinch and saves the day, armed with some arcane wisdom and a bit of slapstick. Also, I brood…
cake is covered with sugar-icing “water” and gum-paste Caribbean “foliage”. Long story short, the scene on the groom’s cake recreates the setting of my proposal to Brittany, in that the proposal was set on the fictional Scabb Island located in a fictional version of the Caribbean as depicted in the fictional computer game The Secret Of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and played on Brittany’s pink Nintendo DS via a customized game cartridge and a copy of SCUMMVM. If you’re still confused, it’s probably for the best. Or, you could just click here.As everything winds down, you dance and toast and eventually walk out into a floating sea of soap bubble wisps, because apparently rice kills birds and birdseed can’t be left on the ground and has to be swept up. It seems to me that birds are very stupid things, otherwise they would eat the avian-appropriate seeds and avoid the lethality of rice, thus negating the need for hundreds of soapy fingers and the asthmatic wheeze of senior citizens and/or smokers attempting to blow a perfect floaty bubble from tiny plastic wands dipped in tule-covered bottles.
Goodbyes are waved, kisses are given, and the newlyweds drive off towards matrimonial bliss as dozens of obnoxiously loud aluminum cans scrape the pavement behind them, waking the dead and aggravating the neighbors. All in all, it’s a pretty fun event. Old friends journey far to attend and regale your new spouse with embarrassing stories from your past, while different family members surprise and impress you by attending. Gifts are received and put to immediate use, and the happy couple gets to drive away and avoid the messy hassle of cleaning up.
Of course, if you get sick later that night and then lost the next day on the terrible backroads and byways of scary Texas towns, you might pause to rethink your situation. Then again, if you’re going to get miserably sick and hopelessly lost, then there’s no one better with which to do it than the person you just married. In fact, even the worst of things can be made enjoyable when in the proper company. Fortunately, through the hard work and dedication of a few family members and some amazing friends, our wedding was about as far from horrible as one can get without coming back around the other side. The decorations were beautiful, the food was delicious, and the company of all the people who matter in our lives made it a perfect wedding. Both Brittany and I will be forever grateful to everyone involved and thankful for everyone who attended. Even the ones who didn’t watch Buffy!
I’m writing this at noon on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 and I have been a married man for three days, seventeen hours and thirty minutes – but who’s counting? I’d love to say that it’s been a great few days and some-odd hours, but I’d also love to say that I have adamantium bones and can fly. Some things just ain’t true, no matter how much we might want them to be. And, to say that the past three days, seventeen hours and thirty minutes of my life have been spent enraptured by the warm and glorious embrace of matrimonial bliss would be like standing at the tippity-top of Liar’s Mountain to shout fictitious truths down at the heart of the world. The sad reality is that, for the past three days, seventeen hours and thirty minutes, I have been living a Greek tragedy.
The wedding itself was wonderful, with only one tragic crisis marring what was an otherwise perfect ceremony. Moments before the wedding, my best man decided that he hated his tuxedo, and refused to wear it. He kicked and screamed and cried and wouldn’t be persuaded with candy or cake or even peer pressure. (Damn you, Nancy Reagan!) Eventually, as the minutes ticked away towards the nuptial deadline, I had to call it. I pushed the button on the whole thing, and just went to the altar sans best man. I couldn’t really get upset with him, though. He’s only three years old.
Trey watched the ceremony in the safe and familiar clothing of his Batman shirt, blue jeans and his Mickey shoes, and he had a great time. Afterwards at the reception, he ran around with his cousins, found Narnia behind the curtains of the stage, and stole the show from Brittany and I during our first dance,
as he twirled around on his own, freestyle. It was a great wedding, filled with family and friends and various meats and cheeses of questionable origin. Somehow, a terrible mix of Barry Manilow and Anne Murray was playing on an unauthorized iPod and assaulting the unsuspecting ears of our guests during the first minutes of the reception, but things were eventually squared away when a collection of Vitamin String Quartet “tributes” to rock and metal bands took over the airwaves.
We pulled away from the church in a car decorated with shoe polish slogans and Brittany’s name misspelled on the back window, aluminum cans filled with pinto beans bouncing and scraping the pavement behind us as we drove off towards our hotel. I’d booked an enormous jacuzzi suite at the best hotel in town, and some friends met us at the downstairs bar for a few drinks after we checked in. This was a mistake.
The conversation was great, and I enjoyed catching up with old friends who I’ve seen far too infrequently in the past few years. However, the drinks were incredibly potent and, as I would soon learn, copious amounts of alcohol do not mix well with the superheated water of a hot tub sent from Hell.
After we’d had our fill of friends and alcohol, I was more than ready to get to the room to exercise my right of primae noctis. We said our farewells and left the bar, only to be confounded by the labyrinthine hallways of the hotel’s obviously occult floorplan. After reaching the back of the hotel and summoning Gozer The Gozerian finding some elevators, we hopped on board and proceeded to the top floor. Or rather, that’s what we would have done, if the particular set of elevators that we found had not been limited to three floors. We grumbled, gathered our bags, and walked off the elevator to retrace our steps back to the lobby. Jutting off to the side of the reception desk was an innocuous hallway that just happened to contain the main elevator bank. We got in, pushed the top button, and ascended to our suite.
After carrying Brittany over the threshold, we set our bags down, kissed and moved over to the bed. Then, we…
Eventually, we made our way into the hot tub. The room was open and airy, with oversized tiles and a large skylight directly over the jacuzzi. Candles surrounded us as we climbed into the bubbling caldron, champagne and chocolate covered strawberries sitting within reach. It was relaxing. It was romantic. It was horrible.
Apparently, there were warning signs both on the door and in the jacuzzi room itself cautioning guests to not consume large quantities of alcohol before submerging themselves in the freakishly hot water. However, being as we were already under the considerable influence of several Long Island Iced Teas by the time we got to the room, we were influenced to ignore the warnings about alcohol and hot water. And, I promise you, it was hot. It was beyond hot. The damned thing was lit by the fires of Hell itself, and it did a number on my body temperature. If I didn’t have a fever before going in, I had one when I came out. If I did have a fever beforehand, then taking a dip in the lobster boiler only spiked it beyond the limits of human endurance.
I spent the rest of the night under the covers of the enormous bed with a sudden onset of the chills, shivering every time I moved. Brittany didn’t fare much better, waking up in the morning with a raspy cough that heralded the return of her bronchitis. We were supposed to have breakfast from the buffet and enjoy a leisurely morning, but neither of us felt like it. We were trying to muster the strength to go pick up Trey and take him to A Day Out With Thomas, which he’d been looking forward to for weeks.
I drove home to pick up some cough syrup and ibuprofen, and came back to find Brittany packed up and ready to go. We went to pick up Trey, and got suckered into meeting some family for breakfast. We needed to eat anyway, so we agreed to meet everyone for some waffles and bacon. After that, we got on the road and began a three hour journey into the heart of darkness.
The town of Rusk, TX is known for only two things: a mental hospital, and a Texas State Railroad depot. The former is easy to find, presumably because of the high volume of crazy people living in Texas. The latter, however, is hidden in such a way as to discourage anyone from ever wanting to get anywhere near it at any time, whatsoever. There were exactly two small signs for the place. One could only be seen once you’d turned around at the edge of town, after having driven through the whole of Rusk and realizing that you must have missed it. The other is directly across from the depot’s entrance, informing you that you’ve arrived. There are no other signs.
There are, however, endless unnamed roads upon which one can – and will – become hopelessly lost. Entangled in the strange web of tiny country roads lined with scary houses and populated by the cast of Deliverance, we drove around and around and around for what seemed like hours. Trey was in his car seat, asking me where Thomas was.
“I’m looking for him,” I’d reply.
“You wooking?” he’d ask.
“Yeah, buddy. I’m looking.”
“You wooking hard?”
“Yep. Really hard. We’ll find him.”
“Ohhh kay.”
This went on every few minutes until we finally found the accursed depot. Fortunately, we were not too late to take in the festivities, and Trey had a wonderful time. The gigantic Sir Topham Hat proved to be too imposing a figure to stand with for a photo, but Trey waved to him and got within a good ten feet of the Churchillian character before planting his feet and shouting “No topum hat!” Thomas, on the other hand, was more successful.
Trey had his picture taken with the “riddy, riddy big Thomas!” engine after it steamed into the station. Later, he had Thomas temporarily tattooed onto his arm, listened to a Thomas story, and refused to take off his Mickey shoes to play in the train-themed bouncey house. We left with our arms filled with Thomas booty, from a new blanket and toy, to a refrigerator magnet and a Day Out With Thomas pennant. He made off with a good haul.
It was a nice end to a good day, or at least it would have been had Brittany’s car not exploded on the drive home. Unaccustomed to the hilly nature of the area, her poor Alero decided to fight back towards the end of the return trip, finally dying completely within a mile of our house. I pushed it into a service station, then managed to coax it back to our driveway through a complex series of pedal movements and gear changes. A friend of mine who builds and races cars came over the next day to attach his computer to the backfiring monstrosity, which deduced that it was misfiring. Well yeah, thanks computer. Very helpful. (Fortunately, my friend is smarter than the computer, and repairs are underway.)
During all of this, my time in the Hades Hot Tub left me with a horrible cold and Brittany with a return visit from a stubborn case of bronchitis. We’ve spent the days since Sunday in our pajamas, her on the couch and me in my chair. Trey ran around the house, playing imaginary games with himself and his toys, always in various states of dress. Sometimes in PJs, sometimes in a pull-up, sometimes in mismatched clothes, such as a pull-up, Mickey shoes, and his train conductor hat. He and I spent most of Tuesday curled up in my chair, watching old movies. I fell asleep during Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird, and I can’t believe I ever thought that The Beastmaster was good. And, while I was previously miffed about Robert Rodriguez’s impending remake of Red Sonja, I am no longer concerned. Merciful Zeus, but did we tolerate some crappy cinema back in the ’80s…
Things are looking better today. I’m on the mend, and Brittany has a fresh batch of medicine with which to fight the invading bronchial hordes. So far, our marriage has consisted of illness, navigational ineptitude, and a non-combusting internal combustion engine. It’s a good thing we’re not actually taking our real honeymoon until next week, otherwise I might think we’re jinxed!
Then again, it’s been a good few days, despite all of the misfortune. We’ve definitely been hit with a dose of reality to help balance out all of the puppy-dogged, big-eyed feelings of lovey dovey, husband and wifeyness. We’ve moved straight into the mundane grit of a life spent together in marriage, to the place where things like suspicious bodily discharges don’t affect us. Brittany even got me to use a bizarre tool of medieval torture called a Neti Pot which, while completely disgusting and foul, is actually quite effective at clearing one’s sinuses through the most hideous way imaginable.
We’ve got the “in sickness” part of the vows down, and now we’re looking forward to the “in health” bits. After all, for all the fun we had in the hotel room before making the mistake of entering the infernal fury of Satan’s Hot Tub, we never actually made it around to consummating our union. Not technically, anyway. Not in the strictest sense of the term. Not really. We need to get around to tying up that particular loose end as soon as possible, lest someone like the Pope come along and try to dissolve the marriage.
The wedding is almost here, and we’re only two days away from “that dweam within a dweam”, despite what the neurotic countdown clock in my sidebar is telling you. This essay will be my last as a single man. The next time you hear from me, I will be shackled to the keyboard as a husband, the obligatory ball and chain fastened to my ankle and chaffing my delicate skin. Fortunately, I’ve never found staying faithful to be difficult, as it’s only my eyes that occasionally wander, not my pee-pee. Also, Brittany is pretty good with a knife…
I think that most of the wedding arrangements have been arranged by now, but I can only make assumptions at this point. New wrinkles have been added into the cloth of our marital plan on a daily basis, and I haven’t had the time to make sure that they’ve all been successfully ironed out. I haven’t had enough time to do much of anything, actually. My days and nights are too crowded already, and squeezing in bits of wedding planning has proven difficult. I’ve generally left things to the smoothlegs in my life who are buzzing around like industrious, coked-up bees, and only offer my opinions and thoughts when I’m directly asked. Fortunately, their need for my input seems fragmentary, at best. Unfortunately, on the rare instances where I’ve actually been asked what I’d like, my suggestions have been riddled with a thousand tiny holes of inadequacy and regret.
For example, I found one of rock’s most touching instrumental performances by one of the best guitarists in the world, and I gently suggested to Brittany that we use it for our first dance together. First, a pause and a look of disbelief. Then, laughter and mocking and shame. Later, after I suggested a classic Nick Cave love song, there was ridicule and travesty, then bitter, bitter acquiescence. I gave in, found an inoffensive Don Henley number that is actually quite fitting, and I reached a tentative accord with everyone involved. This has been the way of things during this whole process. I have ideas, everyone else has “better” ideas, and I’m left alone to wallow in self-deprecating humor and neglect. Marriage – it begins!
I kid, though. Apart from the instrumental song, I knew that most of what I was suggesting was either unfitting or completely inappropriate. When Brittany suggested we use something more classical sounding with strings and woodwinds, my immediate response was, “Good idea! See if The Vitamin String Quartet has any Sabbath.” I seem to invite the scorn of others into my life, although I can’t figure out why. Don’t believe me? Try this: We’re holding our reception at the church, and the first line of that Nick Cave song I mentioned is, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God…” I rest my case.
Trey, my father and myself are going to pick up our tuxedos in the morning, and I pray that my freakishly long, simian-like arms were properly measured during the fitting. I was a groomsman in a friend’s wedding once, and my tux arrived with a short-sleeved jacket that demanded immediate alteration. I really do have an odd build, when it comes to my arms. It makes buying clothes off the rack a curious and upsetting endeavor that ultimately results in me buying a shirt that’s either too big for my torso or that fits me in the body, but has sleeves that come to my elbows. Whatever immortal hand or eye it was that framed my fearful symmetry, something joggled its hand when it did the stitching. Arms like mine belong on a monkey, not a man. (Yeah, yeah. Get the jokes out of your system right now. I am not a Sasquatch!)
Assuming the tuxedos fit and that Trey will be willing to take his off once we’ve confirmed that everything is alright, we’ll move on to the rest of the items on tomorrow’s checklist. (During the fitting, he was reluctant to remove the trial jacket until he’d walked up to every last person in the store and assaulted them with a plaintive demand for verbal acknowledgment of his handsomeness.) There’s decorating (ie, heavy lifting) to be done at the church, there are bridal party gifts to purchase, and there will undoubtedly be an unending stream of last-second chores needing to be done before the rehearsal begins in the early evening.
I hope everything goes smoothly, because right now I’m feeling pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. I’m not sure if I’m not nervous because I simply haven’t had time to devote to nervousness, or if it’s because I’m so comfortable with how things are. I remember the night before my first wedding, when I was pacing the grounds of my hotel and fretting over every aspect of my life. I was angry with my best man for being somewhere other than nearby to talk to me and tell me what I wanted to hear. I was worrying about whether I was truly in love, and if my bride was truly in love with me. I fretted over the potential longevity of our marriage, or the lack thereof. I was scared about being with only one woman for the rest of my life, and spent far too long considering the vast amount of exquisite T and A in the world that I would be cutting myself off from by saying “I do.” In short, I was a nervous wreck, but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t know, because I lacked the foresight to understand back then what I have the hindsight to appreciate now. I was terrified because I was doing something terrible: marrying for the sake of marriage, to complete the rite of passage and enter adulthood, regardless of consequence. I was not in love.
I hope that’s where my lack of nervousness comes from now: from confidence, from truly knowing just how deeply Brittany and I love each other, and from how much I adore Trey. I hope I’m calm and collected and unconcerned with my future together with Brittany, simply because I’m supremely confident in the fact that we’ll actually have one. This serenity I have now, this inner harmony or whatever new age, pseudo-mystical internal “energy” you might want to call it, has me in a mood of perfect tranquility, unconcerned and at peace. I’m not worried about anything. I know that I probably should be, though. After my previous trip down the aisle, I should be thinking about all the negatives of the future as well as the positives, but the truth is that I’m not really thinking about the future at all – the good or the bad. I’m not hoping for happy times in the days ahead, because I know they’re already there, waiting for us. They’re coming. It’s a given. A fact. Certainty.
Saturday will come, and Brittany and I will be married. Sunday will come, and we’ll still be married. Then, another Saturday. Another Sunday. Another week, another month, another year.
Another decade. The days of the calendar will flip forward one by one, year after year, and Brittany and I will both be there in whatever future we’re hurtling towards, standing together against the world. Like I said, it’s not something that I believe will happen. I have no faith in a positive outcome for our marriage, because faith ends where knowledge begins. It’s no longer necessary to believe in something when you know it’s real, when you know it’s right, when you know it’s eternal.
And with that, I think I’ll close things today with a quote from the esteemed Sir Terry Pratchett that I think best describes my lack of faith in our marital success:
“…most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point in believing, of going around saying things like, ‘Oh great Table, without whom we are as naught!'”
When you know something’s real, you don’t need to believe in it anymore.
That’s how I feel about my future with Brittany and Trey, and about all of the endless days rolling towards us: days that we’ll walk through together, as a family. From my proposal through today and for all of the days yet to come, I have never been worried about my future with Brittany, nor will I ever be. I don’t know if I’ll ever be nervous about anything when it comes to her. I’m certainly not hesitant when it comes to pledging myself to her for the rest of my life, and I’m pretty sure I won’t even freak out if and when she ever tells me that she’s pregnant. News like that would have terrified me at any other point in my life, back when I was with any other woman. Now, though, it has a nice ring to it. I’m not saying that we want to start trying to get pregnant in the immediate, immediate future – but I don’t mind practicing. It does, after all, make perfect.
I have a fantasy that comes to me in my dreams at night, and then lingers in the corners of my mind throughout the long shadows of the day. It is a wondrous dream, filled with hope and elation and, eventually, bitter resentment and terrible regret. In my dreamworld, I live and work and walk amongst a citizenry composed of my peers, who see the world though a lens of reality and who pursue Truth in life through rational thought and logic. We work together in this Utopia to solve the world’s problems, to help lift up its less fortunate and to rip down its tyrants. It is a magical land, where happiness is attainable through merit and where superstition has been replaced with reason. Then, I wake up and realize I’m still in Texas. Dammit!
The latest Texan effrontery to rationality and logic comes in the form of a sentence handed down from by a jury that consulted the Bible to determine the proper punishment for a man named Khristian Oliver. Possibly out of resentment for how his parents inserted an unnecessary ‘h’ into his first name, Oliver turned to a life of crime back in the ’90s. In 1998, when Oliver was twenty years old, he and three other individuals decided that it would be a good idea to break into an old man’s house to pillage it for the fabulous wealth and prizes one might expect to find in the mothball-scented dwelling of a sixty-four year old man living in Nacogdoches, Texas. When the elderly gentleman in question came home and surprised the young hooligans stealing all of his Geritol and velvet Elvis portraits, a scuffle ensued and Oliver shot and killed the nice old man. A year later, Oliver was tried and convicted, then sentenced to death by lethal injection. All’s well that ends well, right?
Well, not exactly. The jury stepped outside the rule of law and consulted the Book of Numbers in the King James Bible to figure out whether they should recommend that Khristian get a prison sentence or take the Big Jab and get his doctorate in applied chemistry at the dripping end of a lethal syringe. Obviously, the Bible told them to kill the miserable bastard rather than allow him to live out the rest of his days in the warm and cozy comfort of a maximum security prison cell. The passage cited by the jurors during Oliver’s appeal was Numbers 35: 16-19:
The victim, Joe Collins, was shot in the face and beaten with the butt of a rifle. This apparently made Khristian Oliver an exceptionally murderous murderer because the bullets could be interpreted as stones, and both they and the rifle are made of steel, so that covers the iron. The rifle butt was made of wood, so there’s your hand weapon of wood to complete the trinity of homicidal qualifications. Clearly, the jury had little choice but to opt for the death penalty. God himself declared it right there in the black and white of the King James version of the Old Testament Book of Numbers!
Forget for the moment that God did not sit down between rounds of blessing and smiting to scribble out the Bible on a lazy Tuesday afternoon. It was written by many men over many, many years. Books were included and thrown out, modified, translated and retranslated, and in all other ways completely mucked with over the centuries by members of the Funny Hat Boy’s Club. This particular bit from Numbers is talking about what to do with people who kill other people. Murder is, not surprisingly, looked down upon in the Bible (unless, of course, it’s done to spread God’s glory or to claim land in the name of His chosen people). However, there are provisions made to allow some murderers to seek refuge in specific cities if they unwittingly killed their victim. Involuntary manslaughter would be the term today, but we don’t seem to consult the Bible to determine whether we should allow drunk drivers to seek refuge in the cities of Canaan rather than spend years of their lives confined to a jail cell…
On that note, I wonder what this esteemed panel of jurors would have done if this had been a divorce case rather than a homicide. Stone the adulterer to death? What about catching an employee of McDonald’s flipping burgers on a Sunday? Death by stoning, by the whole community! (A good case for working at Chick-Fil-A…) Disobedient son? More stoning, this time by all the men of the community. Blasphemy? DEATH. Homosexuality? DEATH. Being a witch? DEATH. Not being a virgin on your wedding night? DEATH! Adultery? DEATH! (Ok, maybe He has a point with that one.) Aside from stoning, the Bible also allows people to be put to death by burning, hanging, or tossing their sorry hides off of mountains. Peace be with you on your fast trip to terra firma, brother!
I’m never at a loss of appreciation for the ability of some so-called Christians to ignore the cognitive dissonance that comes with picking and choosing what parts of the Bible they believe in. On the one hand, they say it’s the literal Word of God and should be taken exactly as it’s written. However, when it comes to things like genocide
and extermination or going to a restaurant after Sunday church, it’s less literal and more metaphorical. Just guidelines, really. Suggestions meant for another time, not today. We don’t stone children who revile their parents. We don’t execute people for claiming psychic powers and we don’t kill false prophets – instead, we take our kids to Disneyworld and worship at the big yellow-shoed feet of a cartoon mouse. We don’t think money lenders are evil and, as a nation, we gleefully support usury every time we swipe our credit cards. Cognitive dissonance – the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes. If the shoe fits…
None of this is to say that I think Khristian Oliver shouldn’t be punished for his crime. He brutally murdered an old man while robbing his home, and that cannot be overlooked. However, simply because he committed murder does not entitle anyone else to do the same to him. Give him a life sentence with no chance of parole. Let him live with his guilt and shame and misery. Let him die slowly behind the iron bars of an uncaring prison system – but don’t kill him. It’s just not necessary, especially when it’s being dictated by religion.
Khristian’s parents, Kermit and Katie, are having an art show this weekend featuring some of Khristian’s prison artwork. They suffer for what their son did, although they remain convinced of his innocence. Kermit painted a portrait of Christ’s resurrection using Khristian’s face for Jesus’ likeness. They are parents that now have to endure the knowledge that their son will be murdered and that there is nothing they can do about it. It’s an awful position to be in, and one I can’t imagine living through. Khristian’s mother, Katie, believes she had a vision of an angel taking her to the scene of the crime, where she claims she saw another man murdering him. It’s denial steeped in mythology and delusion, and it’s sad. It’s a mother reacting to the planned bureaucratic murder of her son, and it shouldn’t have to be this way. She should endure the pain of witnessing him held in confined captivity for the rest of his life, but not murdered by the state on November 5th.
In the end, I wonder why some Christians pick and choose certain passages and ignore others. Turn the other cheek comes to mind. Vengeance being the Lord’s does, too. Judge not lest ye be judged. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc…
Then again, what the heck do I know? I’ve never murdered anyone and don’t plan on ever doing so. I’ve not known anyone who was murdered, and so I’ve never felt the need for revenge in the form of state sanctioned murder. However, if some punk killed my father, I’d probably feel differently.
I’d probably want the sick bastard to suffer and die and pay for what he’d done – but that’s exactly why we have the justice system. It’s supposed to be dispassionate and impersonal. It’s supposed to be slow and steady, and governed by reason, logic, and the rule of law. The rule of man’s law, not God’s – otherwise where would we be? Most of the population would be put to death already, and we’d probably have a shortage of stones in the world. There would be no shopping or police protection or ambulances on Sundays. We’d have slavery and wars of genocide, and all television programming would be Davey and Goliath or BibleMan.
It’s time to reconsider the evangelical push to thrust the Bible into every matter of public discourse. It has its place, and religion can be a wonderful thing in one’s personal life. It inspires and uplifts and gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless and random existence. It cheers you up on a bad day and promises you eternal rewards if you follow the rules. In public though, as a means of government and of law, religion corrupts and destroys everything. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The genocidal rampages of God’s people in the Old Testament. Infanticide. Islamic Jihad. Ethnic cleansing. Adolph Hitler. Fred Phelps. Cobra Commander. Gargamel. Skeletor. Calgon, take me away!
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Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to have nice weather on my wedding day, so I have to go sacrifice a goat and then cut out the still beating heart of a virgin as an offering to Tonatiuh, the Aztec sun god. See you next week!
The Federal Trade Commission has decided that bloggers blogging on their blogs need to be bloggin’ regulated, or there’ll be Hell to bloggin’ blog about, by Blog!
The ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing FTC has apparently grown tired of the grassroots, open source mentality that drives writing on the Internet, and so took steps on Monday to bring all the free speech buzzing around on the highways and byways of the Information Superhighway under some sort of federally regulated control. I suspect the blogosphere will be swelling and undulating with indignant rage over it, and we here at Coquetting Tarradiddles would be the first to board the hate train and angrily toot the fury whistle as we pull away from the station, riding on rails driven white-hot by the tempestuous friction of our discontent – if only we weren’t paralyzed by simply not caring.
The whole buzz is about the FTC interpreting existing law to enforce some measure of accountability and responsibility for a certain type of blogger – and I’m sorry, but I just don’t see what the big deal is. For years now, some bloggers have been receiving money and freebies from companies in exchange for glowing, unrealistic reviews and biased testimonials of their products. All the FTC is asking is that bloggers disclose when they receive compensation from an advertiser, and that their reviews and/or testimonials are identified as the browser-based infomercials they truly are: the “Paid Programming” of the Internet. I’ve dipped my toes into the bitter pool of subversive, viral ad campaigns once or twice, but I always made it clear that I was in it for the money. Or the stuff. Or both. In the end, however, it just wasn’t worth it.
I’m not in this for the money, as evidenced by the fact that less than four tenths of one percent of my visitors have ever clicked an AdSense unit and, after running their Mad Lib-esque “targeted” ads for approximately one year, Google is finally sending me my first check next month. Apparently, four tenths of one percent of my readership is worth one hundred bucks. Yay, me! I think I’ll retire. Now, if only I could get the other 99.64% of you to start clicking…
Many bloggers take up the slack from the impotence of their AdSense revenue by selling dedicated advertising space to specific parties. These types of ads are usually far more lucrative and more effective for everyone, since they likely target a blog’s readership better than Goggle’s anemic attempts at automated targeting through AdSense. It’s a good system, if you’ve got the readership to back the play. I’ve been approached a few times for this sort of ad, but I’ve only received one offer that I didn’t feel was too one-sided to consider. Over in my sidebar, you’ll find a link to Titanium Wedding Rings Online that I put there in exchange for a men’s wedding ring of my choice, free of charge. I chose a rather nice ring, too – and Brittany will be putting it on my finger on the 24th. A ring for me, a link for them, and everyone walks away happy. (In effect, I made more money from that one link than I’ve yet to make from all of my AdSense revenue. Did I mention my abysmal 0.36% click-thru rate?)
The ugly side to blog advertising comes mainly from customer testimonials that have been bought and paid for by an advertiser. Bloggers rarely disclose when they’re being paid to post about a product. In fact, many of these “opportunities” either discourage or specifically
prohibit such revelations being made to a blog’s readers. It usually goes down like this. An advertiser contacts a blogger to notify him or her that he or she qualifies to participate in a specific campaign. They will then offer a free sample of the product that, unlike in traditional journalism, does not have to be returned, or they will simply make an offer of a one-time payment in exchange for a blog post tailored to their specifications. For example, over the past few months, I’ve received opportunities to participate in the following ad campaigns:
The list goes on, but you get the idea. Most of these advertisers want glowing endorsements in the form of either dedicated entries or casual mentions, in exchange for a few pieces of silver and the opportunity to do more business with them in the future. Now, there’s no problem with plugging a product that you’ve tried and liked – but none of these advertisers care about truth. They tell you what they want you to say and how they want you to say it. It’s a big business, preying on the unrealistic financial goals of naive and untalented writers. Most bloggers will write anything you want them to, because if they get a buck fifty for a five paragraph essay extolling the many and wondrous virtues of something called Poo-B-Gone, then they can call themselves professional writers. They’ve been paid to write! The dream is real! It’s all happening! Hooray!
In truth, the deep hidden secret of blogging is the massive amount of money that’s not in it. Unless you limit your blog to a narrow target demographic, you probably won’t attract independent advertisers to pay you to run a dedicated ad on your site, and you’ll certainly not get rich by relying on the nonsensically targeted ads of AdSense. If you’re blogging for the money, you’re better off going out and finding a real job. Oh sure, you can whore yourself out to every advertiser that wants a few glowing words endorsing their product and you can probably generate a decent supplemental income from it. Of course, your blog will eventually be recognized for the vapid corporate shill that it is, but you’ll still be getting paid. Never mind that, twenty years from now, everyone who follows your link to Crazy Larry’s LASIK Center will wake one morning to find their eyeballs melted to their PorcuPad pillow – you don’t have a responsibility to be accurate. You just have to meet the requirements for the advertiser’s opportunity. You’re blameless and all your fake testimonials will one day make you super kinda sorta rich moderately wealthy less poor. Good for you!
Only, the FTC says that, come December 1, 2009, the party’s over. You’ll have to start disclosing your infomercial advertisements for what they are. You’ll have to violate the agreements most of the advertisers want you to make by explicitly stating that you were compensated to write an endorsement. Viral marketing via blogs will either change into something a bit more respectable and recognizable for what it is, or bloggers will be faced with potential fines up to $11,000 per violation. That’s a lot of doggie shampoo.
The rest of the blogosphere may be enraged by the FTC sticking its nose into our business, but my business has never been to mislead anyone for my own personal gain. I’ll keep going on with Coquetting Tarradiddles in the same way as I’ve always done: talking about my life, and endorsing products that I feel like endorsing, just because I want to – not because I’m being paid for it. So, just to be clear, I’m fully endorsing the following, and I do so from my own free will:
That’s not to say that I wouldn’t accept any gifts, prizes, or monies that any of the individuals listed above may or may not wish to send me in great and awesome quantities. That would just be rude – plus, I’m really hoping for the eventual crossover hit novel/film/game, The Thieving Pirate That Shouted ROCK! at the Undead Heart of the Discworld.
Hey, it could happen…
I am not a team player, except when I am. I hate teams, except when I don’t. I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, except when I’m a democrat or a republican. I’m just me, flawed and faceted and independent. However, in a nation built on the very idea of independence itself, one which was forged in the insurrectionary crucible of the elegant and dangerous idea that all men are created equal and free, I am a minority. I grew up in public schools and pledged daily allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands. However, as the days of my youth slipped by into the long and disillusioned years of my life, I began to understand one simple truth. I discovered that I was pledging my allegiance not to a flag or to a nation, but to an idea – to the simple and seditious belief in unregimented sovereignty over oneself. It is an idea as old as the Continental Congress, but it has been too long neglected and forgotten, retired to the dark and cobwebbed corners of the national attic.
Sequestered there alone and lonely, people pay it lip service, but rarely have the courage of their convictions to support the menacing pitfalls inherit in the very concept of individual freedom. Freedom. People keep on using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means.
The field of freedom is a dangerous and scary place, a vast open plain littered with mines and trip-wires and booby traps. It is a place littered with the rotting corpses of the timid, and should be visited neither by children nor those with childlike minds, who would quickly find themselves ensnared in one of the horrors of its many hazards, cut off from the herd and bleeding to death. Freedom is a hideous and terrible concept, rife with peril and framed by disaster. It is also, in a word, effulgent.
I hope you looked that up before moving on to this paragraph, because effulgent probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. So, before you go any further, ignore the red herrings of the context clues and take a second to click on the handily hyperlinked word. Then, come back after you’ve received your micro-education for the day, and we’ll continue. It’s ok. I’ll wait…
Freedom is glorious. Resplendent. Shiny. It is the beacon that beckons from atop the tallest tower in the shining city on the hill, the city upon which the world sets its critical and envious gaze. Freedom and liberty built this country, erected over the granite bedrock of concepts like self-reliance, self-determination, and self-governance. It recognized the power of a mind freed from the tyranny of regulation and the oppression of charity. All men are created equal – but only created, mind you. Not raised. Birthed as human, every last one of us emerges from the womb a clean slate. Tabula rasa. A story yet unwritten.
Full of potential and not yet burdened by the shackles of mundanity, babies travel wide-eyed and free through their early years, living their days in a world of imagination, wonder and possibility. A child will test boundaries and push the envelope of acceptable behavior. Kids are precocious and ravenous beasts with insatiable appetites, who claw and bite and tear at the conventions of polite society that enslave the grown-up world. Left to their own devices, children would set fire to the world to watch it burn, then stand there crying amidst the wreckage. Knee-deep in ash and cinder and with no one left to save them, they would cry there and wail there and sob there until, one by one, they would die there. The torrent of their tears slowed to a trickle and then silenced altogether as every last murderous little infant is hushed upon the sharpened scythe of a merciless death. And then, the world turns. The system rights itself, the tanks are flushed, the computer is rebooted and humanity rises Phoenix-like from the ashes to try again, just one more time. Try to get it right this time, this one last time…
A couple hundred years and some change ago, a handful of seditious bastards tried to get it right. They decided to leverage personal freedom against personal responsibility, to amalgamate the strength of the adult with the rebellious passion of the child. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equality. Justice. Freedom. The inflammatory rule of the mob tempered by the slow moving wisdom of a representative government, where majority rules – but only slowly, and only sometimes. The United States of America, the great experiment in democracy that began 2,519 years ago in Athens, declared its independence in 1776, was recognized as sovereign by Great Britain in 1783, and whose Constitution was ratified in 1789. This puts our country somewhere around 220 to 233 years old, depending on your point of view.
In that short time, the destructive power of freedom has led us to visit unimaginable horrors and inflict untold suffering upon various peoples throughout our history. In a genocidal thrust westward to realize the dream of manifest destiny, we very nearly eradicated the total native population of the continent. We enslaved an entire ethnic group on the basis of skin tone and justified it with a Biblical passage from Genesis, where Noah gets drunk and then goes apeshit with the cursing after he finds out that his son walked into his tent to find him passed out and lying there butt-naked. God had just wiped out every living thing on the planet (except for maybe the fish) in the Great Flood, but decided to save Noah, along with his family and a bunch of animals that Noah coaxed into climbing aboard an ark in twosies, twosies. After the flood waters recede and the Noah clan is once again on terra firma, Noah wanders off into a vineyard and gets piss drunk on cheap wine. Later, after he passes out in his tent and his son Ham walks in to find his daddy lying there with his 600-year-old peepee uncovered, Noah freaks out and curses his grandson Canaan (Ham’s son) to forever be the lowest of slaves to his brothers. And, since medieval Christian scholars decided that Ham founded the population of Africa, the institution of slavery in this country was justified by the Biblical story of Noah getting hammered and then cursing his innocent grandson with eternal servitude because his own son saw him drunk and nekkid. Trailer Park Stories, circa 2300 BC.
Freedom isn’t all bad, however. In truth, freedom is a powerful idea that can create wonder just as easily as it promotes horror. The choice of which path the country will take is, naturally, left to the people of the nation. The individual’s right to vote, to dissent, and to protest is equaled by the individual’s right to apathy, lethargy, and supine acquiescence. A free and democratic republic is only what its citizenry makes of it, for good or for bad. The burden of the success or the failure of the collected whole is placed squarely upon the shoulders of the individual. Of each and every citizen. Me. You. Him. Her. Everyone together, everyone separate. A team made up of independent players, all thinking for themselves and pursuing their own agendas. Americans.
I believe in the freedom and responsibility of the individual, not the collective. My United States of America is made up of fifty separate states working together in a cooperative union, all represented by officials elected to represent the hopes and dreams along with the fears and nightmares of their constituents. The constituents choose to vote for these officials based on the belief that their representatives will speak on their behalf, in their interests. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, then the citizenry is heard at the next election cycle, when the failed representative is ousted and replaced by a new candidate. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Democracy requires an educated populace to function as intended. Ignorance and apathy are the death knells of a democratic government, paving the way for corruption, abuse, and unfettered power for a select few at the expense of everyone else. And, in today’s media-saturated culture, apathy is a commodity peddled by the glowering phosphors of the televised town criers, and they ply the vox populi with promises of fame and phantom wealth. The lie of the American Dream.
How did we get this way? How did we go from a country filled with a populace fueled by independent thought and a ferocity of spirit, to a society of Us vs. Them, where everyone chooses a side and hates the other team for mercurial reasons told to us by the blinking lights of the idiot box? I’m no expert, but I think it has a lot to do with our obsessive team spirit.
From the cradle to the grave, we are taught the benefits of the Team. We’re told to share, to fit in, to join the group. We’re raised to glorify sports played by teams opposing other teams who we’re taught to hate because of the color of their jerseys. We go to work and endure team building exercises sponsored by some corporate wank who travels the country shilling his or her useless and pedantic tripe of conformity to the unwitting drones planted in board rooms and auditoriums by their corporate masters, their eyes figuratively prised open like a theater full of Alex DeLarges enduring a groupthink application of the Ludovico technique. The talking heads on the boob toob tell us which political team we’re on, and why we should hate the other one. Groupthink negates critical thought and dispels individual independence. We rely on the teams we play for and root for, crediting them with our success and blaming them for our failures. The team provides everything: every bonus, every excuse, every positive, negative, up, down, inside, outside, leftside, rightside, nearside and farside of our entire existence, from burping cloth to funeral march. It’s Us vs. Them, we’re all in this together, united we stand, divided we fall. And it’s all bullshit.
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
– Terry Pratchett
There may be no ‘i’ in team, but there damn sure is an ‘m’ and an ‘e’. America was built on the backs of individuals, on the merits and weaknesses of important men and brave women. Wrongs were righted by the tenacity and unflinching resolve of far-thinking and ambitious leaders, successes made and failures blamed on them and them alone. Buying into the team mentality reduces us to the level of the insect hivemind. Incapable of surviving on our own, we seek shelter amongst the collective inside the comfortable echo chambers of our like-minded Facebook friends, and we think whatever the groupthink tells us to think. We stand on the right and yell at the left to support our President in a time of war, that the office commands respect, regardless of your politics – until, of course, the left gets their man in the big chair. Then, it’s nothing to do with respecting a wartime President or with the sanctity of the office, and it’s all about buzzwords and talking points lactated directly into our salivating mouths from the jiggling, gyrating bounce of the glowing glass teat. The right cries Patriotism when their guy is in office, while the left yells about Fascism. Then, when the left has their man in the white house (especially if he’s black), the right starts screaming Socialism while the left defends the same policies it used to crusade against. It’s all about perspective, all about knowledge, all about critical thought – and nobody seems to have any of it, anymore.
So I stand aside, off to the corner of the room and mingling with the one or two other like-minded masochists who insist on repelling the unwanted advances of a seductive and uncaring media. I stand with those who are thinking for themselves, who are liberal when it comes to things they want to be liberal about, and conservative when they want to be conservatives. I stand with those who stand apart from the team, who do not put on flashy red noses and join in the reindeer games of fools. I tell myself what I like and what I don’t like, what I want or don’t want, and what I need and don’t need. I praise individual achievement and laugh at the passions of beer bellied and barcalounging quarterbacks, who yell in their living rooms on Monday nights and threaten their televisions with Cheetos-encrusted fists. I’m drawn to sports and activities where the credit for success or the burden of failure is given to one person, and one person alone.
Learn. Think. Grow. Learn the facts of the world and think your own thoughts on them, then grow from the experience. The wonder or the horror your life becomes is your choice. The team will think for you and tell you what it wants you to learn. It will lie to you and manipulate you and confuse you, even as it drags you deeper and deeper and deeper into the wet and sticky coldness of its inescapable cave. Being a team player means sacrificing your capacity for critical thought, for righteous dissent, and for true, unbridled freedom. Freedom to say what you want, regardless of whatever offense others may take to it. They, in turn, have the right to offend you. The right, and the obligation. We must struggle to grow, we must endure suffering to strengthen, and we must triumph over fear to ascend to greatness.
I stand alone. I fall alone. Always, the responsibility is mine. And yours. Don’t forget that. We’re all in this together, after all…
Even after trimming my blogging schedule to twice a week, I still don’t seem to have enough hours in the day. There’s the omnipresent wedding and honeymoon planning to be done, along with everyday time sinks like working and writing and sleeping. I’ve always hated sleeping. It just seems like such a wasteful enterprise, lying unconscious for eight to ten hours out of every day. In the past, I rarely slept more than three hours a night and I loved it. That was, of course, before I had a three-year-old in the house. Now it’s early to bed and early to rise, which – contrary to popular belief – does not make a boy healthy, wealthy and wise. It just makes him tired. For example:
These days, my alarm goes off at 5:30 am. I grumble incoherent phrases as I reluctantly toss back the covers and climb out of bed. After a brief pit stop in the bathroom, I shuffle zombie-like down the hall towards the kitchen. Once there, I shield my eyes from the hateful light that I’m forced to switch on, since I’ve never gotten around to having cybernetic night vision nanites injected into my corneas. And, since I usually sleep with my contacts in, my early morning vision of the kitchen is a haze-filled blur of nondescript shapes and curious knobs.
First, I start the coffee. If I plan ahead the night before, the grounds are already in the filter, clean water is in the reservoir, and the whole affair is reduced to flicking a simple power switch. If I don’t plan ahead, then I’m confronted with the unenviable task of starting the whole vicious process from step one, which calls for measuring coffee into the filter along with the delicate motor skills required to fill the pot with water and then successfully empty it into the microscopic intake area of Brittany’s fiendishly-designed coffee maker. It sounds simple when you’re awake, but my mind is nestled somewhere between vegetative and cro-magnon for at least half an hour after I get out of bed, and the damnable procedure often gets the better of me.
Brittany and Trey come stumbling out of bed once the food is ready, and we all sit down to enjoy a nice, quick breakfast. After we’re done eating, Trey happily gets dressed (or unhappily, with drama) and he and Brittany pile into her car. I walk them out, give a few goodbye hugs and kisses, then I draw a couple of Mickey Mouse shapes onto Trey’s window and watch them drive off. I then go back inside, fully awake and ready to start the day!
Five seconds later, I’m asleep.
Try this for dinner. Serve hot, with a few slices of a thick, rustic bread that you either make yourself or get from a good bakery. Your family will thank you for it and you, in turn, will thank me. Preferably with money.
Add the basil leaves (around fifteen to twenty good-sized leaves), and puree the whole shebang until everything is a nice, even consistency.
Add the butter and slowly stir in the heavy cream. (A good general rule: one stick of butter and one cup of cream for every four cups of juice.)
Add a little garlic powder, then salt and pepper to taste.
Let’s be honest, shall we? Most of you reading this site do not know me personally, and we will never meet. Many of you come from states I’ve never been to and that I don’t plan on visiting, while others among you come from far off places in foreign lands with unpronounceable names that I’ve never even heard of. And, while the narcissist in me enjoys the international attention, the artist in me struggles to ensure that you’re gathering a proper representation of who I am by what I write. To that end, I thought I’d spend a little time today describing myself with a bit more detail than I have in the past.
I was born in 1975, a Texan by birth rather than choice. Given the choice, I’d have been born in a place entirely populated by sentient beings capable of cogent thought and articulate discourse. Instead, I was ripped from the Elysian peace of the womb and tossed in amongst the detritus of humanity, where the collected remnants of a million years of evolutionary offal has drifted into southern tide pools and there congealed into an odious mass of redneck, hillbilly, and yokel. I learned quickly that I was separate from the collective groupthink here, but for whatever reason, I took quite a long while to develop into the angry, frustrated crusader I’ve grown to become.
Back in my youth, I was a very shy, mostly silent child. I was acutely sensitive to the feelings of people around me, and so was as close to empathic as one can get without being at least half Betazoid. I never rocked the boat, rarely spoke up either for or against anything, and instead I just kept my head down and did what people told me. I’m not sure when it was that all of that changed, although I suspect it has something to do with my Boy Scout troop leader, during the fifteen or so minutes that I was actually in the Boy Scouts.
One of the first things a new scout does is memorize and recite the Boy Scout Law. Contained within its hallowed verse are a series of words describing all that a boy scout is expected to be. For the purposes of this story, however, we shall concern ourselves with only two of them: Trustworthy and Reverent (toward God).
After I finished reciting the Law to my troop leader, he asked me to identify the most important word contained therein. I pondered the list for a moment, running the esoteric calculations through my young, fifth-grader mind. Eventually, I settled on the one word I thought to be most important, and informed the troop leader of my conclusion.
“Trustworthiness,” I said with confidence.
He leaned back in his chair as a smile crossed his face, the sort of smug variety of sneer that seems to come standard on the self-righteous models of humankind. “Are you sure?” he asked.
A short pause. “Yes,” I said. I leaned back in my chair.
“Are you really, really sure?” he said, making sure to highlight the redundancy of his adverbs by sliding his voice in tremolo around the curves of the question mark.
“Um, yeah.”
“Maybe you should look again…”
I looked again, then I looked at the troop leader.
“Well?” he said.
“Trustworthy,” I repeated. “It’s the very first one.”
“So that makes it the most important?” asked the troop leader.
“Well,” I said, “it’s not the most important because it’s first, but it’s probably first because it’s the most important.”
The troop leader seemed to consider this for a moment, then he shook his head and dismissed it with a wave. He clucked a few notes of condescension and asked, “What about Reverent?”
“What about it?”
“Well, if you’re reverent toward God, wouldn’t you be all of the other things, too?”
I thought about this for a minute, then simply said, “Nope.”
The troop leader was puzzled by this. I could tell by the way his eyebrows started twitching, and because he said, “Huh?”
I leaned forward, and let my very first smug sneer cross my lips. “Well, you can say you’re loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent – but if you’re not trustworthy, then you’re probably just lying.”
Upon hearing this, the troop leader just sat there in silence, staring at the paper containing the holy writ of Scout Law. He studied it, looked up and started to speak. When nothing came out, he closed his mouth, glared at me, then stood up and walked away.
I never did get that merit badge, and I only went to two or three meetings after my ill-fated debate on the merits of theology versus veracity. It’s not as if anyone asked me to leave, per se, but it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t made of the sort of material that the Boy Scouts were looking for. I have no issues with the scouts, mind you. We just weren’t a good fit, and I let them know it with my constant debating. They, in turn, let me know it by not including me in their reindeer games of bug collecting and fire starting. We parted on good terms, but haven’t seen each other in years. I do not miss them.
And, with that, the seeds were planted for what would eventually blossom into the eternal struggles I find myself facing every day. It is exhausting business, and I am exhausted from it. I sincerely wish that I weren’t always taking issue with everything, or fighting to defend some principal or ethic. I’d love to live a life of peace and tranquility, although much of me revolts against the bloated complacency that sort of happy existence would ultimate lead to. I don’t know why I always fight. I don’t know why I go to bed angry every night and and wake up angrier the next morning (thanks, Unca Harlan), but I do. And, as much as I’d like to be a shiny, happy person who is capable of reveling in the thrilling delight of watching Jon and Kate Plus Eight’s marriage implode on reality teevee, I can’t seem to shake this constant nagging voice in the back of my head that perennially chews at my cerebellum, an omnipresent reminder that almost every single thing in this world just pisses me off.
For example, I can’t stand lies, lying, or liars. I do not believe that there are two sides to every story. Rather, I believe that there is simply the truth – and then there’s everything else. The lies, the fictions, and the reinterpretations of events that distort reality and strain credulity. I struggle and often pay a hefty price for always speaking the truth. There are the personal truths that get me into hot water with friends and family. There are the truths that others would like to be kept private and hidden. And still, there are the truths that everyone knows are all around them, but that through desensitization and demoralization have become muddled and grown opaque. Truths that people know, but that they don’t want to acknowledge.
I also have no tolerance for the willfully ignorant or the functionally illiterate. Living deep in the fetid swampland of the south, I am no stranger to enduring the inane and repetitive
rhetoric that spews forth from the mouths of uninformed, opinionated blowhards who haven’t bothered to educate themselves about whatever topic it is upon which they are opining. Beyond simply regurgitating the sound bite du jour of whichever teevee “news personality” they prefer watching, they are simply incapable of having an actual discourse on the issue. They rant and they rave, they throw around ill-defined buzzwords, and they bore me to tears even as their ignorance digs deep into my soul and sets my blood to boil.
Apart from despising dishonesty and condemning the ignorant, the reserves of my anger are often replenished by other, more mundane annoyances. Things like the public’s misconceptions of reality, or the nature of perceived fear vs. actual threat tend to get under my skin. I also hate manipulators and schemers, the sort of person who delights in the exploitation of others. I can’t abide useless people, either. Find something you’re good at that people need, and go out into the world and do it. I can’t stomach defeatists, who shirk responsibility by accepting the world as unchangeable. I despise self-help books and the hacks who shill them out to an unsuspecting and gullible readership. But, most of all – what I hate more than anything else in this world – is how absurdly, deeply, hopelessly stupid so many people seem to be.
The answers to life’s problems are usually very simple, yet people seem too dirt stupid to realize it. However, it probably goes deeper that that, for in the simplicity of the solution lies a certain inescapable difficulty, so most people seem to gravitate towards overcomplicating matters until they can somehow manage to arrange the Jenga tower of their faults in such a way as to make their own miserable lives somehow tolerable, and their own regrettable behavior somehow justifiable. In truth, whatever problems you may have in your life are usually very easy to solve, if only you have the will to see things through.
Consider the following:
If you are ignorant but want to be educated, then start reading books.
If you are doing something but want to stop doing it, then stop doing it.
If you don’t want people to know you do bad things, then don’t do bad things.
If you want people to think you do good things, then start doing good things.
The answers are almost always very simple. If you’re skinny and weak but want to be big and strong, then start exercising. If you smoke but want to quit, then stop smoking. If you’re tired of something in your life, then decide to change it! The difficulty lies in possessing the strength of character required to actually achieve the change. Change is hard, it’s slow, and it’s difficult – but it all starts with a simple decision. We can decide to change anything about our lives in an instant, and the change will come if we stick to that resolve. Change is sometimes daunting, sometimes scary, and is always, always difficult. Still, you can either sit on your hands and cry about your fate while doing nothing to correct it, or you can make the simple decision to do something about it.
If you leave here today having learned one thing, let it be this:
Most of life’s problems can be solved in one of two ways: either stop doing something you’re doing, or start doing something you aren’t. Stick with that, and remember to never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body, and everything else is cream cheese.
I am now a grown-up. At thirty-four years old, I’ve somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls of encroaching adulthood and sidestep the devious placement of its various landmines for over three decades now, but it’s finally caught up to me. Sure, I’ve known that it’s been gaining ground for months now, but I always managed to outrun it before and I could do it again – or so I thought.
It almost caught up with me several years ago, back when I married the woman who would become my ex-wife, but her obstinate refusal to even look up the word “responsibility” in the dictionary helped me to put some ground between myself and adulthood. Granted, I was the breadwinner and supporter of a wife – which alone should have triggered an early onset of grown-upitude – but it’s not as if we were ever a family. I’d come home and find her either asleep or playing video games, the house would be a wreck, and somehow it would all be my fault. Later, when I was helping to put her through school, her reciprocity consisted only of educating me on the finer points of life in Wannabe College, where students were lost boys and professors were pirates. Mostly, it involved a little studying, a lot of partying, and me heavily editing and revising (or writing) a lot of papers. All the while, the house was always cluttered, I was always cooking dinner, and I shouldered the full burden of blame for the slightest and grandest of the world’s problems. It was not a pleasant time, but a necessary one. I could not have arrived here without going through there, so in a strange and unsettling way, I’m grateful to my ex. Weird.
So anyway, while I had responsibility thrust upon me during five miserable years that finally came to a bitter and lunatic end, I never actually felt like an adult. I went through the motions, of course, but somehow I always knew that it was all temporary. Everything has always felt temporary to me. My jobs, my education, my relationships – every single aspect of my life has always been in flux and transient. I drift along and go where the current takes me, regardless of how white-watered and treacherous the river gets. Becoming an adult would mean picking up the oars and directing my own path for once and, for whatever reason, that was never something that I felt like doing. Leastways, not until now.
I found myself in the grocery store the other day, deep into the dark and carbonated corridors of the soda aisle. Normally, I breeze through this particular section with diligent speed and careless determination, as I pick up a twelve-pack of Coca Cola and go on my merry way. This is something that I have always done, ever since my first day away from the parental teat. Mom and Dad kept the home refrigerator stocked with big plastic bottles, but I chose the convenient portability of the aluminum can – and it was always cans for me – sometimes twelve packs, sometimes twenty-four – but always cans. On this particular day, however, I found myself staring at the row of two-liter bottles: a previously unthinkable alternative to those twelve seductive cylinders of cola-filled aluminum that I was used to buying. It made more sense, I told myself, to buy a few bottles and pour only as much as I want to drink, rather than waste the bottom third of a can that has gone too warm. I’d always avoided them in the past, because I grew up with two-liter bottles of soda. They felt homey to me. Nostalgic. Parental.
And then it hit me: I had grown up. Not just because I was suddenly loading two-liter bottles of soda into my cart four at a time (hey, they were on sale!), but because I suddenly realized that nothing is temporary anymore. In a month, I’ll officially be the head of a really real family, with a loving wife, a faithful husband, and a bright center of the universe we call our son. For the first time in my life, I find myself making plans for a future I never thought I’d have, but that I’ve secretly always longed for. I don’t mind buying the two-liters now, because I want to feel homey again. I want my nostalgia to transcend into Trey’s future memories, and I know now that I have a future, simply because I have finally become a part of something larger than myself. I am husband to a wife with whom I will grow old and wrinkled and ugly, and I am father to a son who will outgrow me and who will eventually leave us to seek out his own adventures elsewhere, while we stay behind and wither away into the dimmed and twilighted time of our lives. I can see myself as an old and happy man now, rather than the unsustainable youth I’ve always been. And, maybe someday when I’m a crazy old codger with legions of grandchildren running around and destroying my house, I’ll smile and remember when I thought I had it all figured out, and how wrong I was about everything. Maybe then I’ll turn and look at Brittany and steal a glance from a grown-up Trey, and I’ll thank them both for that day so long ago, when they came into my life and granted me the gift of a future worth looking forward to. Every day from that day, and every moment from right now, I am a husband. A father. A family man.
I will never call Trey my stepson, unless he comes to me one day and asks me to, presumably out of some random teen-angst need to feel he’s part of a Dickens novel. As far as I’m concerned, for the past year or so, Trey has been my son – and he will forever continue to be. I will not saddle him with the barbed-edged stigma of a label like stepson, and I’ll have no truck with anyone who thinks otherwise. He may grow to add a prefix to the Daddy Kris he calls me now, but that is his choice. If he wants to call me his stepfather one day, I won’t argue the point. Trey, after all, has two fathers: one biological, the other by marriage. Hopefully, he’ll call us both exactly the names we want to hear, but I’ll let him make up his own mind. I don’t have a genetic right to the Daddy title. If I want it, I have to earn it.
Now, when I think about the future, it’s no longer some distant shimmering glint of promise nestled in the swaying reeds of a faraway hill. It’s right next to me. It’s on the other side of every door, at the turn of every corner, and the end of every street. It’s next year and next month and next week. It’s tomorrow. It’s five minutes from now. It’s today. For the first time in my life, I have a real sense of purpose and the motivation to put a couple of oars in the water and start paddling. I’ll supply the drive, Brittany will take the rudder, and Trey will sit forward on the bow, facing ahead and plotting our course. I just hope I give him a good map…
(note: I originally intended this reflection on the Blogosphere to be my 200th post, but I miscounted and overshot the mark, hitting the 201st post by mistake. I am, against all demonstrable evidence to the contrary and with overwhelming improbability, apparently fallible after all. Who knew?!) I am not an Overman, but I play one on the Internet. Well, not really. I do play a character here, as do all of the people in my life, but the truth is that the grand literary house I’ve built on the hallowed grounds of the world wide web is, and always has been, a work of creative nonfiction. It’s been right there in my sidebar all along, wrapped in the warm blanket of nouns and verbs I call a Disclaimer. For those of you who are unfamiliar with what creative nonfiction is, I suggest getting an education. Barring that, I recommend reading some Lee Gutkind, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson or, to an extent, Harlan Ellison. If, however, predicates and participles scare you, then think of creative nonfiction in movie terms: Based On A True Story.
In Hollywood, ‘based on a true story’ often means taking a tiny nugget of truth and, in the interests of dramatic tension and increased ticket sales, bits and bobs are drafted onto the narrative to give it that little something extra. Creative nonfiction is a bit more restrictive than that, but let’s start with one extreme and then move down towards the other. Take, for example, the most famous feel-good movie starring a hobbit that’s ever been produced in Middle Earth: Rudy. You know, the football flick starring Sean Astin as the plucky short kid with the heart of gold, who defies the odds and gets to dress for the final game of the season? The one where all of his teammates ganged up on the big, bad coach by turning in their jerseys and saying, “This is for Rudy, coach!” Yeah, that one – never happened. Well, leastways, not as it appears in the movie. In reality, the coach voluntarily let Rudy dress for Notre Dame’s last home game of the season, and the famous jersey scene was a complete fabrication. It was more inspirational though, and in some ways it helped communicate Rudy’s frustration and accomplishments through a solitary character rather than through the cumulative effect of a lot of undramatic nuance. In other words, it served the story, so it stayed.
Other movies that have deviated from the true bits of their true stories?
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story – Bruce hurt his back working out one day, after he failed to warm up. In the movie, his back was almost broken in a vicious fight to determine if he would be allowed to continue teaching martial arts to non-Chinese. The fight did happen, but he won it handily. The back injury did happen, but not very dramatically. But by their powers combined, it was movie magic. And it worked.
Lean On Me – Yes, I love Morgan Freeman’s voice, too. I’m even a fan of it on Facebook. That does not, however, get the famous flick out of the spotlight when it comes to enhancing its true story. For instance, the driving plotline of the movie was entirely fabricated. Eastside High wasn’t actually threatened with a state takeover while Joe Clark was the principal. Furthermore, while his bullhorn antics and mass expulsions did decrease violence in the school, they did not increase test scores, as the movie implies. However, the events of the movie are meant to encapsulate Joe Clark’s entire tenure as principal, but depicted over the course of a single year, certain elements were added or modified in order to convey the same message as detailing the minutiae of his life would have, and it did it through the power of concentration. Think of concentrated laundry detergent, where one capful of the concentrate does the work of an entire box of the diluted stuff. Same effect, different ways of getting there.
Creative nonfiction in literature can work in much the same way as true story movies, only us writers tend to stick a little closer to the lifeline of truth. The pursuit of truth in all things, after all, is the primary reason most of us write what we do. Writing the truth forces one to be honest not only with your readers, but also with yourself. It’s often far too easy to convince yourself that a lie is true, especially if you don’t have an army of readers ready to take you to task on it. People lie to themselves all the time. It’s how many people cope with the struggles that arise from life’s school of war. Rather than understanding that what does not destroy us makes us stronger, they choose instead to deceive themselves into believing that reality is something other than it truly is. Rather than admit that every choice has consequences, they shift blame and massage the truth and crack the bones of credulity like a world-bending chiropractor until the fault for their situation falls flatly upon the doorstep of someone else. Someone who isn’t them.
Us creative nonfiction writers though, we’re a weird and silly lot. We revel in the truth, and roll around in piles of our own words like hot pigs in cold mud. We use the truth to shield ourselves from lies and to deflect the blows of inept accusers. We use the truth as a sword, to pierce to the heart of things, even if the heart be our own. We wound ourselves with the truth, so that we may be wounded. We hurt and later, we learn and we grow. We use the truth as food and drink to sustain us, to drive us, and to make life worth living.
Sure, sometimes months of conversation with someone may be reduced to one exchange in order to bite directly into the marrow of the bone, rather than spend time nibbling our way down through skin and muscle, pausing to pick bits of hair and gristle out of our teeth. Venues may change. Multiple people may be composited into one character who can best encapsulate their collected wisdom. Some things may move around, some people may fade into view or plop noiselessly from existence. In the end, though, it is all done in service of the truth. Truth not as an ideology, enforced with the iron-gloved tyranny of the Inquisition, but as motivation. The pursuit of truth is life, and creative nonfiction writers love being alive.
That said, I did lie earlier. I am an Overman. I believe in the here and now, and in the present as the most important point in any of our lives. The future may be unwritten, but it’s being typed up as we speak, as each metronomic beat of an ever ticktocking clock brings new words and sentences and paragraphs into the stories of our lives. The benefit to the present is that the past precedes it, and thus a cartographical understanding of the future can be charted – assuming, of course, that you’re plotting your course on accurate maps. Lying to yourself and to the world at large about your past can only create a need to lie about your present, which ultimately means you’ll soon be lying about your future and making everything up as you go along. And, as your Münchhausian-styled life grows, so do your lies until eventually, something gives. Maybe it’s a moment of clarity, maybe it’s hitting rock bottom, or maybe it’s the sudden appearance of an anthropomorphic cricket who shows up in a top hat and tails, and keeps telling you to stop being a jackass. Whatever happens, eventually the liar realizes that he’s spent his life blindly wandering in an unknown forest, with no idea how he got there, where he’s been, or where he’s going. This is not a problem that plagues the embracers of truth.
So, as you read through Coquetting Tarradiddles, please understand that everything you read here is true – except where it isn’t, although nothing is a lie. I am writing the narrative of my life, exposed to the core, with jagged bone and drippy red bits for everyone to see. I hide nothing, and I make no apologies for the truths I lay bare. I’ve been threatened by large corporations with menacing attorneys and I have not blinked, nor will I ever yield to demands for censorship.
If you are in my life and don’t want people to read bad things about you, then stop doing bad things. If you’re in my life and enjoy people reading good things about you, then keep doing good things. (Or, if you’re like one old and attention-starved associate of mine, if you like people reading about you doing bad things or good things – as long as they’re reading about you – then keep interjecting yourself into my life as much as possible, despite how strongly I wish you wouldn’t…)
One of the greatest things about freedom is the ability to speak. To speak in private about public things, and to speak in public about private things. To speak in support of something, or to spit with the angry blood of red-faced condemnation. To speak with adoration or resentment, with love or hate, with praise or with regret. Above all, to speak with truth and honesty, and know that there is nothing anyone can do to stop us. To anyone who wishes to try to silence the independent voices across the nation, the legal definitions are quite clear for anyone who wishes to look them up. A good place to start might be the Bill of Rights. After that, perhaps a brief visit with a dictionary to understand the difference between slander and libel. And finally, maybe a pause for the consideration of the fact that those of us who are doing this sort of thing – who are writing out our lives on pages and on screens – well, that we probably know what we’re doing, and we’ve heard it all before.
Everyone has the power – and the right – to write the stories of their lives, whether they keep the stories hidden or lay them bare for the world to see. Creative nonfiction allows its writers to tell true stories with the narrative tools available to the novelist, and so they are freed from the tyranny of Who, What, When, Where, How and Why. Lies cannot be invented nor presented as fact, but absolute fact can not be demanded for every sentence written, as long as it serves the greater truth of the work. As long as it’s Based On A True Story.
So what is true here on Coquetting Tarradiddles? Everything and nothing. It is simply my story, as I remember it. I speak loudly and strongly, and I go forward unconcerned with the trivialities arising from the effronteries of others. If I offend you with the truth, I do not apologize. If I glorify you with it, I do not ask for humility. If I sting you with it, I have no concern for your tears. If I wound you with it, I do not care if you bleed. The truth is what it is. For some, it is a beacon radiating from the shining city on the hill. For others, it is a razor-edged firesword that cauterizes even as it cuts deep through flesh and bone and vital organ. If the truth hurts, you can avoid it – or you can be wounded by it and grow stronger, wiser, better. For those of you horrified by writers like me who piss out yellow truth in the public swimming pool, understand that we do so unconcerned with your concern and with your outrage. We do so in spite of it. We do it because of it. We do it because to do so is to be brave. Unconcerned. Mocking. We do what we do because truth leads to wisdom, and wisdom loves warriors. We are the bloggers. We are the truth. We are Übermensch.
The chicken nuggets were a hit. I’ll give you the recipe, but you’re probably not going to like it. In fact, if you count yourself within the ranks of the epicurean geek corps of The Alton Brown Army, you’ll absolutely hate it. I say this not because the dish is in any way inferior to the results of Mr. Brown’s culinary acumen, but simply because I don’t go in for pesky annoyances like measurements and baking times. I’m a dumper and a taster, and I cook things until they’re done. For acolytes of Archchancellor Brown’s school of cookery, not measuring things out to the within the most anal retentive degrees of absolute accuracy is the stuff of heretics and heathens. For people more interested in how things taste than how things work, however, dumping and tasting is the accepted dogma when it comes to working in the kitchen and creating truly good eats.
So, I’ll lay out a list of ingredients and give you some general instruction, and the rest is up to you. If your head explodes from indecision in the face of being liberated from the tyrannical rule of recipes, I cannot be held responsible.
What you’ll need:
Chicken breast tenderloins – Pound them, poke them, then hack off the niggly white bits before cutting what’s left into nugget-sized chunks.
A couple of eggs, a splash of water, and some melted butter – put all of that together and mix it up. Use a whisk, if pretentiousness gets the better of you.
Breadcrumbs (I like panko), parmesan, basil, thyme, oregano, garlic powder, paprika, pepper, salt – use as much or as little of each as you need to. Mix it all together and find out if it tastes good by TASTING it. Pretty simple, really.
Plop the chicken into the egg mix, then throw them in the breadcrumb mix and roll them around. Grab a baking sheet, spread some foil on it and blast it with some non-stick spray. Spread the nuggets out on the foil and try to remember that you’re not baking cookies. Chicken doesn’t spread out when it cooks, so cram all of the little suckers on there – just try not to have them actually touching one another. There’s no telling what they’ll get up to in the dark privacy of the oven if they’re all on top of each other going in, so try to enforce a solid No Touching policy before things get out of hand. Cook them for a little while, then turn them over and cook them some more. When they’re done, eat them. Simple. (Ok, maybe ten minutes on each side. There, you got a cooking time out of me. I hope you’re happy.)
If you’re making the golden brown nuggets of tasty delight for your own children, try and keep in mind that kids generally don’t like very flavorful food. They prefer bland, boring, spiceless meals that don’t demand much from their inexperienced tastebuds.
However, laying the groundwork for a future appreciation of flavor now rather than later might just save you some dinnertime frustration from a picky eater as life goes on. Work in just enough of the herbs and spices as you think your child will accept, and go from there. Granted, if you make your kid a snobbish foodie now, you’ll have to remember to keep up the good home cooking as they get older, or you might find yourself staring down a familial revolt the next time you try and bring home fast food. You have been warned.
In other news, Brittany and I have most of the wedding preparations behind us. The only major hurdle still facing us now is the selection of music for our ceremonial first dance as husband and wife. However, even as we argue about what song to use, neither of us is certain that we’ll even be able to dance at all. It seems that the church has a strict no dancing policy, which immediately calls to mind the image of an argumentative and freedom loving Kevin Bacon standing in a courtroom, vehemently asking, “What did David do?!”
In this particular case, though, the dancing ban is temporary and not at all for religious reasons. Apparently, a wedding crowd got quite out of hand not too long ago, and the nice (but frail) old ladies of the church weren’t exactly equipped to stop a horde of drunk and saucy bridesmaids crunkin’ it up on the dancefloor and grinding against a veritable wall of eager groomsmen pelvis. Instead, the church elders took a page from the temperance movement and prohibited alcohol by passing their own little Volstead Act, apparently unconcerned with the possibility of a new Al Capone rising from the ranks of Sunday School parishioners. Next, they enacted a temporary ban on dancing to the devil’s music, thus lumping even the benign and boring slow-dancing of middle school sock hops in alongside the wild debauchery of the Lambada – which, as everyone knows, is The Forbidden Dance!
Fortunately, the dancing ban is only temporary. The elders are set to meet again sometime in September – well before our wedding in October – to provide a new ruling. Hopefully, John Lithgow won’t be present to put the kibosh on lifting the ban, and dancing will once again return to the sleepy little town of Beaumont. We shall keep our fingers crossed.
Oh, and about the song we’ll dance to? I’m leaning towards George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun” while Brittany prefers the transitory pap of Jason Mraz’s “Lucky”. You can see my predicament.
On the one hand, we have a classic from The Beatles that summarizes the dark and miserable times we both had to endure earlier in our lives, even before the terrible and wasted years spent living with our unworthy former spouses finally came to an end. Then, after finally moving on in life and finding each other, the Sun came out in all of its flamboyant and metaphorical splendor to banish the darkness from the rest of our days. Brittany is my Sun, but only in a completely positive sense. A life-giving sun, one of nurturing and of life and of love. A sun that lights up the sky on a beautiful and crisp Fall day, and makes you happy just for being outside. Not a literal sun that heats up the atmosphere, melts polar ice caps, and gives you skin cancer. That type of sun would make the song totally inappropriate for nuptial gyrations, I suspect.
On the other hand, we have the very hip and very trendy “Lucky”
that will undoubtedly be played at one-point-twenty-one-quadrillion weddings this year alone, and which neither characterizes either one of us, nor speaks to our mutual experience as a couple. Sure, it’s pretty and sweet and all that, but it’s generic. Normal. Boring. Lame. It’s a typical love song about infatuation, and marriage is built on enduring love, not infatuated attraction. Yes, I’m lucky to be in love with my best friend and yes, I’m lucky to be coming home again, and the lyrics of the song DO fit. I just think my song fits better, and I’m always right. At least, I think I am…
Our oven stopped working one day, quite unceremoniously and without fanfare. It simply stopped getting hot. I’ve been meaning to call someone to come fix it for ages now, but for one reason or another, I never got around to it. In a few brief bursts of ignorant enthusiasm, I tried to fix it myself. However, since I’ve been neither trained nor tested in the delicate art of natural gas oven repair, I never met with much success. I thought that I knew what the problem was, and I even formulated a very scientific hypothesis concerning how to make the blasted thing work again. The only problem I kept running into was the bizarre and arcane construction of the accursed appliance, which thwarted my every effort to open it up for surgery and get a good look at its innards. I even called in the big guns one sleepy Sunday, and had my father come take a look at it with me.
He came over, and we went right to work. We pulled the oven out into the middle of the kitchen floor and studied it from all sides, planning out our best attack vector. It was all for naught though, as the oven would prove itself the victor later that day. Overcome by superior construction and spot welding, neither one of us could decide how to penetrate its considerable armor. We tried attacking from the front and were repelled. We came up from underneath, but the oven was ready for that too, and it just hissed a mercaptan-scented giggle at us once we’d spent time removing an incalculable number of screws and bolts, only to find ourself apathetically staring at the gleaming horror of seamless sheet metal. We eventually admitted defeat, and reluctantly returned the foul champion to its throne in the alcove of my kitchen.
So, it was with some measure of trepidation that I approached the oven again this weekend, determined to best it with one final push on the linoleum tiled battlefield of my kitchen floor. Brittany and I had settled in for a brief afternoon nap earlier in the day, which turned out to be far briefer for myself than it was for her. Awakened by some unseen force, I felt drawn to the kitchen, where the shining metal of my enemy waited in mocking silence. I grabbed my toolkit, steeled my nerves, screwed up my resolve and, undaunted, I returned once again into the fray.
I pulled the oven back into the middle of the floor and, planning a rear assault this time, I twirled it around as far as I could get it to turn. It was still tethered to the gas line, and I would have to shut off the flow of gas and disconnect it before I could turn it around far enough to work on. Bending myself into impossible positions, I made like a circus contortionist as I worked my way back to the lever that controls the flow of gas. The oven was ready for this, though, and it had taken steps to halt my progress. The lever, after probably decades of inattention and neglect due to the infrequent need one might have to operate it, refused to yield to my limited human strength. I grabbed a wrench and cautiously tapped at it, before the image of a broken gas line was mentally projected onto the back of my eyeballs by the more sensible areas of my mortal brain. Understanding that I was probably going to fail at this latest attempt to repair the oven anyway, I didn’t want to add the expense and hassle (not to mention overwhelming danger) of a gas leak to my shameful list of failures. Instead, I chose to leave it alone and to get back to it later, should I be able to buck the odds and actually find a way into the oven’s insides.
I went in for a combined assault this time, concentrating on a frontal charge followed by a sharp push from underneath. This proved to be an effective strategy. I removed the storage bin from the front of the oven, and found the tiny hidden bolts that released the seamless bit of metal my father and I had encountered during our unsuccessful campaign. Removing that, I was able to target the source of my frustration: the oven ignitor. Excited by the sight of my quarry being so close, I quickly reached for it before remembering that I had not yet cut off the gas. However, since I was already elbow-deep in metal and grease, I decided to Risk It All and just go in for the kill, before the oven had time to react to my plundering and devise a new defensive strategy.
After some more contortions and Houdini-like joint dislocations used to try and fit my giant man hands into impossibly small spaces with sharp and bloodthirsty edges, I was able to remove the bolts securing the ignitor. It was then, with the ignitor released but still inaccessible, that my years of misspent youth I “wasted away” playing Tetris came into service. After several minutes of twisting and turning the bulky ignitor, I was able to wrangle it from the deceptively small hole from which it was implausibly mounted. Finally, after twenty to thirty minutes spent inverted like some modern day, mechanical-minded Michelangelo, I emerged from under the belly of the beast. But my work was not yet done.
The broiler located at the top of my oven uses its own ignitor, which I reasoned was likely the same part as the one used by the oven itself. In a great and questionable sort of irony, this ignitor was both easy to get to and simple to remove. Once I had it in hand, I checked it against the broken one, and it was then that I finally outsmarted my oven. It was, in fact, the same exact part – right down to the little stickers that some good Samaritan factory worker had placed on each of them with considerable foresight and unsolicited helpfulness. Armed with the knowledge that I was probably not going to blow myself up if I attached and mounted the broiler ignitor to replace the faulty oven ignitor, I set about my task.
It was pretty much the same thing as I’ve already described, only in reverse this time. The ignitor was a bit more difficult to mount than it was to remove, but I managed to Jenga it into place and bolt it down. I then reassembled the various bits and bobs of the oven, and secured all of the large sections of alarmingly sharp metal to the equally sharp and murderous edges of the oven’s interior. I returned the storage bin to the front, and pushed the defeated beast back into its alcove. Then, I turned it on. And sprinted to the living room.
Just in case, you know. Just a precaution against the remote possibility that I had just MacGyvered myself into the exploding fury of an early grave.
Fortunately, Richard Dean Anderson taught me well in my formative years (before he started slumming around the cesspit of SyFy programming), and not only did I not die, but I returned to the kitchen to find the warm glow of a fully functioning oven. I did it! I conquered the beast! Armed with nothing more than gross arrogance and no official training along with a callous disregard for personal safety, I faced down my mechanical foe and bested him with the strength of my will alone. Or maybe I just got lucky. It’s a toss-up.
So tonight, in celebration of my victory, I am returning once again to where I belong: in the kitchen, chopping and stirring and mixing up delicious food for my friends and family. I’m headed to the store soon, to acquire the varied and mysterious reagents needed for my Epicurean potions. Tonight, I seek not only to revel in the spoils of war, but I am taking on a new task of titanic improbability: I am going to get Trey to eat healthy chicken nuggets!
My sister has an interesting sounding recipe up on her own blog (which she has apparently stopped concerning herself with, as the latest update is from an hour past forever ago), but she’s gone and added ground flaxseed to it. I’m sorry, but I don’t go in for all of the New Age bibblebabble surrounding the latest and greatest miracle foods. In fact, despite all the hype surrounding how good flaxseed is for you, precious little actual science has been done to either
confirm or deny the claims. Further still, some of the miracle benefits of the seed seem in direct contradiction to current knowledge, considering that high levels of Alpha Linoleic Acid actually increases the risk of prostate cancer by around 300% – a far cry from curing or preventing the very same cancer, as the waterheaded advocates of organic, holistic diets like to claim. Not only does flaxseed contain traces of cyano-glycoside linamarin (think cyanide), but some studies have actually classified flaxseed oil as a hazardous substance. There’s another name for flaxseed oil, you know. It’s called furniture polish. How can that be good for you?!
No, I’m going to try my own recipe tonight. It’ll be simple and quick, with fresh ingredients and healthy preparation. Some breadcrumbs (maybe Panko), a little parmesan, a touch of basil, thyme, garlic powder, a sprinkle of salt and a dash of pepper, and that should be all it takes. Throw in some eggs and water along with a touch of butter, and you have yourself the ingredients for delicious chicken nuggets. A little soak in the wet stuff followed by a roll in the dry stuff, and all that’s left is to toss them in the oven until they’re crispy and delicious and totally irresistible to the dubious palate of a three-year-old boy. That’s the plan, anyway. I might just wind up burning the house down and taking the family to McDonald’s. It could go either way…
As of today, our wedding is officially two months away, and the days are starting to slip past us a bit quicker now, with every terrible tick and ominous tock of the countdown clock accelerating us faster and faster to the I Do Deadline. It’s a funny thing, a wedding. When it’s far off in the hazy glimmer of some distant day, it’s exciting and joyous and – perhaps most importantly – it’s all theoretical. But as the days slide off the calendar one by one and bring you ever closer to the event, things begin to change. And, with the exponentially increasing speed that accompanies the arrival of any deadline that’s been victimized by excessive procrastination, what was once merely theoretical suddenly becomes inescapably inevitable, and the excitement and the joy start to give way to the stress that comes from having so much left to do and the panic that results from having so little time left in which to do it. It’s a common theme, really. They have reality shows about it, wherein future brides channel the ancient spirits of antediluvian Japanese reptile-gods and set about devouring whole cities with the homicidal fury of their nuptial rage. Or something like that, anyway.
Brittany, thank Gojira, is not one of those brides. She’s fairly laid back even in times of extreme stress, which is an enormously good thing. Recently, some of her bridesmaids
had to leave the wedding party to take on other roles in what is apparently known as the House Party (which, it has been pointed out to me, unfortunately involves neither Kid nor Play). This sudden change to the starting lineup might have rattled a lesser coach, but Team Brittany perseveres through all things. She just cracked open her playbook, moved some Xs and Os around, and everything and everyone is happy. Although, I must regrettably alter my number of groomsmen so as to avoid a potentially catastrophic imbalance at the altar. The wedding party, it would seem, must be equal on both sides, lest one side overpower the other. I guess the battle of the sexes begins even before the first vows are spoken. Who knew?!
We met with the wedding coordinator of the church this past Saturday, which was a much-anticipated event that was altogether anti-climactic and disappointing. I was all set for a rousing theological debate with a well-armed opponent, perhaps someone along the lines of a holy Nurse Ratched. Instead, all I got was a nice old lady with the face of a sun dried tomato, who was happy and pleasant, and who possessed an altogether infectious eagerness to give us everything we wanted. I had braced myself for the thrilling bloodsport of an ecumenical showdown, and all I got was a sweet old lady who kept saying “Yes” to us – it was infuriating! I did have to bite my tongue once, when the conversation took a brief sojourn into the strange political landscape of a media-distorted mind, but I was good and kept quiet, even in the face of words like socialism, debt, and the French. I could go on about how misguided and ill-informed people are about political things, but I think I did that already…
As of right now, much more is ready for the big day than is still left to be done. We’ve got the church and reception covered, including music and decorations. The cake is taken care of, the reception menu decided. (Although, sadly, I’m not going to be catering it myself, as I originally wanted. Gordon Ramsay will be so disappointed…)
The bridesmaids all have their dresses, Brittany’s bridal gown will be here in a few weeks (I think. I hope.), and our rings should be here in the next few days. All that’s left is for me to choose my tuxedo style and get my groomsmen fitted. However, in a depressing turn of events, I suspect that my trimmed-down roster of groomsmen will prevent me from getting my tux for free, which might have been Brittany’s plan all along when she moved some bridesmaids into the house party. After all, most of the tuxedo rental places have a minimum number of rentals required before the groom gets his tux gratis, and I’m sure that number is greater than three. Maybe it’s some kind of twisted and bizarrely feminine attempt at a firm enforcement of the equality of the sexes through a fiendish manipulation of established tuxedo renting incentive protocols, sort of thing. Yeah, that’s probably it. She did it on purpose! Although, I’ll never know for sure…
So here we are, two months away from the big day and all of the stresses are beginning to dissolve away, bit by bit as we check items off of the To Do List. Like generals on some matrimonial battlefield, Brittany and I are ticking off objectives one by one and laying waste to the armies of Need To Do, Want To Do, and Have To Do. Pretty soon, everything will be set and in place, and all we’ll need to do is show up and look pretty. I can handle the pretty, and with GPS navigation, showing up won’t be a problem. All in all, I think we’re in pretty good shape. Bring it on!*
*The preceding statement should in no way influence any or all ethereal agents of Fate, Serendipity, Luck, Destiny, Fortune, Kismet, Chance, Karma, or of any other natural or supernatural entity capable of affecting, manipulating, altering, or otherwise interfering with the plans described elsewhere in this document. Interpreting said statement as an issuance of challenge for eldritch forces to advocate, either through the use of enhanced enforcement techniques or without, or to otherwise attempt to instruct the mortal author of this document on the futility of mankind’s efforts to control the multiverse is strictly prohibited, except where explicitly allowed by existing transdimensional law.
I hate Dora The Explorer. I normally stomach Trey’s choice of television programming fairly well, because it’s fun to watch the shows with him sitting beside me in my chair while we both interact with the characters on the screen. Blue’s Clues, for example, is great, sometimes even giving a wink and a nod to the parents in the audience. Dora, on the other hand, is complete and worthless tripe from beginning to end. There is little educational value to be found in any aspect of the show, even if you count the sporadic Spanish words sprinkled about each episode like las migajas del Hansel y Gretel. The animation is poor and repetitive, the voice acting is miserable (especially when the characters break into monotonous musical numbers characterized by tone-deaf vocals and three-frames of a dance animation), and Dora herself is an enormous, half-brained twit.
Last night was an important night. A watershed moment in my life’s story. A hero’s journey. Monumental. Epic. You see, last night I became something greater than myself through the transformative power of the toddler mind. At the start of the evening, I was nothing more than I was the day before, or the day before that. However, by the end of it – by the time the sun slipped beneath the horizon and the moon shone bright in the nighttime sky – I had become Legend.
although an alternate hypothesis involves the vampiric bloodsucking of fleas. There’s no way to be certain, but the end result is the same: Trey goes completely bugfuck crazy when he spies any tiny little thing with more than two legs. Please understand my use of terms here, for I do not choose them lightly. The child literally breaks into a type of hysteria and fear typically reserved for the last victim in a horror movie, the last one standing, who’s had to watch atomic powered giant killer mutant cockroaches eat every single living person on the planet – and now they’re looking at him with hungry eyes and wildly gyrating antennae. He loses his freaking mind!
Yesterday, I took aim at the JK Wedding Entrance Dance with a critical eye poking through the telescopic site of my Hate Rifle. I didn’t intend for the tone to come across quite as caustic as it apparently did, although I did mean everything I said. Well, mostly…
In part two of my Jill and Kevin tirade, I want to expose the hypocrisy behind my words and maybe smooth over some of the rougher bits of part one. I admit that I am looking at the whole dancing wedding affair through disillusioned-colored glasses and, with today’s essay, I hope to explain why I wrote what I did in part one. Yesterday, I revealed that I have been married before (for those who didn’t already know), but I did not divulge the circumstance surrounding my absent-minded walk down the aisle. To set the record straight – and to put all my cards on the table – I have to confess that I, myself had a frivolous wedding, although I didn’t know it at the time.
First, some backstory. I grew up taking family vacations to Walt Disney World in Florida, so I have many happy memories of the place that I wanted to share with my then-girlfriend way back in 2001. She loved it, and we went back again a year later. I’d spent some time before we left, working with the WDW staff to secure a location inside one of the parks to be the site of a lavish, fairy tale proposal. I popped the question, she said yes, and another year passed before we were back in Florida and getting married at the place where (I thought) we fell in love. Yes, I got married in Disneyworld. (And I called Jill and Kevin’s wedding silly. Nice to meet you, kettle. I’m pot!)
Looking back now, I can see the frivolity of a Cinderella Mouse House wedding, but things were very different then. It was romantic and sweet and perfect. I was giving my blushing bride the gift of a fairy tale wedding, complete with a happily ever after that would last forever. What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that she was merely enjoying the ride. And, once things started getting a little bumpy, she hopped into another car…and then another one…and another one…and another one…
While the Disney-centric, fairy tale extravaganza was something that I thought was special and would be a lasting memory for both of us to share for years to come, it was, in fact, simply a blanket of romantic camouflage draped a broken and one-sided relationship that should have never happened in the first place. If I hadn’t been so caught up in planning the perfect storybook proposal and, later, the quintessential fairy tale wedding, maybe I would have seen her for who she was, rather than who I hoped she would be. Maybe if she hadn’t been dazzled and distracted by the spectacle, she would have wandered off to nibble on the greener grass of other pastures a lot sooner than she did, preventing me years of misery and regret. Maybe we would have never been married at all. Oh, if only!
But, as it happened, we did say our vows and we did get married. It just turned out that, while I was taking vows that I believed sacred and permanent, she was just reciting lines from a script she was playing out in her own mind. They didn’t have any significance or meaning to her, existing instead as the simple and transient dialog of an imagined movie about her life, wherein she is the star and her supporting cast is as interchangeable and replaceable as her increasingly gaudy costume changes. It was all a grand deception, my marriage – a hideous charade in which we both took part. I willingly deceived myself with the belief that what we were doing was serious and real and permanent, and she lied to both of us in her delusion that she could ever change who she was. Granted, she tried to change. In fact, she prided herself on idolizing and mimicking Madonna’s (!) ability to reinvent herself, year after year. In practice, at least this far removed from any superstar spotlights, all I eventually saw in my ex-wife was a sad, self-loathing little girl who hated what she saw in the mirror, but who lacks the will or character to change the reflection. Instead, she just does a quick wardrobe change and recasts all the players on her life’s stage. She concocts a new script in her mind to accommodate The New Her and Her New Him, and she sets off once more to try again, and maybe get it right this time…
And that’s about the long and short of it, friends. I don’t want to dwell on her or my Huge Mistake any longer today, as I’ve devoted enough of my energies to that sort of drivel in the past. I mention her here only to serve as reference for my current outlook towards the fugacious nature of so many recent marriages, and so you’ll understand where I’m coming from when I talk so strongly about why marriage is a serious business that should be taken seriously, with serious seriousness!
Anyway, my words to Jill and Kevin were motivated not out of hate or spite. They were coming from a place of warning and caution, and I’d hoped to point out some of the potholes they might face along the way on their journey together down the highways and byways of married life. I wanted to prepare them for the hard-packed dirt of reality that awaits them at the bottom of their inevitable long, skydive fall from the high they’re enjoying now. Most marriages seem to disintegrate somewhere around the fifth anniversary these days, (the Seven Year Itch having been trimmed down by a couple of years, presumably as a result of technology making cheating easier and more efficient). Coming down from the infatuation-based high of the newlywed years is a hard enough thing for any couple to endure, but when it’s compounded by a unique wedding that scoops you up and takes you soaring through the atmosphere well above the Kármán line, it’s a very, very, very long way down. Without advance warning and a little heat shielding, you’ll burn up on re-entry and your marriage will disintegrate long before you make it to a gentle, gliding touchdown at Cape Canaveral.
So, that’s all I was doing. I was warning Jill and Kevin about the dangers that lie ahead, and preparing them for unexpected things. They happened to me, and I didn’t see them coming until it was too late. Maybe, if someone points out some of the bumps along on the ragged road ahead of them, a newly married couple can find a way to navigate past them that doesn’t send one or both spouses seeking smoother rides in newer vehicles. Maybe.
P.S. – I know that I put my proposal to Brittany on YouTube. I didn’t want to, though. Originally, I hosted the video locally, right here on Coquetting Tarradiddles. Unfortunately, my simple solution proved too lightweight to endure the bandwidth demands of the site, so I was forced to seek a beefier solution. YouTube was the obvious choice, so I uploaded the video there and embedded it back here. So you see, my hypocrisy is plain and obvious, although not without its limits. I didn’t expect my proposal to ever become a media sensation, and it didn’t. It’s far too geeky and niche to be interesting to anyone who isn’t already interested in it. Still, I did, in my own way, exactly what I’m fussing at Jill and Kevin for having done themselves, and I should be the one to draw attention to that fact. Hey, at least I’m honest about my hypocrisy – which probably says a lot more about my character than I’d like it to, although I did always have a strange and special fascination with Thomas Jefferson…
As you may or may not know, I am about to get married. And, while I prefer to pretend that I never made a Huge Mistake, the disastrous horror that was my first marriage cannot be omitted from my experience, and so I must regrettably acknowledge that this will be my second walk down the aisle. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I could grab a Magic Eraser and Mr. Clean the stain of those wasted years away, but I can’t. They’re still there, and they’ll always be there to cloud my thoughts and haunt my dreams, even as time slips by and I think of them less and less.
Mostly, I try ignoring the dark and lunatic times of my unfortunate experience, in the hope that they’ll eventually go away and bother someone else. I don’t like counting my first marriage. It was a strange and hollow thing, filled with strange and hollow years spent bound to a strange and hollow person, and I don’t like thinking about any of it. However, every so often something comes along to rattle my braincase and jog loose a few forgotten memories best left repressed and unremembered, locked safely away and lost in the dark and cobwebbed corners of my cluttered mind. Last week, just such a nasty little terror of remembrance came along in the form of a seemingly well-intentioned YouTube video that Brittany asked me to watch. She thought it was cute and sweet and precious, and she wanted to share its joyous nature with me. By now, I’m sure most of you out on the wide world of the Internet have already seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance, and I’m sure most of you think it’s the bee’s knees. Most of you probably thought the choreographed chorus line of a wedding processional was brilliant and unique and sweet. Most of you probably smiled and giggled, then passed the link on to share with your friends and brighten their days. Most of you are, of course, ignorant fools!
This is the video, for the two people on the planet who haven’t seen it:
Alright, maybe you’re not fools. Heck, some of you might not even be ignorant. Maybe you watched the video and had the same reaction I did – but somehow, I doubt it. Apart from a few holy-rollers getting their sensible and modest undergarments in a bunch over what they view as a show of blatant disrespect for God and the sacred observances of the occasion, most of the buzz around the Internet is overwhelmingly positive and supportive of this recently wed couple. I, however, have a different take on the whole thing, a view colored and scarred by my own experience with reducing a wedding to frivolity. (Read more about that tomorrow, in part two!)
Now, before you go and get yourself all riled up, thinking that I’m about to poo-poo the whole dancing-nuptials enchilada, let me make one thing perfectly clear. Yes, I have Issues and Views concerning the video, the couple, the wedding party, and the probable motivations behind the whole idea. However, I don’t write any of the following to try and cast a shadow over Jill and Kevin’s future life together, however short I think it might be. I sincerely do wish them all the best, and hope they prove me wrong with everything I’m about to write. That said, it’s time to address the newlyweds directly, as we move on into the Festivus portion of today’s essay…
I got a lot of problems with you people! To begin with, you’ve trivialized the real and serious business of getting married. Yes, it’s supposed to be a special day to celebrate your love in a way that’s unique to you as a couple – but I have strong doubts that what you did actually represents any of that. You wanted to do something unique and special, I suspect, not for the sake of creating a lasting memory for each other to enjoy for years to come, but to compete with all of the other recent flashes in the great popping pan of the Internet Meme Kitchen. You had to do something that hadn’t been done before on YouTube, that hadn’t been seen yet or copied yet. You needed to stand out against the white noise background of all the other copycats and showboats competing for a few minutes in the warm glow of an Internet Famous spotlight. And so, you took the most important day and decision of your lives thus far, and reduced it all down to the simple, marketable level of linkable spectacle and farce. Then, you publicized it.
That’s all well and good, and it’s not even that dumb of a thing to do. Usually, people wait until the reception to try and pull off one of these memorable/sharable surprise dance moments, but you knew that post-ceremony dance numbers were becoming a dime a dozen. A million imitators. Milquetoast. Lame. You knew that to stand out, you needed to raise the stakes, so you moved things into the church, and lightened up a normally serious and reverent affair with dancing and silliness. You knew that if you could pull it off, you might have a shot at stealing your entitled Warholian minutes away from any would-be usurpers of your glory. You wanted to be Internet Famous, for whatever reason. You found a way to accomplish your goal, and you did it. You made it onto the web, you became a sensation, and you even found your way to national television. Congratulations!
But why did your wedding need to be your launch vehicle to mini-stardom? Why did you have to record it and share it and publicize it on the Internet? If you truly wanted to simply capture your unique and playful spirit as a couple, wouldn’t it have been enough to dance down the aisle and leave it at that? Gathered friends and family would have witnessed your cute cleverness firsthand, and you could share the video with those close to you who were not there – so why did you need to make it the world’s business? What was the motivation? Was is something so mundane and boring as Internet fame? Hopefully not. Maybe it was with a mind towards AdSense revenue from your website tie-in? I could understand if it was for the money. Young married couples need all the clams they can get their hands on, so if that was the whole reason for doing it, I could let it slide. I honestly could. You saw an opportunity and you took it, and now you’re cashing in. It’s like the American Dream, only with trendy music and a well-fed chorus line. I get that. I do.
However, I can’t help but think that it goes deeper than Internet Fame and money. I think the whole idea digs down farther, deep into the dark and unsightly places of the human psyche. I suspect – and I could be wrong (but I’m probably not) – that the two of you actually believe what everyone else is saying about you. Do you? Is the video just a sweet expression of giddy love? Is it true that you thought your dance idea was unique and special, and you wanted to share it on YouTube out of a genuine love of what the two of you had done together? Maybe you thought it would make your special day even more special, and perhaps even inspire other people to come together and create something to top your video. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if any of this is indeed true, I can only predict eventual disaster for you, the happy couple.
Why? Because you’ve displayed the classic symptoms of an unfortunate case of hipsterism. The song, the sunglasses, the hairstyles. All contemporary-retro, all hip, all cool, all very Now. And, if you’re anything like all the other hipsters in the world, your sense of self is inextricably bound to your sense of fashion and awareness of trends. You took it a step further, however, and integrated your so-called ‘personal style’ into your wedding ceremony, and then put it out on the Internet as a way to gauge your own personal worth as people. More hits = more acceptance. Acceptance = trendy. Trendy = Sacred.
So you have your dance, you have your video, you have your Internet sensation, you have your talk-show interviews – and, somewhere along that bumpy ride to mini-stardom, you picked up a spouse. Kevin, you just married Jill. Jill, you just married Kevin. For life. Try not to forget that. It means you’ll be together long after the warm and fuzzy glow of your bright star has dimmed and grown cold. It means you’ll be bound to each other through the thick and thin times, long after trends have passed you by. You’ll grow old together. You’ll get sick. You’ll have boring times and exciting times and trying times. You will love each other. You will hate each other. You will have countless opportunities to walk away, or to sample the seductive wares of younger, sexier vendors selling false promises and alluring lies. You’ll fight, you’ll make up. You will laugh, cry, and mourn. You will be married. FOREVER.
Too many people see marriage as a rite of passage today, no more significant or permanent than any other coming-of-age ceremony. The institution of marriage has lost its sticking power, its meaning and its permanence. It’s all just something you do now, like graduating high school and going on to college. It’s something entered into lightly and with little commitment, because it’s just another stepping stone along life’s pathway, mixed in with all the other bits that seemed a really big deal at the time, but have since been neglected and forgotten as the years rolled by. As such, the desire to claim you marriage ceremony as your own and stamp your ‘unique’ mark onto the affair has grown stronger over the years. Nobody wants a traditional, humdrum wedding anymore. Everybody’s already done traditional. It’s so last week!
We’ve seen spectacles on the TeeVee and YouTube. We’ve witnessed celebrity extravaganzas that send midwest parents into triple-mortgage hell as they try to finance the unattainable dreams that “reality tv” has planted in their children’s minds. Everything has to be a show now. Everything has to be an expression of our uniqueness, even as mass production and mass consumption rob us of our personalities. Dancing to a hip song as you walk down the aisle doesn’t make you unique and special. It makes you just like everyone else, lining up to show how special you are through the appropriation of pop culture and Internet fads. The truly unique people are doing truly unique things, like getting married with serious faces and making serious commitments about serious things. They’re being quiet and reserved and contemplative during the ceremony. They may party hard at the reception later, but they’re being unique and special by taking the ceremony seriously. After all, everyone is dancing down the aisle these days. That’s so last week!
So what happens when it’s all over? Where do you go when you return to the normal, boring routine of the everyday? What happens when your bellies swell and your hair thins, and the music starts to hurt your ears? Do you think you’ll still be together? Do you think a marriage represented and defined at the beginning by the mercurial nature of trendiness can exist with true permanence? Do you honestly believe that you won’t get tired of each other, and find the easiest way out, once things come to that? How many one-and-only soulmates do you think you’ll have? Two? Three? Ten?
My advice to you, Kevin and Jill, is to take down the video, shut off the website, and stop answering phone calls from strangers. Enjoy your first years together, but know that the tough times will only get tougher, and however bad it gets, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Don’t be poisoned by the fairy tales, and try to stay faithful, even as you feel inexplicably unfulfilled at times. Don’t be tempted to fill the empty spaces of your life with someone else – they’ll never be enough. Learn to live an independent life together with someone else. Respect each other. Trust your spouse, but not too much. Love your spouse, but not too hard. Give, but do not spoil. Take, but do not expect.
The video cuts off before you get to your vows, but hopefully you said at least a few traditional words while at the altar, spoken in traditional tones and with traditional sincerity. These sorts of words and phrases should stick in your minds as real and as binding as the rings on your fingers. Phrases like “For richer, for poorer” and “In sickness and in health” aren’t just hollow strings of words; they mean something. Hopefully you understand the all-encompassing opposites of those words and are ready to stand together and embrace the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the bliss and the misery that married life will undoubtedly bring you. Remember words like Love and Cherish and Forever. Especially remember Forever – it’s important, even long after the dances are over and the music has faded, and the Internet Fame has passed you by.
(Click here for part two of this essay, “Concerning the hipster situation”)
UPDATE: Why do you people like this essay so much? It’s quickly becoming my most popular post, with several hundred people reading it each day. I don’t understand that. It rambles and takes forever to get to the point. And I’m not even sure what my point actually was, now that I think about it. Can someone explain the appeal?
I rail against hipsters in this one, but I really don’t hate hipster kids. As one commenter pointed out, all kids are hipsters in one way or another. I think what irked me about this group of kiddos was that they were just vapid and stupid. But then again, that’s all kids. Heck, that’s most adults I know.
Maybe I was just in a cranky mood, but I’ll always be annoyed at people who appropriate cultural icons without having experienced them, or at least having some understanding of what they’re going on about. My problem with hipsters isn’t general. I don’t loathe every kid in vintage clothes and ironic t-shirts. I only hate the ones I hate.
Just don’t ask me to explain why. I don’t think I know, but there’s some truth to be found in the words of someone much funnier than myself…
“One way to tell if your Frank Sinatra hat isn’t working for you is if you’re not Frank Sinatra.”
Words to live by, hipster kids. Words to live by.
Earlier this week, it occurred to me that I really don’t like people. More specifically, I don’t like what pop culture and advertising has done to people. Even more specifically, I don’t like what people have allowed pop culture and advertising to do to them. My fiancée (And no, that’s not a typo. She’s my fiancée, and I’m her fiancé. Look it up, and stop proving how stupid you are by trying to correct me.) were trying hard to enjoy our dinners despite the brackish horde of youth sitting in the booth behind us, assaulting our delicate eardrums with an incomprehensible cacophony of brain-dead, waterheaded inanity.
There were three of them altogether – two guys and one girl – and each of them gave off the distinct odor of people who believe that items like soap and shampoo and general hygiene are things that happen to other people. As such, they appeared largely unwashed, with clumps of stringy, frizzed hair that put to mind what one might expect to find tangled around the diseased and bloated corpse of a beached mermaid, assuming merfolk are real and don’t believe in using Product. Salt water is murder on the old follicles, dontchaknow?
So anyway, we were sitting there, like I said, and doing our best to try and enjoy our meal, despite the odious death cloud of stink that was wafting over our table from theirs, like some terrible low pressure system moving across Tornado Alley. That wasn’t the worst part, though. No, the ghastly stench of body odor combining with the heavy scent of diner grease mixed together with the sticky high notes of maple syrup was not the worst part. That oughta tell you something right there, kiddos – but I’ll go on, so that you can truly understand the depth of my revulsion and horror.
I don’t hate all people. Not really. Not all the time, anyway. It’s just that some people – and their numbers are growing at a geometric rate – have just been so warped and maimed by the jagged edge of disenfranchisement that they no longer resemble people, so much as they do dolls. Empty, ugly dolls with empty, ugly minds. They’ve been so distanced from society that they eventually gave up somewhere along the way, and surrendered the animus of their humanity to the trendsetting tyranny of Madison Avenue. At some particularly low point in their miserable lives, they must have looked up at their television screens and began pleading to the eldritch phosphorous gods of Red, Green, and Blue to have mercy on their souls, while they prostrated themselves in front of the glowing nightmare faces of nip-tucked bodies and Joker-faced smiles, and begged to be included.
You know the sort of person I’m describing. You’ve seen them before. They’re everywhere. They are in the winding queues of movie theaters across the country on the opening night of The Next Big Thing. They are wandering the country’s shopping malls and thrift stores, carefully choosing just the right combination of contemporary style and vintage fashion to create the perfectly crafted look of the sloppy, devil-may-care hipster. They are in your restaurants and churches and schools. They stand behind retail countertops and glare at you with judgmental hate and mocking scorn. They are the murderers of authenticity, and the usurpers of culture. They exist merely to consume iconic cultural imagery and reflect it back as a hollow, mirror-flipped inversion they call their own, personal styles. They pick and choose and steal from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, robbing those decades of meaningful art and music and film before appropriating it all for themselves – not as expressions of meaning or significance, but as simple, dunderheaded fashion. A way to stand out and stand apart. To deny being labeled and categorized. To be unique and special. To be just like all the other hipster rebels and trendsetters, who “have defanged, skinned and consumed” the dangerous visions of others “into a repertoire of meaninglessness”.
What’s worse than hipster fashion and hipster stench, is hipster conversation. As Brittany and I sat there in that diner the other night, listening in on the three hippayuppies and their incessant bibblebabble, we discovered that they can talk with each other at length about things like life and love – but only in the context of something else. Something trendy. Something marketable. Fashionable.
To my horror and disgust, this group of trendbucking trendies sat down and immediately began talking about World of Warcraft. They went on about this sword and that sword, this armor and that spell, and about monsters and dungeons and quests. They argued over the game. They agreed over the game. They bonded over the game. They lived over the game. But, not to pick on WoW players too much, I’m happy to report that they eventually moved on to other topics. Soon, their conversation turned to movies. Movies and criticism.
I knew a hipster who had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o!
Here were three people who God mercilessly beat with a Texas-sized ugly stick before ripping their personalities out right along with any capacity for actual talent – and they had the audacity to try and criticize someone else’s hard work. According to these idjits, Robert Downey Jr. apparently not only “looked the part” but he “acted the part” while filming Iron Man. In contrast, Christian Bale neither had the “grizzled, hard-living look” of John Conner when starring in the latest Terminator movie, nor did he have the “acting chops” to “accurately portray the angst John would have over Judgment Day.” Things kept on like this, but only got worse.
Eventually, Hipster X was arguing with Hipster Y by way of stealing quotes from Kevin Smith, and Hipster Girl wasn’t taking sides. In fact, she would repeatedly pipe up to tell them how wrong they both were, before saying something about Star Wars or Thundercats, and then quietly lowering her head to get back down to the bleeps and bloops of her Nintendo DS. She did say something about how District 9 was a rip-off of Half-Life at some point, though – which pissed off Hipster X (or was it Y?) to no end, resulting in a ten-minute dissertation on the absolute storytelling genius of the Half-Life videogame saga. Seriously.
As the meal winded down, their talk grew heavier. It started with a reverent and thorough examination of all things Harry Potter before the subject turned to love – but not love as any of them had ever experienced it. No, they could only talk about such a heady subject through the context of other things. This time, they chose music. “Which song do you think best describes love?” one of them asked. The answers were always wrong, of course. Each hipster was right unto themselves, and took great pleasure in discussing exactly why it is that their chosen song was the most genuine. The most pure. The most disconnected from real love and actual reality, which meant it was undoubtedly being ironic – the ultimate symbol of meaning to the hipster.
Hipsters are vapid, hollow-headed people who have intentionally disenfranchised themselves from society in an effort to become as enfranchised and accepted as possible. They express their disgust with pop culture by saturating themselves in it to the point where they no longer have the capacity to experience life as it happens to them, and can only find meaning through their meaningless appropriation of cultural iconography. They don’t know what love is, only what love songs are. They know movies that tell them what struggle and perseverance mean, but they’ve never struggled to persevere against anything. They don’t understand revolution, but they love Che Guevara. They can’t create art or music or literature, but they can critique it. They take anything with substance and whittle away thought until only fashion is left. They consume, they appropriate, and their live their lives through the detached lens of simulation and fantasy.
This is a stunningly accurate artist’s rendering of a hipster girl.
Trust me.
I don’t know what to do about these people. There really is no way to reach them, as they seem to live in some sort of simulacrum universe where nothing is entirely real, and where consequences don’t exist. They don’t think beyond themselves, and they don’t consider other people except with regard to how other people affect their own lives. Everything exists to serve them. The struggles and trials of others are the fountainhead of their fashion. Their identities are bound to real societal contributions, made by real people with real lives, and the hipsters trivialize them into meaningless etceteras. They float about in their judgmental groups, scorning the non-hipsters even as they depend upon them to supply a steady diet of culture for consumption. They take everything. They contribute nothing. They are an embarrassing brown stain upon the world’s white dress, and it makes one embarrassed to go out in public.
The funniest part about my hipster encounter the other night was when one of them began trying to pass off Kevin Smith quotes as his own. Not surprisingly, Kevin has become a sort of slacker idol to these hordes of waterheads, despite how much he talks down to them in his films. Trust me, the man is far from a slacker. He just panders to the mushbrained crowd in some sort of diabolical attempt to trick them into hating themselves. Clerks wasn’t about embracing mundanity; it was about transcending it. (Clerks 2 replayed this theme, only louder and in color, in the hopes that the audience might pay attention this time around.) Mallrats predicted the rise of the hipster from the ashes of the grunge-age slacker without passing judgment on either, but while cautioning against the latter. The hipster is the result of the dead-end of consumer culture, where postmodernism has played itself out and irony is no longer ironic. Simulation is reality, and understanding isn’t necessary. Image is everything. Fashion is personality. Flaunting consumption is the ultimate expression of self.
The Hipster Creed:
Spend. Buy. Advertise.
Be different, just like everyone else!
(Click here for part two of this essay, “Concerning the hipster situation”)
I’m posting this a little early today, but it’s important. My sister called me last night to ask me about something called iJingo – The Center Of The Online Universe. Apparently, a family member has bought into this new venture and told her about the amazing opportunity she could have to get in on the ground level of the next Google. I was interested to hear what she had to say, being as I hadn’t heard anything about this “next big thing” before her call. Sadly, once she started describing it to me, I instantly recognized the ugly stain of a multilevel marketing / pyramid scheme / ponzi scheme.
Basically, iJingo is claiming to have patented an amazing new technology that will revolutionize the way we use the Internet. In reality, they’ve merely cloned iGoogle – but, to their credit, they’ve made it a little sleeker. Their tantalizing sales pitch offers you riches beyond your wildest dreams for the simple and affordable investment of $150 dollars up front, followed by a $20 monthly service fee for what they call “the back office”. How will it make you money, you ask? Simple, they reply! Every time you use the Internet, you’re making someone money. If you do a Google search, then Google gets paid. When you use Facebook, the Facebook folks are getting a few clams. When you go to YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, etc… all of those companies are making money. iJingo, they say, will let you take a slice of that enormous, cash-filled pie!
All you have to do is join up with your $170 dollars and then set about recruiting more people to become your buzzwordy “downliners” – ie, other suckers you convince to pay into the pyramid scheme. The money, iJingo claims, comes in from you paying to use their Internet portal, which you then turn around and give it away for free on the Internet. For everyone who uses your portal to access web content, you’ll get a slice of that revenue pie. It sure sounds good, I guess. At least, it sounds great to people who aren’t very familiar with how the Internet and e-commerce work, or who simply don’t want to risk passing up a chance to get in on the ground floor of the next Internet success story. However, if it sounds too good to be true…
iJingo is a scam, pure and simple. It’s a classic scam dressed up with technobabble and jargon that makes it sound plausible. Of course companies like Google and Facebook make money from people using their free services, and everyone knows that e-commerce is HUGE. If, for example, you could get just 1% of the total revenue generated on the Internet, you’d be set for the rest of your life. It sounds like it might work. It has that common sense believability that usually gets people into trouble. The whole problem with the notion that you could somehow get paid for driving traffic to places like Google or Facebook with your iJingo portal is that it doesn’t make any real sense. Let me explain: free sites make money from ad revenue generated by the ads that line their pages. They have the massive traffic levels to drive serious income from per-view exposure and on-click units. However, they’re not gearing up to give any of it to you.
Here’s how the real game works on the real Internet: Google owns AdSense, and people opt-in to the advertising program by signing up and installing the AdSense code on their site. This allows AdSense to place advertisements on their pages, and the AdSense algorithms dynamically place context-appropriate ads. (Although, in practice, the results are sometime hilarious – but that’s a whole other topic.) Meanwhile, advertisers pay Google to run their ads. Some of the ads generate small amounts of money per-view, but most of them only pay for on-click traffic. This means that a user needs to both see the ad and click it before any money changes hands. Once an ad is clicked, Google charges the advertiser for the exposure and then takes a percentage of that revenue and deposits it into the account of the publisher hosting the ad. Google keeps the rest of the money.
With that in mind, why would Google suddenly decide to let you come between them and their money? Why do you deserve a share of a revenue stream you’re not contributing to? To extend my example, let’s use Coquetting Tarradiddles for the sake of argument. I have AdSense ads on this site. They function as described above: if someone clicks one, Google gets money from the advertiser and pays me a small percentage of that fee. Now, along comes iJingo and their “amazing” portal that will allow anyone to put my site onto their portal page. Then, somebody uses that portal to access my site, where they find an ad and click it. Somehow, iJingo has managed to convince people that I would now owe the portal user some money. Why? Because they drove traffic to my site? I didn’t ask them to. I didn’t agree to anything or opt-in to any service, and I have no obligation to divert a portion of my advertising revenue to anyone other than Google, who is the one selling the advertising units in the first place. This is the key to understanding why iJingo is a ponzi scheme. There is no revenue stream other than the money coming in from people buying into the program. Their proposed business model is no different than believing that you could sell someone your television set and somehow be paid for all of the advertisements they end up watching on it. It’s a lunatic proposal, but the bigger the lie…
iJango will be quick to point out that there are other multilevel marketing schemes that have been around for years and aren’t scams. They’ll cite Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay Cosmetics. The problem with these examples is that yes, they are MLM ventures – but they are, in fact, selling products. They’re crazy and horrible ways to invest your money, but there is the possibility of a revenue stream via the sale of merchandise. iJingo has nothing to sell, nothing to leverage, nothing to speculate, nothing to bring in any money other than the financial investments of all the poor suckers they manage to con into playing along.
If you’ve already plopped down your $150 + $20, then I advise you to get out now, while you can. If you can. You might have even seen a good initial return on your investment, if you’ve been busily recruiting new schmucks into the scheme. This is one of the short term benefits of a ponzi con, because some people really can make disproportionately large sums of money near the beginning of the venture. The problem is, most of this money doesn’t usually exist anywhere – and, if it does, it’s hardly liquid. Once confidence in the scheme begins to falter, if you’re able to get any of your money back at all, you’ll have to compete with the hordes of other disillusioned investors for the limited pool of cash that’s actually there. It’s kind of like having a run on the banks, where everyone finds out that there’s no money in the vault, and that the banker has skipped town to live an expatriated life of luxury in a foreign land with no extradition treaty.
So anyway, this concludes my emergency posting. If you need more convincing, try thinking a couple of things over. First, iJingo is set to have their spectacular launch event in the next few days, yet the media has absolutely no coverage of this revolutionary new technology. Second, iJingo has gone through enormous trouble to spam the search engines in an apparent attempt to stifle dissenting viewpoints to their own, although they haven’t been entirely successful. Third, remember your Internet history. Companies make it big on the Internet by coming up with a novel and marketable idea, and finding some venture capitalists to invest in its development. Then, they bring everything on-line and give it away for free. They use advertising income to generate revenue as they grow, and they eventually IPO and offer initial shares at rates reflective of their service’s popularity, after which they leave the company and either start up a new venture, or go to their high school reunions to rub their geek dollars in the jocks’ faces. Sometimes both.
What they don’t do is sell a pyramid structure of investment and ask that you then go recruit downliners that will feed you and everyone higher up on the food chain. They don’t ask that you get in early by tantalizing you with the notion that, if you invest quickly, you will occupy a powerful seat of authority and wealth along with the other early adopters, who all have an endless army of downliners constantly feeding them unearned cash. No, real companies have real strategies that don’t involve bilking investors of their cash through false promises and hollow claims. Real companies succeed or fail based on the merit and popularity of their products and services, not on a revenue stream that is dependent on the gullibility of hardluck people hoping to turn a quick buck in an increasingly stressful economic climate.
But don’t take my word for it. Go check out these links and make up your own mind. Just remember to come back here and tell me how right I was, after it all blows up in your face.
iJango’s Site:
http://www.ijango.biz/
Scam Information:
http://www.clicksniper.com/ijango-scam-cameron-sharpe/
http://www.clicksniper.com/ijango-scam-part-2/
http://ontopresultsllc.com/news/2009/07/13/ijang-the-next-localadlink/
http://www.mlmblog.net/2009/07/who-will-win-the-ijango-scam-.html
Definitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
Good luck to you. If you’re in, get out. If you’re out, don’t get in. Simple, really.
I have a love/hate relationship with zealotry. On the one hand, watching fist-shaking hardliners trying to resolve cognitive dissonance by flopping about like a spilled bowl of goldfish is funny as hell. On the other hand, the world wouldn’t be in quite so miserable a state if people would just stop clinging to blocky, ill-defined ideologies handed down to them through the talking head punditry of an ever-devolving media. I despise both left-wingers and right-wingers alike, and for the same reason: choosing sides is stupid. The world isn’t cut and divided into equal parts Conservative or Liberal, and all of the issues facing a nation can’t be contained within the bullshit, ticky-tacky structures of either party. Joining the card-carrying and waterheaded ranks of either the Democrats or the Republicans simply dissolves critical thought and excuses mindless adoption of whatever mushbrained, poorly conceived policies either side may be peddling at any given time. As with sports, party loyalty has nothing to do with the players on the field, or the outcome of the game. All it does is provide a sense of belonging for the non-participants, by dividing them into two groups, each united together out of a mutual hatred for the other side. And, all the while, the game plays on without them.
If devotees of either side would just stop cheering and jeering for half a second, they might wake up and realize that nothing they’re doing matters. They might pause for a moment and understand that they don’t truly understand what they’re clapping for or booing against. Maybe with just a moments pause, they might look around at the rest of their herd and recognize that they’re just aping what everyone else is doing. They might – if we’re all very, very lucky – start thinking for themselves!
Take, as an example, all of the lunatic idiocy surrounding poor President Obama. Sure, he’s new to the game and still learning the ropes, but he’s only human. One side paints him as a mythological hero ascending to the Heavens, where he can do no wrong. The other side busily tries to tear down anything he does by making outlandish and absurd claims of ‘socialism’ without expressing any hint of understanding about what that term actually means. Both are being equally naive, equally blind, and equally obtuse. And, of course, equally and unforgivably stupid. Just plain dumb.
America already has a lot of “socialist” programs, (if they must be labelled with a misunderstood term), and most people think they’re actually pretty nifty. Social security, Medicare, farm subsidies, retirement systems, unemployment insurance, public education and school breakfast and lunch programs, etc… All of these programs soak up tax dollars and spread them out among the American people. Medicare is the primary means by which most elderly Americans obtain healthcare. Most retirees live off of their social security checks. Most of America’s heartland is made up of red-state, conservative farmers who wail about encroaching socialism, but who depend upon federal subsidies to survive. Unemployment insurance can literally make all the difference in the world when someone living paycheck-to-paycheck (read: most Americans) loses his or her job. Public education dips deep into the taxpayer’s wallet and pulls out wads of cash for things like school lunch programs, but without such a redistribution of personal wealth, a great many American children would be malnourished and completely uneducated, or worse.
WE the people. The government is ALL of us.
Isn’t it?
Government exists to take personal wealth and redistribute it across the nation. That’s the whole point behind government! Governments are formed to deal with issues facing a nation that are too big or unwieldy to be tackled individually. Citizens earn money, and some of their earnings go toward taxes. Those taxes then go into programs that help the citizenry of the nation. It’s why we have the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, rather than a militia-based military of pitchfork-wielding farmhands. Taxes pay for subsidies that enable us to provide historically unprecedented levels of food to our people. Government agencies, through tax dollars, help guard the safety of its citizens. Government funding supported the creation of the Internet, and FCC regulations make connecting to it affordable. Granted, every government program is susceptible to manipulation, corruption, and mismanagement – but so is the private sector. And, for anyone who doesn’t believe that, follow my middle finger as I point to Enron, the ’80s Savings and Loan fiasco, the housing bubble, the recent banking crises, etc…
Now, along comes President Obama with some ideas about health care. He has a plan. Not many people understand it. Some think it will provide free and universal health care for everyone, and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, complete with rainbows, moon ponies, and unwashed happy people dancing around with flowers in their hair. Others think it will destroy America, replace the stars and bars with the hammer and sickle – and, before we know it, we’ll be staring down the barrel of Obama as our Fearless Leader. The truth is, the health care plan isn’t going to be nearly as wonderful as die-hard supporters want to believe, but neither will it be the end of the world, as others fear.
Conservatives like to point out that Obama’s plan will cost a staggering ONE TRILLION DOLLARS over the course of a decade. That’s ten years, kids. I know math is hard, but even a Barbie doll should be able to use a calculator to break that down into a yearly cost of $100 billion bucks. That might still sound like a lot, but let’s compare it against another recent cost of big government. Namely, one that conservatives tend to support: the war in Iraq. Currently, our little excursion into the middle east is costing us around $12,000,000,000 a month. That’s twelve billion dollars. Every month. So far, we’ve racked up a cost of around $650 billion in Iraq alone, while the sum topples over $900 billion when our foray into Afghanistan is factored in. In eight years, we’ve managed to spend almost as much on fighting foreign wars as Obama wants to spend in ten years, towards keeping Americans alive and healthy, right here at home. How is it that keeping American people alive and healthy through health care reform is somehow less important than defending those same lives oversees? It seems to me that, if American lives are worth saving, then syringes and stethoscopes are just as important as bullets and bombs.
I just don’t get the zealotry, especially when some policy or another won’t even touch the lives of those crying out against it. People are now jumping on the small business owner bandwagon, crying out about how the health care plan will bankrupt everyone! Nevermind that it’s only requiring that businesses either provide healthcare to employees, or take tax hikes to compensate. Nevermind that it isn’t targeted at ‘small’ small businesses, but only those that have payrolls over $400,000. Nevermind that, out of every fifty people whining about ‘fleecing the rich’, only one of them is actually in that fortunate demographic. That means forty-nine of them are stupidly supporting (or denouncing) policies that hurt them, while Richie Rich stands alone, laughing the smug, satisfied snorts of a manipulative and elitist asshat.
This isn’t all to say that I support Obama’s plan, or anything of the sort. In point of fact, I think he’s made some horrible decisions that look more like maintaining the status quo than bringing about any of those changes he ran his election platform on. I just don’t like it when people blindly attack things that don’t make any sense. People who yell that Obama is a crazy, free-spending liberal are usually the same people who backed President Bush while he maintained one of the most fiscally liberal presidencies in the history of the nation. They cry about socialism and fascism and big government now, even as they had no problems with eight years of big government for citizens / small government for corporations. They didn’t bat an eye when the housing bubble was bursting, or when the banks began to fail. They didn’t yell so loudly about bailouts and nationalizing powerful banks when Their Guy was in office. They worry about losing their freedoms today, and forget all about eagerly dismissing them away underneath the guise of a waving flag and the Orwellian-titled Patriot Act. And why? Because Their Team was behind the previous lunacy, so they clapped and they cheered, and all was right with the world. The Other Team is at bat now though, so it’s time to boo and hiss and moan. Meanwhile, nothing changes. New boss, same as the old boss. Same shit, different day. Status quo. It’s all bullshit.
I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.
(Sadly, lyrics like “enslaved to debtors, poisoned by megacorps, and brainwashed by media” just didn’t have the same ring to it.)
I’m all for political debate and citizen oversight. I encourage open dialogues and heated arguments. I want people to fight amongst themselves over which policy is better, and which one is nothing but crappy craptacular crap. I just want them to use their brains before they start yelling. Obama is not the anti-christ, nor is he the second coming. Both sides need to peel their eyes and lips from the television teat, and learn to think for themselves. Look at the issues. Look at the data. Learn the facts. Facts aren’t liberal, and they aren’t conservative. Math doesn’t favor red states or blue states. Logic is cold and uncaring, and doesn’t give a damn if you think Bill O’Reilly is made of Awesome, or if you swoon at the sound of Keith Olbermann’s nightly Murrowesque-wannabe signoff. If everyone would just start thinking for themselves, we would probably find that most of us would agree on most of the issues. If we would think rationally and without influence about our own real and factual situations of the here-and-now for a change (rather than be blinded by the glittering, illusory promises of a bountiful and prosperous tomorrow that most of us will never see), we might find that we’re all aboard the same sinking Titanic, and it’s carrying us all to the bottom. So, unless we want to go down to those icy depths and wait for James Cameron to float by with a camera crew decades later to film our floating bones and barnacled flatware, we might want to stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the interests of an elite few who keep running us into icebergs and stealing all the dinghies. Just sayin’…
I’m not sure what weather conditions are like in whatever part of the world it is that you find yourself as you read this, but things are pretty miserable around here. For those who don’t know, I live Deep In The Heart Of Texas. Well, maybe not quite so near the heart, if you want to be specific about your lyrical metaphors. If, for example, the heart is roughly around the center of the state’s anthropomorphized body, then my city would be located somewhere in its pelvic region. It would be deep, though. Very deep. Gastrointestinaly deep, along the lines of a lower intestinal blockage in the Lone Star State’s digestive tract. Deep In The Heart Of Sewage!
The summer days around here are miserably hot, and almost every exposed surface radiates its own special version of the sun’s awful intensity. Inverted mirages are everywhere, as blurry wisps rise up from the ground, the asphalt, the concrete and the metal of the world around you. They rise to gently waft and shake the background just above whatever it is you’re looking at in the foreground, and the world feels a split-second away from apocalyptic combustion. It’s as if Autumn has come early this year, only it’s killing with heat rather than cold. Plants and trees are shedding dead, brown leaves as they remain rooted in the dried and powdered cake that cements them in place. The more rural areas outlying the city have “burn bans” in effect, preventing hillbillies and hicks from setting fire to the various trash piles scattered about the land. Errant sparks from burning diapers and used condoms could spell disaster, after all, and no one wants that.
If your burning trash ignites your trailer, you have only yourself to blame.
Trey has a largish above-ground swimming pool that we placed in the backyard a few weeks ago. He fell in love with it immediately, and dubbed the blue-lined aquatic monstrosity Lake Mama. I’m not sure why he decided to call it that, but I suspect it had something to do with the fact that Brittany was the one splashing around with him beneath the glaring, unforgiving rays of the hateful sun, while I was sequestered safely away in the shade. Not that the shade is all that much better, mind you. It’s still hot. Everything is hot. Everything and everywhere. The pool lost around a third of its water to evaporation in just a couple of days. I went out to check the chlorine level, and found the cute little external filter slurping and gurgling its little heart out as it gasped for water that was no longer there. The sun is trying to murder my pool now. Where does it end?!
It’s no secret that I hate the sun, and that it hates me right back. However, when I was younger and too stupid to appreciate the horrible awfulness of the summer months in the South, I enjoyed June through August. School was out, and I was free from the tyranny of public education for a few glorious months. It was easy to fill the days, back then. Sometimes, I’d go swimming, or maybe hang out in my backyard, up in my open-roofed fort. I’d sit there for hours as the sun beat down on me, burning my skin and cooking me until I was the deep red and purple hue of a boiled lobster. I’d sit up there, reading comic books or conducting bizarre and unholy experiments with the aid of a few unlucky action figures and a chemistry set I stole from my sister. Other times, I’d ride my bicycle down forbidden pathways, deep into the hidden forest near my home, beyond the ghostly fields of creaking oil pumps and forgotten farms, where exotic dangers lied in wait along its shale-lined road. I would set up Lemonade and Kool-Aid stands, and wait for foot traffic that never came down my simple, empty street. I would run outside and play all day, but I don’t remember sweating. I’m sure I did, but I can’t remember it. I do, however, remember the burning.
I always burned. My sister would tan. My mother would tan. My father, with whom I share my fair-skinned genes, would even tan. But me? I would always, always, always burn to a crisp. Sunscreen never helped, either. Maybe I wiped it off when my mother wasn’t looking, or maybe the SPF technology of ’80s sunscreens wasn’t all that effective, for lack of space-age polymers and whatnot. Whatever the reason, I only remember the relentless burning. It didn’t slow me down back then, though. Sure, I’d be crispy for a few days, and the sticky applications of aloe vera slime that my mother would incessantly apply to my skin on an hourly basis weren’t very pleasant (but probably helped), but I would always be back outside the next day, ready for a new adventure. I…was a moron.
Maybe we had a different sun, back then. A better sun. Less hateful. Less murderous. Maybe the sun today is hotter because of global warming, or climate change, or the lack of an appropriately-sized convocation of sun-worshipping natives. Who knows? All I know is that what used to be a mild discomfort to me a few decades ago, is now a homicidal ball of yellow hate that hangs in the sky, searching for ways to kill me. Like a real-world Eye of Sauron, it watches for me, and it waits. It knows where I live, and it rises each morning, hoping for me to come outside and expose my tender flesh to the unseen lashes of its ultra-violet whip. And, it wins. It always wins.
I walk outside for five seconds, and I’m sweating. If I step out of the shade for an instant, my skin is burning. I’m like some power-deprived vampire, with all of the solar weaknesses and none of the blood-fueled strengths. Hell, I don’t even sparkle!
I’m trying to stay indoors as much as possible right now, and I will continue to do so until the terrible summer months have passed me by, once again. I don’t know how the South was ever colonized before the invention of air conditioning, but I do know that it must have been a crazed and soft-headed bunch of outcasts that ever stomped around in the Hell-Heat of this place and thought it would be a good spot to settle down. Demons wouldn’t want to live here. It’s just too damned hot!
Without air conditioning and proper shade, I’m certain that spontaneous human combustion is not only possible, but likely. In fact, the only thing good about this place in the summertime is how nice a cool blast of refrigerated air feels on slowly roasting skin. It’s not the snuggle-wuggle sort of comfort you get in the wintertime, when you escape the bitter cold by planting yourself in front of a roaring fire and cuddle up with your sweetheart. No, it’s a little more basic than that. More primal. More panicked. It all feels kind of like narrowly escaping death by dodging enemy fire on the front lines of some terrible battlefield, as you dive into the cool sanctuary of a deep and well dug trench. You check your body for damages, say a little prayer of thanks, and take a deep breath of the safer, softer air. Until, of course, the power goes out…
I had dinner this weekend with my Godson, who I’m certain was born only a few years ago, yet he seems to be starting high school this year. He is already enrolled in driver’s education, and his existence makes me feel old. Time is a funny thing. It passes by painfully slowly when we’re young, but picks up steam as we move along. Our teen years pass by a little faster than our naughts, and our twenties (if we’re doing them right) move by in a blur, accelerated by oceans of alcohol, endless parties, and way too much sex. Before we know it, we’re in our thirties and looking back on a confusing haze we call the past, where everything seems to be just a little bit closer than it actually is. What looks like yesterday was actually last year, and what looks like last year was, in fact, a couple of decades ago. It’s a confusing endeavor, getting older.
Things are made even more perplexing due to the appropriation of my childhood’s pop culture by the youth of today. During dinner with the Godson, the conversation turned to what’s cool right now. Much to my non-surprise, he quickly said, “Anything retro, like from the ’80s.” Naturally, he started telling me all about the decade I grew up in, as if it were all new to me. Later, I came home and started poking around the Internet, because lately, I’ve come across several fiendishly stupid blogs that are written by people talking about their childhoods, and what it was like to grow up in the 1980s. The only problem is, these people are usually twenty-somethings who aren’t really qualified to portray themselves as ’80s kids – because they did not grow up during the decade. Most of these poseurs are in their early-to-mid-twenties, and so were born no earlier than 1985. Maybe ’84, possibly ’83. I was born in 1975, but I make no claim to the ’70s, much as I’d like to. I wasn’t even born until half of the decade had already passed me by, and I was barely out of diapers by the time it was over. No, I grew up in the ’80s, with the greed and the scandals and the Reaganomics. I spent my time on Channel F, Atari, and Intellivision. I played Space Invaders. In the arcade. With quarters.
I watched all three Star Wars movies in theaters, when they were new. (Well, technically I saw the first re-release of A New Hope in 1981, at a local drive-in. It was a great place, with a huge screen and those little speakers with the tinny sound that clipped onto your car window. Sadly, it was later demolished and turned into a highway-side driving range for the wannabe golfers of the pretending-to-be-rich sect, of which we have so very many in my small corner of Texas.) I watched Michael Jackson debut the Moonwalk. I watched saturday morning cartoons while eating Booberry cereal. I stayed home from school to watch the early Space Shuttle launches, but I was sitting in Science class when the Challenger exploded. I played Pac-Man, but preferred the enhanced speed of his bow-headed spouse. I stood in line to destroy a ray-traced Death Star, and plopped down a Vegas vacation’s worth of quarters trying to help Dirk the Daring rescue Princess Daphne from the Dragon’s Lair. I went to a breakdancing competition at Chuck E. Cheese’s, back when Nolan Bushnell still owned it and it was still cool. A girl doing gymnastics won. Strange.
I saw the rise of Dungeons And Dragons, and the religious hysteria that surrounded it. I saw Halloween transform from a fun holiday for kids, into a twisted and paranoid reflection of a media-saturated culture, where urban myth was reported as fact and thousands of parents protected their children from phantom, razor-bladed apples and non-existent, rat poisoned candy bars. I witnessed the birth of the religious right, even as Jimmy Swaggart cried. I listened to songs without videos, and I wanted my Mtv. I played with Transformers, when they were made of metal and looked like real cars. I saw Optimus Prime die. I read comic books, even as everyone else was collecting them. While I was bending spines and folding pages, friends were sealing them in polyurethane condoms and locking them away in the dark. I cast my vote for the Joker, and I watched in rapturous horror as he murdered The Boy Wonder. I drank Hawaiian Punch and red Kool-Aid, back when you knew better than to ever ask for a Hawaiian Punch, and while the Kool-Aid man was demolishing living room walls across the country. I preferred Tiffany over Debbie Gibson, Transformers over Go-Bots, and Nintendo over Sega. I had a Cabbage Patch Kid. I used it offensively against my sister, by grabbing its legs and spinning it around, using leverage and momentum to create a deadly weapon from the horrible hardness of its terrible plastic head. I got in trouble before parents invented Time Out. Belts were involved. Lots of crying.
Most of all, I just grew up. The world around me was getting more and more complex, even as the media became more and more simplistic. Our leader was an actor turned politician, who I didn’t even trust back when I still had the trusting innocence of childhood on my side. I watched Oliver North spill the beans on a suddenly(?) stupid Ronald Reagan. I saw Dukakis ride in that dumb tank and wearing that silly helmet. (Years later, I watched the same thing, only this time it was an S-3 Viking jet and a flight suit, and nobody was making fun. Weird.) My heroes were Luke Skywalker and and Indiana Jones. The Russians were the bad guys, and Red Dawn was so real, it was scary. Rocky stopped them, though – and he did it without the aid of steroids or the stoic and demanding love of Brigitte Nielsen. Back when he was still just a kid and calling himself Leaf, Joaquin Pheonix reprogrammed a robot named Jinx, and launched one of my boyhood crushes, Lea Thompson, into space. I was also a big fan of not disassembling Ally Sheedy, of letting Mary Stuart Masterson have a boy’s haircut and wear red leather gloves, of Soleil Moon Frye’s Punky-Power and, of course, of anything – anything – Phoebe Cates wanted to do. I may have learned a lot about life and love from John Hughes, but I learned about swimming from Cameron Crowe, at a place called Ridgemont High. Swimming, and boobs.
I guess I don’t really blame twenty-somethings for wanting to stake a claim on the ’80s, now that I think about it. After all, what happened in the freaking 1990s that anyone would want to try and own? Beverly Hills 90210? MC Hammer? Power Rangers? Vanilla Ice? The Taco Bell dog? No, they know that there’s no gold in those unfortunate hills, so they look elsewhere for inspiration. And, lacking any natural talent for invention themselves, they fall back on the safe cushion of the ’80s, usurping the nostalgia from those to whom it truly belongs and trying to pass it off as their own. They wear “vintage” t-shirts bought new yesterday from Hot Topic and Old Navy. They walk around with Pac-Man on their shirts, and wear tiny NES controllers as jewelry. Recently, they talk ad nauseum about Michael Jackson, his genius, and about how important he was to their generation, even as they cite only his work from the ’80s. They go on about how it personally touched them on a deep and emotional level, even though they were sucking bottles and pooping diapers when he first flashed the sparkly glove.
It’s annoying, but like I said, you can’t really blame them. The ’60s and ’70s were too recently pilfered by my own generation, so they’re off limits to the wannabe-retro crowd. All they can do, apart from claiming the actual, depressing reality of the vapid and wonderless culture of their own childhoods, is to fudge the dates a little and fall back on what seems to be working for us thirty-somethings. We’re the ones writing the television shows they’re watching and the movies they’re going to see. We’re the ones telling society what’s hip and cool and in, and right now we like nostalgia. Specifically, 1980s nostalgia – so it’s no surprise that all of you want to like it, too. You can’t really be cool if you’re not doing it, so throw on a hipster uniform and join in. Grow some wacky facial hair, maybe some muttonchops, and pile on the corduroy. Spend a lot of time working on a disheveled, careless look and make sure to throw in some ’80s icons. Maybe a Smurf here, or a Triforce there. A little Mario always works a treat, or maybe toss in some Goonies or Shirt Tales, if you’re feeling daring. Don’t be afraid to show your free-thinking and independently-minded ways by making cult references to the period, either. A little Blade Runner, maybe some Heathers. Be just as unique as we tell you to be!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get ready to decide where we’re eating tonight. I wouldn’t mind washing a McDLT down with a nice, refreshing New Coke, but I’m probably out of luck on that front. We could always trying eating in, for a change. Maybe buy a french bread pizza to cook at lightning speed in our amazing microwave. While we wait, we can sip on some Bartles and James wine coolers and watch a tape of last week’s Friday Night Videos. Later, nothing says dessert like the chocolatey goodness of a Jell-o Pudding Pop.
Yum!
Last night, after Brittany returned home from work, we headed out to grab some food and visit a friend of ours. You might think this sounds like a simple affair. You would be wrong.
The decision to go out to eat is often a simple one that leads to enormous and daunting complications. Primarily, we can never arrive at a mutually acceptable decision concerning where we want to eat. Often, not even the type of food can be agreed upon. Fast food? Restaurant? Mexican? Italian? Chinese?
What basically happens is that we pile into the car and hit the open road, intent on enjoying the journey rather than the destination, because the decision about the destination is something that is often made for us, and born out of equal parts frustration, starvation, and geolocation (the proximity of the nearest building with food in it when all negotiations break down often being the chief determinant.)
So last night, after driving off down the street, I play the role of the loving and supporting man, and ask my lovely little lady where she would like to eat tonight. She first tells me, “Anywhere. I’m not really hungry, so I don’t care.” My first impulse was to greedily accept this obviously Opposite Day answer and make a beeline straight to my (current) favorite restaurant to indulge in a delicious steak. However, this not being my first time riding the dinner choice rodeo bull, I suspected that there was more to her answer than she was saying. So, I pressed her again. This time, she suggested a drive-thru only fast-food joint that I obsessed over (and then burned out on) long ago. I countered with my own offer of someplace more local, as her suggestion was several miles down the road, in a neighboring town – and we were at the height of rush hour traffic.
She immediately fell back to her original position and repeated her cavalier and non-committal opinion. She didn’t care, she said. Of course, I said that I didn’t care either, and this went on for several minutes and several miles, as we wandered the strange and boring streets of our little, barely-bustling metropolis. I started making suggestions, and she started shooting down all of them.
“Oh hey,” I said, “there’s that good Mexican place we ate at the other day. How about that?”
“Yeah, but we just had it the other day,” was her simple, definitive reply.
“How about hamburgers. We could go to — ” she cut me off.
“It’s too hot for hamburgers.”
“Too hot?”
(It was at this point that I received The Look, which is a firm and unforgettable expression that roughly translates to, “I know whatever I just said doesn’t make any sense, but asking me about it would be A Tragic Mistake.”)
“Um…” I began to feel around the blind darkness in which I was trapped and stumbling. “How about…” More delays. More hesitation, hoping for inspiration. “Hey!” I suddenly beamed. “I know! How about Tony’s?!” (It should be noted here that Tony’s was my aforementioned first choice, which I knew she would not accept at the time, but might later, out of desperation.)
I swear to you, her eyes sighed. “Ugh!” she began, “We eat there all the time!”
“But last time, you didn’t even eat. You just got a coke…”
“…and I just sat there, watching you take an hour to eat, because you order an ocean of food and eat maybe a third of it, one tiny, microscopic bite at a time – and if you start talking, you go on a rant and forget to take bites between the yelling and the soapboxing!”
“Well, you could have ordered something.”
“I didn’t want another steak. Again. Every single night! Steak! Steak! Steak!”
“Ok,” I said with a tinge of hurt and sadness, “Where do you want to go, then?”
Another eye-sigh. Followed by an eye-roll. Followed by The Look again, only this time what it said was unrepeatable, on account of the fact that the words of the English language can’t actually bite you.
“How about Chinese?”
“All we have are buffets,” she explains to me. “And you hate buffets.”
“I don’t hate buffets.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t!”
She began flailing her hands around in what was either a visual aid to expressive language, or some bizarre and complicated form of sign language involving curious finger flicks and threatening gestures. “YES,” she shouted, in frustrated, capital letters. “You do! You never want to eat at buffets. You go on and on about how they’re unhygienic and foul and that the food isn’t ever good.” Her hands stopped convulsing and she just pointed at me and grinned. “You know you do!”
“Well, yeah,” I said, so sheepishly it may have come out as baaaah. “I mean, they’re not clean. You know that. Not with the people we have in this city. They poke their fingers under the sneeze guards and root around the different dishes like pigs digging for some sacred chicken wing. It’s gross. And they never use a new plate. And, besides – I don’t think it’s wrong to want my food cooked for me, rather than just made en masse and schlepped out by some minimum wage bus boy with a grudge.”
She folded her arms and looked at me. “Are you done?”
“What?” I said, with the quaint innocence of a clueless man who’s significant other knows his patterns of behavior all too well.
“I was just waiting for you to come down off the soapbox.”
I resented the remark. “That wasn’t a soapbox rant,” I said. “That’s just the truth. You know it is! You know the bus boy doesn’t get any tips, and he’s got to haul the food and clean the tables – and what’s to say he’s not having a bad day and decides to take it out on my sweet and sour chicken?”
“Just let me know when you’re done.”
“But — ”
“No, really. Go on. I’ll wait.”
I threw up my hands this time, which was unfortunate, since I was driving. I quickly put them back on the wheel. “You want a Chinese buffet? Then that’s what we’ll have!” I pulled into a nearby shopping center. “There’s one right here, actually! See? See how I anticipate your every desire?” I pointed at the nondescript red door of the Peking Chinese Buffet in triumphant defiance. “Let’s go!”
I parked the car, and we got out and began walking across the parking lot. I was the one who spotted the sign first. I wish I hadn’t.
“Um,” I said with a scared softness in my voice, “I don’t think they’re open.”
Brittany kept walking and simply asked, “Why do you think that?”
“Well, I’m just guessing based off of the ‘Re-opening Soon’ sign that’s taped to the door.”
“Are you serious?!”
“Yeah, see it?”
She walked a little closer, just to confirm it with her own eyes. She’s learned not to trust me on certain things, if I think I might get a laugh out of it. Sadly, I wasn’t teasing this time, and the place was, in fact, closed. We sighed a little and laughed a little, and got back in the car.
Eventually, we made it to the next town over, where we almost wound up eating at her originally suggested place. I managed to modify the destination slightly, however, and good food and good times were finally had. Of course, it only took us over an hour of driving around in circles and bickering like old married people. I enjoy the bickering, though. It’s just something we do, all the time – especially when it comes to deciding where to eat. It’s like gastronomical foreplay, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I am not an easy person to know. I’m opinionated, loud-mouthed, stubborn, and egotistical. I have Views and I have Issues, and I’m usually none too shy about jumping down the thick necks of the willfully ignorant to gleefully rip the still-beating hearts out of the stinking filth of their insides. I like to rip the heart out and show it to them, really pressing the glistening, gushing muscle into their shocked faces and let them gasp a few hyperventilated and final deathbreaths while it thumps and squishes in my cold, uncaring hands. I crack a smile and tip my hat, then throw the useless lump of meat to the first stray dog I come across. I just can’t abide stupid people.
Thus, it makes it difficult to know me. The insipid, tiresome rhetoric that vomits forth from the slack-jawed mouths of the ignorant is something I find so vile, so abhorrent, so terrifyingly mundane and nugatory that it rattles the fillings in my mouth and makes my teeth hurt. I try to walk away when I can, but it doesn’t happen very often. When confronted with the sanctimonious and goat-footed certainty of an idiot’s bibblebabble, the hairs on the back of my neck bristle and come to attention, and certain conspiratorial bits of my brain’s pharmacy start cranking out a Herculean overdose of adrenaline. I’ve no doubt that, when my ancestors climbed out of the primordial ooze, shed their gills and fins and scales and stepped up the evolutionary ladder to break off from the missing link and leave Australopithecus alone in his sandbox, crying on the imaginary shoulders of Piltdown Man, they must have skipped right past the “flight” bit of the “fight or flight” education that the rest of the cavemen received. I have no retreating impulse. I lack the ability to back down from unwinnable fights against unbeatable odds, and I’ve no doubt that the sight of me, rabid and foaming at the mouth in a clenched-fist and rage-filled hysteria is not a pretty picture.
I always fight. To me, the simple act of standing your ground and fighting the good fight always counts as a win, regardless of the technical outcome of the situation. Sure, mainly I rumble against stupidity and ignorance, but even that – especially that – is enough to set my heart racing and my blood boiling. However, let it not be said that I globally hate the unintelligent, or the simply misinformed. I don’t have a problem with Person X not being as smart or knowing as much as Person Y – not as long as they know they’re uninformed, and work to remedy their unfortunate situation. In most of my encounters, however, the more severe the ignorance, the more certain the other person is of their worldview’s credulity, and the less likely they are to ever do anything about their stupidity. If part of being wise is understanding that you probably don’t know nearly as much as you think you know, then part of being stupid must involve wrapping an ironclad blanket of certainty around your nugget of internal ignorance, like some hideous monster-child that must be secreted away from the world and hidden behind a deceptive, delusory mask.
Recently, my soon-to-be brother-in-law posted a fairly innocuous status update to his Facebook page that expressed his unhappiness with inattentive parents while sitting in a pediatrician’s waiting room with his newborn baby girl. Naturally, I opened my big mouth and responded with a simple and innocuous reply that advised him to enjoy the last of his judgmental years, as his new baby girl would soon be mobile, and The Rules Would Change. Left at that, everyone would have moved on to other things and never think another thought on it. Of course, things are rarely ever that easy.
Nope, some dunderhead had to come along and take some sort of personal effrontery to the whole affair and begin posting inflammatory diatribes on how he, although young and childless, knows exactly how parents should raise and discipline children, and that he is absolutely certain that his mythical way of parenting imagined children is the rightest, truest, and bestest way of going about the difficult and humbling task of raising a child. I’m sure you can see what sort of dark and terrible road this put us on…
So we had our little comment war, and I tried to get him to simply admit that he couldn’t say with any certainty of what he would or would not do as a parent until he was one. I certainly don’t know anything about the day-to-day life with a newborn, having gone from zero directly to toddler with Trey, without passing Go. Likewise, I can only speculate on the challenges facing parents of children in other stages of development, such as the unruly and mercurial years of an adolescent teenager. However, every point I made zinged right over his head, whizzing by far above his noggin, high up in the upper stratosphere where the crawling, earthbound disaster of his intellect could never hope to reach. Having previously endured the unpleasant experience of running headfirst into the brick wall of absolute certainty that accompanies someone’s willful ignorance, I knew that there would be no end to the battle. And, out of respect for my brother-in-law and the sovereignty of his own Facebook page, I eventually chose to bow out of the conversation, and leave the poor sod to stew in the viscous slime of his own odious juices.
Undaunted, but cowardly, the schmuck then proceeded to go elsewhere on the Internet, into some dark and dingy cave where he thought I could not see. He then went on to recount the whole conversation verbatim (sans the last bits that made him look especially stupid), and somehow wrangled my otherwise nice and affable future brother-in-law into condemning my atrocious behavior by calling my a douche. (Reminder: douche/douchebag is a silly, stupid insult.)
Of course, neither my almost-brother-in-law nor his little troll of a friend ever expected me to come across this unknown forum, but my spy network stretches out far and wide, tendril-like and pervasive, through every nook, every cranny, every highway and byway of the Internet and beyond. It was only a matter of time until the ugliness walked up to me to present itself, and I have to admit that I found his hidden comments disconcerting. I had no idea that I’d so greatly jostled his apple cart, because apart from my very first, very innocent comment about the last of his judgmental days, none of my subsequent (and increasingly hostile) comments were directed at my nearly-brother-in-law. Instead, I was aiming squarely between the doughy, Neanderthal eyes of his imbecilic friend, hoping to carpet bomb his diminutive brain with enough Ideas that one might stick, like some lone and lucky metaphorical sperm out of an ejaculation’s worth of an unlucky few hundred million. However, I neglected to actually tell my brother-in-law that I wasn’t talking about him or how he plans to raise his daughter, which led to the tragic misunderstanding that triggered his (understandable) wrath.
I’ve since explained myself to him, and he’s apologized quite graciously and unnecessarily, and everyone is happy and smiling and ready to move on to the next time I rock the boat in shark-filled waters and anger those around me. I rarely blame anyone for just getting flat-out annoyed with me and my insensitive antics. I know I’m abrasive, and I can be positively relentless when I think I’m right about something, ignoring all social niceties and expected etiquette. Fortunately, I have a great and silly fear of looking stupid, so I rarely go to the mat for anything that I’m not fully informed about. I do my homework, I study my research, and I draw upon my own experiences before I ever open my mouth about anything. Unfortunately, this means that I’m almost always at the advantage over anyone else when one of these debates spontaneously starts, since I’ve had time to prepare and they have not. And, since my short-fused approach to educating the ignorant tends to start more fires and lead to more furious explosions than it does enlightenment or understanding, these sorts of heated debates can only end in tears. I know this, and yet I persist. Perhaps it’s a flaw in my character?
Anyway, I extend to my brother-in-law a twofold olive branch of equal parts Mea Culpa and Don’t Sweat It. Your friend my be a laborious little urchin, but you are a stand-up guy and a bright beacon in this dismal world, where people are loathe to admit wrong doing or to ever say I’m sorry. What we have here is a momentary lapse of character and integrity on both our parts, but we’re all allowed a few errors in judgment when emotions run high and words are not clarified. Know that I think no less of you today than I did yesterday or the day before it – and that, if anything, this whole sordid affair has actually moved you up a few rungs on my secret, nebulous Ladder of Worth.
Your friend, on the other hand, can bite me.
“Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none.”
– Jules Renard
Everyone thinks they can be a writer. All it takes is a little time, a little patience, and some skill behind a keyboard, right? Wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who hasn’t, at some point, told me that they’ve had the Greatest Idea for a story. It’ll be a bestseller and everybody will love it, just as soon as they get around to writing it. I’ve met other people who pride themselves on being Idea Men (or Women), and who strut about with their heads held high and chests puffed out to Nebraska, because they think they are the smartest people in the world. They are utterly incapable of doing any actual work, mind you – but they’re absolutely filled with ideas. Ideas that they then pass on to other people to wrestle into reality.
I suppose that anyone who’s actually been able to forge a career out of not doing any work might very well be the smartest person in the world – but I’ve no truck with that sort. They’re loathsome animals, devoid of any character or passion. Bottomfeeders of the lowest echelon, they excel at nothing other than motivating their subordinates into doing what they could never accomplish on their best days – and they get paid well for it. Better than the poor sods actually doing the work, anyway.
So what do you do when you’re convinced that you want to be one of the few, the proud, the penniless? What do you do when you realize that all you want to do in this life is communicate? To write. Well, in the past, all you did was sit down behind a typewriter and set to work. You pecked out a manuscript on the keyboard, then wrote up a query letter and sent the whole package off to a publisher. Then, you waited. And waited. And waited some more. Inevitably, you’d be rejected and move on to the next publisher. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one, until you either realized that you had no marketable talent to begin with and gave up, or you persevered until you finally found a publisher willing to print your hard work. And that was it; that was the game. But you know what? It still is, even though most people today see the World Wide Web as a clean and quick shortcut through the thickets and the thorns.
With the rise of the Internet, people have shifted both their expectations of what a writing career will get them, along with their understanding of how the system works. Today, it’s all about getting noticed. People equate recognition with fame, and fame with money, and money with success. So, most netizens naturally assume that they need to become as recognized as possible, as quickly as possible. Blogs are started. Linkbacks are requested. And, with communities joined, search engine optimizations optimized, and circle-jerk critiques and commentaries given and received, a blog becomes popular. Usually, it’s with a niche audience, but the Internet has proven that even the smallest niches can be lucrative – if you market yourself correctly.
We few, we happy few…
So people place ads on their blogs and hope to cash in on their relative success, only to face bitter disappointment when they find out that no one actually bothers clicking the damned things. Still, thousands of people from all over the world are reading your blog every week, so that must mean it’s good, right? Surely there must be some way to transform this insignificant exposure into fame, cash, and career, right? Right? Maybe, you reason, if you work at it long enough and hard enough, you’ll Get Noticed by some mysterious Power-That-Is, who will instantly recognize your talent from the sheer power of the exalted magnificence of your words, right? After all, your command of the language is so considerable, so profound that your phrases must surely leap off the screen and dive directly into your reader’s eyeballs, where they skip the trip down through the optic nerve, and don’t even consider stopping for tea and conversation in the dining room of the neocortex. No, your words are far too awesome for any of that sort of banal mundanity. Aren’t they?
Biology is something that happens to other people, not to you. And, while everyone else is busy trying to get their words shoved into a publisher’s brain, your masterwork won’t have to take the painful and tedious biological stroll along the crowded streets of his optic nerve, or be lined up and sorted out at the crossroads of his optic chiasm. Your majestic verbiage gets a golden ticket and a free pass to skip the slicing and dicing of his lateral geniculate nuclei, and they don’t even bother showing their faces in his occipital cortex, where they’d be lumped in with everyone else’s plebeian locutions before they’re ever finally seen. No, you’re special. You’re talented. You’re awesome!
Except that you aren’t. Really, if you were that talented and that skilled at the arcane and mysterious craft of writing, you’d already be getting paid for it. You wouldn’t be on the Internet, giving it away for free. Or, maybe you would – but then you’re just perpetuating a problem that will never find a solution until the halfwitted amateurs stop giving it all away for nothing. Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with blogging. I blog, for pity’s sake. This a blog that you’re reading right now. I’m not about to call myself an idiot, am I?
Of course not. But then again, I don’t expect anything to ever come from this blog. I come here to digest or to purge, not to sell myself or my talent. I started Coquetting Tarradiddles on a lark, as something akin to a verb-laced dagger that I could stick into the black heart of my ex-wife and smile as I twisted it with an adjective here, or an adverb there. It’s grown and matured into something quite different than its origins would have suggested, but I never for once thought that my amazing use of the predicate would land me a seat at the head of the table in the promised land, because…well, because that would just be naive. Naive, and stupid.
No, I have no illusions about how things work. I don’t care about my popularity or non-popularity on the Internet, where everyone is so busy giving everyone else reach-arounds and complimentary verbal blowjobs that it seems like any schmuck with a keyboard and a modem can become a really big fish in a tiny digital pond, almost overnight. The sad trick is that the pond seems a lot bigger than it really is. Sure the Internet is vast and limitless, and to stand out and to stand apart amidst its detritus and flotsam is no small accomplishment – but it’s how you earn your fame that’s important. It’s easy to join a bunch of communities, or go to a lot of other blogs and post links, or ask for linkbacks. It requires very little effort or talent to simply visit popular blogs and leave nice comments, hoping to leech some of their traffic, or join communities filled with other bloggers who want to visit your site, if you’ll visit theirs. It’s how popular blogs are built.
A bit of truth from Flaming Spinach.
The problem is, publishers know these tricks. If you want to take your blog and have it printed in a really real book, on really real paper, then you’re either going to have to do it yourself or let your talent outweigh your need for approval. No one is going to fund the editing, printing, binding, distribution, and publicizing of any material that stinks, regardless of how popular your blog might be with Focus Group X or Demographic Y. Publishers don’t like to reprint existing material to begin with, and that goes double and triple for websites. Why, they reason, would anyone want to pay money to purchase something that they can get for free on the World Wide Web?
Of course, there are some ventures in the “New Media” that do reprint existing web material, but there’s usually a steep price involved. You see, the worst part about blogging is the massive amount of money that’s not in it. At best, your blog might be picked up by some larger umbrella site, but all they’re likely to offer you is additional traffic. A way to feed that need for moderate fame that drives so many bloggers to write. The most successful of these New Media sites is The Huffington Post – and, by all accounts, it’s a wild success. Arianna Huffington is a bright lady. She’s a witty, sharp as tacks, and tough as nails journalist who saw the writing on the wall and decided to cultivate a career outside of the traditional (read: Dying) newspaper industry. She started The Huffington Post and, within a very short amount of time, flattered enough bloggers to come write for her – FOR FREE – that she could probably retire now and walk away to live in obscene luxury for the rest of her life.
I don’t blame Arianna on the whole, although part of me does. That part nags at the back of my mind, telling me that she is helping to sustain a backwards system that rewards only those who are least responsible for the site’s success. None of Arianna’s bloggers are paid a single red cent for their work. Not one. Still, all she did was provide a service to stroke the needy egos of a few bloggers, and they came in droves and thanked her for the honor. Sure, if you’re part of the site, you get a significant boost in your traffic – but, since the fundamental economic model of the Web is designed to Screw The Writer, all those visitors reading your content and not clicking your ads does nothing to change your bottom line. A few hundred thousand more people not clicking ads isn’t really much different from a few dozen not clicking them. Zero plus zero is…
And that’s the real meat of the problem with blogging, or web sites, or the Internet in general. Everyone expects everything for free – even the advertisers. In any other medium, ad revenue is based off of a simple measurement of exposure. How many people subscribe to your newspaper? What are the ratings points and share of your television show? The more people who will be seeing the ad, the more the advertiser pays. It’s simple, it’s direct, and it’s fair. (Well, all things considered…)
But advertising on the Internet doesn’t work like that. Not for the vast majority of advertisements, anyway. Most sites use Adsense (or a similar system), which rewards you based only off of how many people click the various ads. It doesn’t matter that several hundred thousand people a day may see the ads on your site; all that matters is the half dozen or so who actually bother to click them. Would this model have sustained American television or newspapers or magazines though the years? No, it would not have. No one expects Johnny Reader to come walking into Sears to buy a toaster and credit the ad he read in The Daily Sun for the purchase, and so no advertiser pays The Sun based of off toaster sales. They pay off of exposure. Readership. Viewership. Ratings. On the Internet, however, you gotta sell them toasters, boy! AND YOU GOTTA PROVE IT, TOO!
So what’s my advice to aspiring writers? If you’re blogging because you simply want to blog, because you enjoy it and it helps you, or helps others – then, by all means, keep doing what you love doing. If, however, you actually want to become an actual, factual writer one day, then you’re going to need stop doing it for free! Write something worthwhile, and keep it off the Internet. Write it, publish it, and get paid. Then, you’re a writer.
Try not to get bogged down in the trap of what Lawrence Watt-Evans likes to call egoboo. You know all of those nice people who come and leave glowing compliments in the Comments section of your blog? They’re just the digital equivalent of friends and family stroking your ego and telling you how great you are. It doesn’t help that most of them want you to reciprocate their affections by visiting their sites and telling them how great they are. These people are not helping you. They are groupies and they are sycophants. Leave them to their puerile chittering, and look elsewhere for the truth. Honest, biting critiques of your writing are helpful – but not many people are going to risk coming to your site and pissing you off with a truthful examination of your talent, because then you might turn around and do it to them! GASP!
Soon, things might take a bad turn and you suddenly find that no one wants to come to your site anymore, because you’re not following the unspoken rules of the unseen game of mutual masturbation by refusing to exchange shiny, happy feedback with everyone. If you don’t compliment Sally, she doesn’t compliment you, and then Sally’s friends don’t compliment you either, so you stop complimenting them, and so on until no one loves you anymore! All of your precious traffic dries up, and there’s no more egoboo to feed off of! What a depressing and vapid existence it must be to survive off the compliments of others. Don’t do it!
Finally, I want you to go out there into the great big world, and read. Good writers read, and then they read, and then they read some more. They contact other writers and talk to them. They get to know the ones they admire, and learn what not to do from those they don’t. They network with other professionals, not to advance their own selfish careers, but to collaborate and educate each other on every topic imaginable. They tell each other when they stink, and they congratulate each other when they succeed. Most of all, a writer is constantly learning, observing, and growing. What he’s not doing is worrying about the mass market appeal of his words, or who he might piss off by saying them. He’s not worried about becoming famous, and he’s certainly not under the laughable delusion that he’ll ever be rich. Most published writers continue working a regular job, because the money just isn’t there like it should be. Writers – real writers – aren’t in it for the fame or the non-existent fortune, even though they should all fight to be paid as big a purse as they can snatch from the greedy belt of The System. It may never be much, but it’s the principle of the thing. Besides, if every writer working for free right now would stop and demand to be paid, then maybe a good writer could make a good living doing what he loves most – and what everyone else only thinks they can do.
Oh, and one last thing. Although in today’s world the mere ability to passably parse a subject and a verb will allow even the most inept scribbler to write his way into the hearts and undies and bedrooms of untold amounts of young, naive readers, try not to get too hung up on the sex. It’s like the fame – it’s not really real, and you never know when it’s going to dry up, dry out, and leave you standing there alone and confused, holding an itchy and inflamed party favor. Writers are writers because we can’t stop writing. It’s in our blood. A need. A hunger. It’s never sated. Never filled. Never finished. The words never stop coming, even when we want them to…
Living with a toddler has the peculiar effect of altering one’s perspective on the outside world in much the same way as I imagine a fistful of LSD might in the hands of a tie-dyed True Believer, for whom the reality of the really real world is but a thin and illusory veil just waiting to be penetrated and ripped apart through the wonders of modern pharmacology…or, as it turns out, by the keen and curious intellect of a child.
Trey is a contemplative student of the world, and so his progressive milestones tend to spring upon us in alarming ways due to their lack of developmental preview. He’s not a baby-stepper, in other words. He goes from sitting quietly and appearing as though he’s not absorbing any of the material, to suddenly shocking you with how much he’s actually taken in. He went from spouting out random numbers between one and five, and refusing to learn that they progress in a specific order, to spontaneously counting well into the twenties without a skipped beat. He went from recognizing only a few letters of the alphabet to an immediate and inexplicable mastery of the Alphabet Song, and can now point out every letter of the alphabet whenever he sees a sign with lettering that piques his interest.
So, it is from this perspective that I offer unto you some of the child’s ponderous wisdom and – because no true genius should be without – one of his charming idiosyncrasies, as well. First up, we have his stern and calculated approach to Astronomy. I’ve no doubt that Science could learn a thing or two from Trey, but I’ll leave it up to you decide. I do have to warn you, however – arguing with him on his points of observation will lead you down the dark, labyrinthine catacombs of his mind. I seriously doubt you are prepared for the trip.
Trey loves the moon. He sees it in the night sky, and makes it a point to draw attention to its existence in any way possible. Most often, this involves him grabbing the face of whomever it is who has the good fortune of carrying him at the moment, and pulling or pushing it in the desired direction he wishes you to look. He then points at the moon, steals a quick glance to make sure you’re watching, and proclaims, “Look! The moooooooooon!” This goes on until he either gets tired of the game (read: never), or until you’re either buckling him into his car seat or walking into an indoors venue that blocks his view of the celestial orb.
This same sort of thing happens during the day, but not in quite the way as you might imagine. Upon spotting the great glowing wheel in the sky, he grabs your face, pulls or pushes your gaze into alignment, then points and proclaims, “Look! The mooooooon!” Clearly, you might think, the child is confused and immediate attention must be paid to his education, lest he become one of Those People. I assure you, I tried this. I truly did, and I did it with all of the earnest verve any good father would show his son as he guides him down the great road of education. However, as I alluded to earlier, this proved to be an egregious error in judgement.
Upon trying to teach him that the fiery sphere in the daytime sky is called the sun, Trey grew instantly agitated and contorted his adorable face into a Venetian carnival mask of consternation and effrontery. “No!” he shouted, with all of the righteous fury his three-year-old vocal chords would allow. “No, it not the sun! It the mooooooon!”
I remained calm in the face of his aggressive stance on the matter, and simply told him that, “No, Trey. That’s the sun. The moon comes out at nighttime.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and pursing his lips dramatically. “No, dat not the sun. Dat the moon!”
I could see that I had my work cut out for me, so I did the foolish thing and tried to resort to adult logic. “No, Trey. That’s the sun,” I said, hopefully. “It comes out in the morning and lights up the daytime and makes it hot.” I felt proud of my well-reasoned statement, and I let out a slight sigh of contentment and ill-placed confidence before I went in for the pièce de résistance. “The moon,” I began with a smug satisfaction that came from thinking I was winning the debate, “comes out at nighttime, after the sun goes to sleep. The moon doesn’t like it when it’s hot, so he goes to sleep in the daytime, and the sun comes up.”
Mac Tonight:
The cool moon
“Oh,” he said, just before crinkling his baby brow and cutting his ginormous eyes at me. “Noooooooo,” he said, dragging out the vowel and shaking his tiny head from side to side. “Dat’s the moon.”
“No, Trey. That’s the sun. It’s hot.”
“Noooo, dat not the sun! Dat’s the moon.”
I decided to concede defeat. Cut my losses. Tactically withdraw so that I could fight another day. “Ok, Trey.” I sighed. “That’s the moon.” I slumped back into the driver’s seat and put the car in reverse.
“Nooooooo!” came an immediate exclamation from the back seat. “DAT’S THE HOT MOON!”
The second bit of Trey’s wisdom that I wish to share with you today is shorter than the first, but no less illuminating. Being a child of divorced parents, Trey identifies both parental houses a bit differently. He calls his father’s trailer “Daddy’s House,” for instance, while calling my home “Kris’ House” – most of the time. Sometimes, it’s “Mama and Kris’ House” or “Mama and Kris and Trey’s” or simply, “Home.” Most of the time, it’s something with the word house in it. This, coupled with the fact that I enjoy taking him to breakfast at Waffle House during our Boy’s Time days (where he eats a dry waffle and an obscene amount of bacon), has led him to conclude that everything in this world is named by simply slapping house on the end of the title.
Going out for pizza? You’re headed to Pizza House!
A cookie from the cookie stand? Cookie House!
Need some books? Head over to the Book House!
Buying toys? Toy House!
I’ll wrap up today’s essay by discussing just one of Trey’s eccentric little idiosyncrasies, which comes from his strong belief in proper etiquette. The child – and I kid you not – is practically a goose-stepping zealot when it comes to returning a well-placed thank you with a polite you’re welcome. This, in and of itself, seems like a good thing, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t every parent like to have a polite child, who observes the niceties of the unspoken social contract to which we all subscribe?
Of course they would! Having an excessively polite child around has its other benefits, as well. As I’ve mentioned before, Trey is a strong and powerful chick magnet, and his insistence on observing proper etiquette is a primary reason for his considerable powers of cuteness. Whenever we go through a cash register, the clerk receives a huge “Thank you!” from Trey, which is always followed by a smiling, “You’re welcome,” which is, in turn, followed by a nod of approval to me of a job well done, and – if Trey is lucky enough for the clerk to be an elderly lady – a piece of hard candy. (It is a seldom documented law of the universe that elderly women have some unidentifiable lump of hard candy upon their persons at all times. This is a fact that, while not widely publicized, is certainly well-known by every human on the planet who is both under the age of five, and who is not at all unwilling to sacrifice a little cheek squeezing in exchange for a delicious sweetie.)
All is not always as it seems, of course, when one is discussing the lives and times of toddlers. Trey, while an extremely polite three-year-old who says things like please and sometimes slips in a sir or a ma’am, can go a little overboard in his demand that every nicety he grants unto others be returned to him, in kind. Things usually work themselves out quite well, as people in general are eager to be polite to small children that display good manners. However, sometimes his fervid demand for strict observance of proper decorum Presents A Problem.
Case in point, this past Saturday. We’d taken Trey to my parents (Mammie and Pop’s House!) to swim in the pool and play with some other kids. After an early evening filled with splashing and swimming and Learning To Share, everyone went inside to eat. The kids gorged themselves on pizza, while the adults ate delicious fajitas. Trey enjoyed flirting with a little girl named Gigi, much to the dismay of her father, who is one of my mother’s former fifth grade students, but who is now all grown up, with a family of his own. (She’s been teaching for a long time.) Trey enjoyed singing “pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girls” to her, sometimes replacing the word girls with her name, Gigi. He told her that he liked her hair, and gave her hugs and kisses followed by a very loud and boisterous, “Ohhhhh yeahhhh!” Gigi’s daddy, ever vigilant against the unwanted attentions of a foul usurper of his daughter’s purity, kept a watchful eye on Trey for the rest of the night.
Of course, it was all in good fun and very cute, so there was much laughter all around. (Which, as any parent knows, only encourages children to continue the behavior until someone either gets hurt, gets in trouble – or both.) Towards the end of the night, Trey was playing with Gigi’s cousin, Anthony. The game they were playing seemed to consist entirely of taking plastic golf clubs out to the playground and beating the crap out of the Playground Rules sign. (Yeah! Fight the power!) When Anthony offered to let Trey unleash a dual-wielding fury upon The Man by offering him his club, Trey graciously accepted, and gave Anthony a very sincere “Thaaaaank you!”
It should be noted here that Anthony is a bit younger than Trey, and decidedly less vocal. Tragically, this earlier stage of development proved detrimental to Anthony’s experience with Trey, as he was unable to return the thank you with the expected (and demanded) you’re welcome. Trey was displeased with this effrontery to politeness, and so repeated himself, for effect. “Thaaaaank you,” he said, with just the hint of an edge creeping into his voice.
Silence.
“THANK you,” he said again, this time growing observably irritated.
Crickets chirp.
“THANK YOU!” Trey shouted, visibly upset now and growing angry.
Blank, innocent stare.
“THANK YOU!” Trey again shouted, only this time the cheerfully colored plastic golf club in his right hand began to rise in a foreboding display of oncoming terror. “THANK YOU!”
Blank, but more-scared-now-than-innocent stare, followed by a hasty retreat and terrified running.
Trey gave chase, yelling “THANK YOU!” as politely as any madman could in the midst of a psychotic episode. Anthony ran into my parents’ bedroom, where Trey cornered him on the opposite side of their bed, next to the window. And, like a little Norman Bates, he walked with a slow and sinister determination towards Anthony, who himself was wide-eyed with terror and confusion. “Thank you, Anthony!” Trey chanted. “Thank you. Thank you! THANK YOU, ANTHONY!”
We have ways of making you polite, Herr Playmate!
Fortunately, it was around this time when Pops suddenly announced that dessert was about to be served, which I’ve no doubt saved little Anthony’s life – or at least prevented him from developing a tragic and irrational aversion to the words thank and you for the rest of his life. At the first suggestion of the sticky, sweet confectionery delights of dessert, Trey smiled and forgot all about Anthony’s gross ignorance of social graces, and Anthony forgot all about Trey’s homicidal interpretation of Miss Manners. The pair of them came running out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, beaming shimmering grins of innocence and friendship.
Ah, to be young again!
Today, I write my grand and final opus in my ongoing crusade against the great tyranny of our time. Well, maybe it won’t be quite so grandiose as I want it to be, and it sure as Hell won’t be my final word on the subject, but if I’m lucky, I might just begin to chip away the smallest microscopic grains of sand and dirt and mud that make up my ever-growing monument to despair. And, if I’m really lucky, I might just manage to breathe a faint and throaty whisper onto the swirling winds of change and provoke some of you into action. Maybe not many, but a few will do for a start. The right few, anyway.
The tragic few of you know who you are. You’re the stubborn bastards who, despite being beset upon all sides by the cretinous assault of imbecilic minds, refuse to yield to the seductive allure of apathy in the face of apparent hopelessness. You remain steadfast in your defiant struggle to continue swimming upstream against the brutal current of an angry river filled with the churning whitewater rapids of stupidity, and I need you. Humanity needs you. You are the last, best hope for the future, and I want to hear from each and every one of you. Maybe things can still turn out all right. Maybe we can hold back the tide of idiocy just a little bit longer. Then again, maybe I’ll just get a lot more hate mail. It could go either way, really.
The tyranny to which I refer is, of course, the enforcement of functional illiteracy by the mindless, vapid agents of the culturally ignorant and the willfully stupid. We live in a world where being intelligent ranks right up at the tippity-top of the Great List Of Sins, and where those who are not among the helmet-wearing, intellectually challenged mob must hide their true faces to simply fit in with the great, gyrating crowd of the mindless. It’s either that, or be forced out into the harsh glare of the spotlight, to stick out like the proverbial sore thumb on a delicate hand of otherwise respectable phalanges, where the only comfort to be found in life comes from sticking that plump little digit directly up the rancid asses of the ignorant, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Fortunately – or perhaps, unfortunately – with so many stupid people in the world doing so many stupid things, opportunity is never far away. Which kind of person are you? A sneaker in the crowd, a mask-wearing saboteur, an apathetic yes man? Or are you the sore thumb, the unappreciated and ugly reminder to the hand that you’re the only thing separating it from a monkey’s paw?
There are many threats to intelligence in today’s world, but right now the single greatest weapon in the arsenal of the inane and the foolish is technology. For all of its glittering promises and dubious claims, the rise of technology has not ushered in a new age of enlightenment, peace, and harmony. Instead, it’s unleashed the horrors of text messaging and smart phones and bluetooth headsets onto a world filled with people in constant communication, talking all the time and saying nothing. It’s brought us the great, equalizing meritocracy of the Internet, where the merit part of the -ocracy has proven to be earned by simply being a louder, more obnoxious asshat than the guy sitting next to you. It’s given us the ultimate in fantasy wish fulfillment through the bleeps and bloops of polygonal, texture-mapped video games, where the meek and the week can escape the terrible realizations of reality by fleeing into the virtual world, where they can become the strong and the mighty – and where they can finally have a turn at the other end of the bully’s stick. In short, the thing that was supposed to level the playing field and even the odds, to raise the bar and spread universal knowledge – the thing that was sold to us as the great, empowering savior of mankind – has proven to be nothing more than a fanciful pipe dream for the True Believers, and the ultimate source of control for those who wish to keep you stupid. So go, if you’re of that persuasion. Go away from here, and ignore me and mine even as you ignore your wives and husbands by clicking your way to some fantastical porn-filled wonderland or discount online shopping center. Go start a blog and become a movie critic or a literary critic, and reinvent yourself as an authority on matters you know nothing about. Go stand in front of a webcam and do something stupid. Get famous. Get rich. Get anything – just get gone!
For those of you still with me, let’s take a moment to remember the fallen and curse their names. I make no apologies for not having the desire to tolerate the stupidity of small minds. I just can’t stomach their witless presence. They move about in colonies like cockroaches, you know. They move about to survive and subsist on the most vile and disgusting minutiae of life experience as is humanly possible, and still be considered human. They breed like cockroaches, too. Or mice. Rats…
They meet online, they meet at bars, they meet in coffee houses and shopping malls, and on bikes and in cars. They meet and they greet, and they text and they sex, they break up and move on, and they flex and write checks. But in the end, no Seussian rhyme can contain the hideous consequence of all the sheets stained. They fuck and they fuck, they get knocked up and give birth, and with each shrieking child, they increase their net worth. And, if you’ll pardon me now and let me get back to the prose, I’ll stop all this rhyming about assholes and hos.
I’m…not…sure what just happened. It just sort of came out. Let’s not dwell on my temporary burst of rhythmic insanity, and instead get back to the bitching at hand. Where was I? Oh yes, the breeding. The stupid breed like rabbits and rats, as if there’s no tomorrow to worry about and no yesterdays to deal with. Always thinking only in the moment and only of themselves, their incessant fucking results in a constant and unending stream of children – children they don’t care about. Children who will grow up learning what their parents know, and then go to restart the cycle anew by birthing even more inanity into a world already filled to the brim with the dull and the boring. They will never have anything to offer the world, aside from their capacity to consume. To shop. To buy.
The stupid are the target demographic for *Insert Derogatory Reference To International Retail Megacorp Here* , and the worst part is – they’re happy about it! They love to want things they don’t need, and to need things they don’t even want. Your (below) average stupid person is a blank slate, eagerly waiting to have his hopes and dreams and desires chiseled into his soul by greedy and unseen, uncaring hands. In time, this strange tabula rasa army will blitzkrieg across the nation, over its airwaves and along its wires and through its fiber optic cables. Already, villainous and wicked forces manipulate, contrive, and control an increasingly silent vox populi, and we let them get away with it! They get away with it, and the people beg for more.
Terry Pratchett once said, “The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” This is a good thing, when in the context of education and alongside the idea of filling your head with knowledge. Children are blank slates, but they don’t stay that way. Well, they don’t have to, anyway. Sure, there are always going to be people who are naturally more or less intelligent than other people. It’s down to genetics and upbringing, and things like the quality of the education they receive. The problem is, we’ve allowed the State to dig their bloodied claws deep into the guts and viscera of the educational process, and they’ve eviscerated, disemboweled, and neutered any positive effects it may have once had. Under the terrible guises of “standardization” and “performance measurement” the powers-that-be have reduced education to a mere product. It’s pre-packaged, pre-processed, and shipped to your local public school for consumption. Where it once had nutrition, it now has filler. Where it once had dedication, it now has featherbedding. And, where it once lured noble individuals with the sacred calling to teach, it now has technology and so-called artificial intelligence teaching software.
Education is not a product to be weighed and measured, priced and sold. It is a great and powerful process, at times tedious and soul-crushing, but always worthwhile. A good teacher is brilliant and inspiring, and motivates his students to develop an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and encourages them toward understanding. Unfortunately, we no longer have very many good teachers. Oh sure, we have plenty of employees who stand at chalkboards and cluck their tongues – but there’s something to be said for quality over quantity. I don’t blame them, though. I think it still takes a special sort of inspired insanity to want to walk into a classroom filled with idle minds resistant to challenge, and try to help them work toward their potential. We need all of the (good) teachers we can get! However, until we wrest control of the education system back from the clumsy hands of government, there isn’t much that even the best teachers can do. They’re simply not allowed to teach anymore.
Instead, we work toward turning our children into little drones. We program them, rather than teach them. And, as with all robots, we train them on how to memorize, and how to regurgitate facts like so much vomit on a ScanTron form. It doesn’t matter that they develop a love of knowledge and a passion for learning. We only want to think they’re intelligent, and for them to think it of themselves in return. What nobody seems to want is actual intelligence, because along with it comes troubling things like critical thought and ideas and independent thinking. Children who can actually think cause problems in the mind-killing classrooms of America, and are best dealt with by crushing their spirits as quickly as possible. It’s sad, it’s offensive, and it’s a horrifying effrontery to those who actually care about leaving the world a better place than we found it – but it’s the truth. The reality. The sickening, ghastly reality.
I’m going to leave you today by echoing something I began earlier in the week, only this time I hope it sticks. I believe that the most important thing for us as human beings – the most important damned thing – is our ability to communicate. Mathematics may be the language of the universe, but down here on Earth it’s pretty hard to carry on a conversation using arithmetic and long division. No, we use words to convey our ideas. We use words to create the myths that bind our societies together. We invent concepts like love and hope and justice, and we invoke these myths into being through the power of our words. Without our nouns, verbs, and adjectives, we’re nothing more than hairless apes with opposable thumbs and less colorful genitalia.
We need words. We need to be able to understand them and use them. The more we have, the more refined and exact our communication can be. Words allow us to think in higher resolutions, with more detail and clarity possible with every new word we learn. The more of them you know, the clearer you can see the wonders and the horrors of this world, and the better armed you are to either fight or defend them.
With that in mind, I close out today’s essay with an excerpt from Lonelyache, by Harlan Ellison. This is the opening paragraph of a short story that I’ve loved for years, long before I’d lived enough to fully appreciate its meaning. Still, even as a young teenager who’d never experienced the wrenching agony of romantic betrayal and loss, I could read his words and feel the loneliness and the heartache behind them. And later, after I’d grown a little and been damaged a little, I could read the story and smell the necrotic stench of loss, and taste the rancid flavors of a broken heart. My experiences helped me appreciate the message behind the words, and the words helped me understand my experiences.
It’s a powerful story written by a powerful talent, and it’s important that you know who he is. It’s important that you know others like him, all of whom craft words with the delicate exactitude of a surgeon and the inspired vision of a masterful painter. It’s important, because what Ellison and others like him do is a dying art. It is being lost even as you read this. In a world too wrapped up with instant and trivial communication and the transient fads of a jellyheaded pop culture, powerful words saying powerful things seem to have little place.
Characters are created and birthed on the page for a reason, and even though a good story must be entertaining, its meaning transcends simple enjoyment and demands critical examination. The writer chooses this word over that one, or puts this word in front of this other one, and he massages and adjusts and calibrates each tiny nuance of a sentence until it does exactly what he wants it to. Some words may be big, others small. Some sentences may be long, others short. Some stories may require three novels to properly tell, others only a few paragraphs. A good writer is a craftsman with his pen or his typewriter or keyboard. He knows that how you say something is as important as what you’re saying, because it all works together. Like a culinary masterpiece, every word, every comma, every period – they all work together to create the smell, the flavor, the texture, and the nourishment of the story.
When I asked Harlan if I could use the following excerpt, I asked that he also agree to one slight caveat. I wanted to show how important words are by contrasting his original work with a version of it as it might be written today in the fumbling hands of an inept but popular writer. Like any true craftsman, he’s very protective of his work and I didn’t actually think he would agree to let me hack it to pieces, but he did. Maybe he knew that, once it came down to brass tacks, I couldn’t really do it. I wanted to be really clever and show how witty I am by transforming his tragic portrait of loss and bitterness into something barely recognizable and hilarious in its ineptitude, but now that I have the opportunity, I just don’t feel like it.
Here then, is the opening of Lonelyache. Read it properly, or I’ll come over there and smack you a good one, wherever you are.
The form of habit she had become still drove him to one side of the bed. Despite his need for room to throw out arms, legs in a figure-4, crosswise angled body, he still slept on only one side of the big double bed. The force of memory of her body there, lying huddled on the inside, together cuddled body-into-body, a pair of question marks, whatever arrangement it might have been from night to night – still, her there. Now, only the memory of her warmth beside him kept him prisoner on his half. And reduced to memories and physical need for sleep, he retired to that slab of torture as seldom as possible. Staying awake till tiny hours, doing meaningless things, laughing at laughers, cleaning house for himself with methodical, surgical tidiness till the pathology of it made him gibber and caper and shriek within his skull and soul, seeing movies that wandered aimlessly, hearing the vapors of night and time and existence passing by without purpose or validity. Until finally, crushed by the weight of hours and decaying bodily functions, desperately needing recharge, he collapsed into the bed that he loathed.
To sleep on one side only.
To dream his dreams of brutality and fear.
And that, my friends, is how you communicate to others the strange and terrible lunacy that befuddles the minds of the heartbroken. If I haven’t proven my point to you that intelligence is something sacred and rare, and that it must be cherished and nurtured and fought for, then I’m afraid no amount of my tampering with his words would change your mind. Sure, it might get a laugh – but the expense is too great. I really don’t want to mess with what’s already there, lest I feel the dark guilt of someone who would throw fistfuls of watery shit globules onto the Mona Lisa for a lark. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be That Guy.
I usually close my essays with some sort of joke or some other hit-or-miss stab at humor, but today feels a little different. I’m a little exhausted from pouring out my anger and bitterness about the world, and I’m feeling a little reflective about just how far I’ve come in the year or so since I started this blog. It’s been a curious trip, clawing my way out of the pit I’d sunk into – and I don’t think I’d have made it without the writing. The ability to digest or to purge via these essays has been a strong tonic for what ailed me, and I hope they’ve helped out some of you along the way. I’m not sure where the roads of the future will take us, but I thank you for coming along with me this far. It has been…Interesting.
In the great, unending Battle of the Sexes, there has remained an ever-present obstacle to peace that continues to elude most people to this very day. At first, it seems a trifling sort of thing, something that bears little import to the greater campaign on either side – but it is far, far more than that. When recognized and addressed properly, it signifies a symbolic understanding and represents an agreement to concede a mutual respect for the opposing gender. Far too often, married couples fight pointless skirmish after pointless skirmish, losing as much ground as they take while never quite getting the point. The goal of the war, for either side, is not to win or lose – it is simply to reach a level battlefield.
I present to you, then, the most contentious object in the married household. Whether it represents the most significant threat to equality in your marriage, or the ultimate manifestation of your mutual love and respect for one another, the choice is ultimately yours. I wish only to humbly point out a third option available for dealing with this terrible object, which many of you seem to have never considered. I am speaking, of course, of the household toilet.
Visual aid supplied for the intelligence deficient.
Arguments and opinions concerning whether the toilet seat should be left up or down is a thread woven around the hearts and minds of spouses everywhere, if comedians, movies and television sitcoms are to be believed. And, while it might not amount to quite the hullaballoo that it’s made out to be by these dubious sources, it is something that is bound to come up whenever a tripod lives with a smoothleg. The problem is that this should never be an issue. The fact that it is one – however slight – is something that, I think, says much more about how we think than it serves as any sort of commentary on gender equality.
Gifted with the mutant power to stand up while they pee, men like to leave the toilet seat up. Women, lacking this particular superpower, prefer the seat left down. The problem is, neither of these options represent good solutions to the problem. Demanding either requires an acquiescence of defeat from one gender to the other, which is unacceptable. Either the man in the relationship admits fault and takes on the burden of lifting and then lowering the seat, or the woman accepts the fact that she’ll just have to put the seat down whenever she needs to visit to porcelain depository. Either way, one ends up doing work the other could be doing, so it sets the stage for resentment.
So, the third option? It’s simple, stupid: close the lid. Most household toilets have a seat and a lid, but the latter seems to only be used when it’s covered in some sort of frilly hat and closed when company comes over. Any other time, it’s relegated to just sit there, perched above the seat and leaning against the tank, ignored and forgotten. I say it’s time to remember the lid. Embrace the lid. With a closed-lid system, where both spouses close the lid, each partner has to do an equal amount of work whenever visiting the loo, or hitting the head, or whatever you want to call it. Sure, enforcing equality through mutual respect might feel a little unamerican at first, but it really is for the best – and I promise you won’t wake up a communist.
Additionally, if you have little children in the house, then keeping the toilet lid shut is a great preventative action to take that can help to guard against unfortunate and costly plumbing bills. Trey, for example, has suddenly taken an intense interest in throwing things into the toilet. Last week, he was sitting on his potty chair when he unceremoniously stood up, walked over to the edge of the bathroom counter, and picked up one of his mother’s socks. He then turned and calmly walked back to the potty chair, sat down, and threw the sock into the open toilet next to him.
“Trey!” I exclaimed. At first I was shocked at the randomness of such a curious act, but I quickly realized that I’d have to fish the sock out of the suspicious looking water in which it was now swimming. At the thought of that, I found myself reflexively shout, “Why would you do that?!”
It was at this moment that I realized I had become one of Them. Those People. Parents.
I used to think that the parents of small children were, themselves, a little bit soft in the head. They appeared to walk around wearing eerie, blank expressions on their faces. They seemed perpetually lost and confused, and expressed these deficiencies through irritability and frustration at the slightest of provocations. I didn’t know why this was, but for a little while, I suspected that only stupid people had kids. I was wrong.
Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but those vacant stares and confused expressions were actually conceived and birthed in the fiery kilns of parenthood, where crazed sculptors known as children take up fiendish tools to carve terrible and hideous features into their parent’s faces. They do this early on, of course, when the severity of their cuteness is dangerous and disarming. Slowly, they work their magic. A cut here, a nick there, and before you know it, they’ve created a ghastly masterpiece, which they then toss into the searing heat of a parental oven to set the glaze and fire-harden it into permanence.
Oh sure, you could dismiss me as being overly dramatic – but you probably don’t have kids. It was when I shouted, “Why would you do that?!” when it hit me. I was not asking Trey a rhetorical question. I was truly and literally confused, and needed his help to understand. I needed a three-year-old to explain something to me. Oh, how far the mighty have fallen!
Every parent says that their children are advanced for their age, but this is only a small and comforting lie designed to hide the fact that Little Johnny eats his poo.
When he couldn’t explain – when he wouldn’t explain – I understood what it means to be a parent. It means that you do walk around in a state of semi-confusion, with a befuddled and weary expression resting on your tired face. You look that way not because you’re stupid, but because you live with tiny, stupid people who doing tiny, stupid things. And, while you long to understand why children do the stupid things that they do, you ought to just slowly begin accepting that you never will. It is a mystery beyond your capacity to solve, because your brain just doesn’t work the same way.
Children see the water in a toilet as some sort of miniature, mystical ocean under their command. Like tiny Tritons, children control the ebbs and flows of the amazing toilet waters with the arcane power of the chrome-plated lever on the side of the tank. It might as well be a swirling whirlpool of the river Styx for all they know. The rush of the water as it spirals down, the satisfying whoosh as the last of it leaves the bowel, and the thrilling whish of new water coming in are, to a child, wondrous and exciting events. Possessing minds not yet dulled by the banality of mundane things, these simple happenings are amazing in the mind of a child, and so children are amazed by them.
The conflict comes from throwing adults into the mix with children. Our ways are not their ways, and so we are not meant to understand them. To make any effort to do so is to take a short trip on a fast bus that’s driving straight into the mouth of madness. It is not recommended. Instead, simply understand that you will never understand them. They live in a different world that functions with different rules than we do. Granted, their world is the better one, but we can’t let jealousy get in the way of good parenting. We also can’t let good parenting get in the way of not looking like slack-jawed yokels.
On the seashore
Play with your children, certainly. Laugh with your children, definitely. Love, nurture, and teach your children, without question. But please – please, Please, PLEASE – don’t try to understand them, for that way lies only sadness. Assuming for the moment that you do eventually manage to reach some level of toddler comprehension, understand that no good can come of it. We are meant to lose the ability to find fascination in the repetitive qualities of annoying toys, somewhere around the time we stop eating paste and licking our shoes. Trying to take a severe u-turn on life’s cognitive development highway – just so that you can identify with a tiny human who laughs at toilet water – can only end in a spectacular crash up, resulting in having to wear an embarrassing yellow helmet for the rest of your sad and confused little life. Don’t do it!
The moral of the story is to keep the lid closed, and avoid being drawn into a philosophical debate with a three-year-old. The former will help keep you and your spouse on an even keel as you navigate the fjords and rapids of life’s marital waterways, while the latter will quite likely prevent you from going completely insane. Never say I didn’t warn you!
Last night, I took Trey out for a brief period of Boy’s Time. We called up my father, whom Trey calls ‘Pops’ and headed out for pizza. The boy loves pizza. He adores it to the point that I remain convinced that some strange and wonderful aspect of toddler physiology exists that allows their small bodies to metabolize foods like pizza and chicken nuggets directly into crack cocaine. Seriously, certain foods have a clear and apparent intoxicating effect on Trey that I not only fail to comprehend, but that makes me extremely and irreversibly jealous.
When he’s sitting there with a giant grin on his marinara-stained face, I struggle to try and remember when anything could make me that happy. Then, as he starts bobbing his head and dancing to unheard music as he giggles at unseen hilarities, I know that childhood is a wonderful place that we all want to get back to in some small way. Unfortunately, whenever we try to go back and revisit the hallowed halls of our youth, we find that the exits have all been fitted with the one-way wrought iron turnstile monstrosities of the sort you find in subways. You can never go back there again.
The good news for parents, however, is that you get a chance to peer through the tyranny of time to peek between the bars of the exit and glimpse the earlier days of life every time you watch your child. Sometimes, you can even get a day-trip Visitor’s Pass to go inside and run around the crazy fields of excitement and wonder, and all you need do is play with your children. Sure, the pass expires at bedtime and you’re deported by midnight, but you know there’s always tomorrow. Well, at least until there isn’t.
Brittany never wants Trey to grow up. She’d be perfectly happy if Science found out that pizza stunts your growth, and her little boy would always be a little boy. She doesn’t want to think about his first bike ride sans training wheels, or the first time he won’t let her kiss him in public. The milestones of life should just go on without him and happen to someone else, as far as she’s concerned. The thought of Trey’s first date and first awkward, groping makeout sessions are the stuff of nightmarish legend for her. The first time he wants to borrow the car and then comes home late, or the first time she looks under his mattress and finds a girlie magazine (or a guy magazine – we don’t judge) are looked upon by her as hateful tales spun by wicked old women who are bitter and mad at the world, simply because their own children had the nerve to grow up.
Everyone needs to grow up, because Peter Pan?
A little creepy…
As for me, I’m having too much fun now to worry about later. And, whenever later comes, I plan to be having just as much fun then – well, at least up to the point where Trey no longer thinks I’m cool, or when he borrows my flying car (this will be in the future, after all) and forgets to refill its Flux Capacitor. That’s so damn annoying!
We’ll keep getting into fights about it, and he’ll keep telling me that I need to buy a Mr. Fusion like all his friends have, but then I’ll want to teach him the value of a dollar and insist that, if he wants to throw garbage into a fusion reactor like his friends, he’ll just have to pay for it himself. In the meantime, I’ll expect him to refill the plutonium if he’s going to use the car, just like I used to have to do! (Well, except we called it gasoline back then. But, since this argument with Trey happens after I get old and crazy and start believing that reality is, in fact, a peculiar amalgam of 1980s Spielberg movies, we’ll stick with the Back To The Future imagery for now.)
On our way home last night, after Trey took me on a whirlwind tour of the manic emotional landscape of an exhausted toddler when he went from euphoric to cranky and back down to hyperkinetic silliness in zero-point-two seconds, we stopped at the grocery store. I had to run in for a couple of things, so we piled out of the car and walked through the store’s automatic doors. (Trey, I suspect, prefers to think of these magically opening portals as the eighth wonder of the world.) He declined the offer of a buggy, for preference of being carried.
Automatic doors make me feel like a Jedi.
It should be noted here that I firmly believe that Trey’s molecular density is made greater by the rays from the Earth’s yellow sun. This should eventually grant him super strength and the ability to shoot laser beams from his eyes, but for now the only effect seems to be that his specific gravity has been rendered roughly equal to that of lead. I’ve never actually seen him alone in a body of water deep enough to sink in, but I’ve no doubt that he’d go right to the bottom. In short, he’s heavy – not overweight or anything, just very, very heavy…hence the density theory.
After carrying his preternaturally heavy mass around the store, we go to check out with our handful of items. We’re forced to use the U-Scan line, which is backed up to the point of absurdity due to the complete and overwhelming stupidity of the people using it. One of the scanners is offline, and the three others are being used by people who should have their U-Scan licenses revoked. One woman was trying to scan her produce by moving one carrot at a time across an uncaring scanner that wasn’t impressed with its lack of a barcode.
Anyway, while we’re waiting for our turn at the self-checkout for the deeply stupid, a line forms behind us. Immediately behind us are two cute, young girls in either their late teens or early twenties. Trey is a curiously strong chick magnet, and these girls couldn’t stop talking about him. I pretended not to hear them, but he didn’t bother with such polite niceties. Instead, he flirted.
He started by busting out with a little Mick Jagger as he sang his (current) favorite line from his (current) favorite song, “Beast of Burden”. He was holding on to my neck and coquettishly grinning at the young ladies as he sang, “Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girls!” Of course, it comes out much cuter in actual Trey dialect, where the Ts in “pretty” are over-emphasized and where “girls” comes out more like, “gruuuuaawwwls!” At some point, though, I guess the girls stopped smiling at him, because he grabbed my face and twisted my head around to point at one of them and yell, “Ewww! It’s YUCKY!”
Ah, the joys of being a toddler! You get to flirt and tease and ridicule, and all of it is cute. The scary thing about Trey is that he is fully aware – and in command of – his cuteness. He can turn it on or off at will, and disarm you with a single smile. It’s a great skill to have, especially for times like late last night, when I heard him out of bed and playing with his toys. I opened to door to scold him, but before I knew what was happening, I’d tucked him back in bed, exchanged hugs and kisses, and brought him a new packet of fruit chews he calls “SpongeBob Candy”. I knew that I was supposed to get mad and fuss at him, it’s just that at some point after opening his door, I somehow became his doting man-slave. I am unsure as to how he does this, but I do know with an unwavering and sagacious clarity that it involves the awesome and terrifying power of…The Cuteness!
Like an ancient and mysterious Kung Fu master, Trey misdirects you with The Cuteness before striking with furious speed and deadly accuracy!
I do not believe in the tyranny of family. The simple act of sharing some specific genetic data doesn’t endear me to anyone who has my blood, and I don’t feel any more obligated towards a mother or father, brother or sister, cousin, aunt or uncle simply because society tells me that I’m supposed to. Screw society, and screw family! Accidents of blood are no basis for the foundation of lasting commitments, and so I refuse to honor such imposed dominion.
Except when I do.
I believe we choose our family, at least after a certain age. Naturally, a four-year-old can’t simply walk out of his house and move in with the neighbors whenever he decides that his mother is a fiendish tyrant who delights in his suffering every time she serves green beans and suspicious looking meats for dinner. At a certain point, however, the kid grows up and grows out and – if he chooses to – he can leave it all behind. The house, the yard, the town, the city, the state, the family – he can just walk away. After a quick kiss goodbye and a quicker kiss off, he’s on to bigger and better things.
At some point, you have to look to your left and look to your right, and take stock of the people around you. Are they there because you genuinely like them, and because they’re decent people who have earned and deserve your love and attentions? Or are they there for no other reason than for having come into this world through the same birth canal as you? Maybe one of them is the birth canal. Maybe another is the fleshy stick that poked at it late one night, when there was nothing better to do. It doesn’t matter what the physical connection is. What matters is whether the people in your life deserve to be there.
I’m fortunate to have parents who I find to be exceptional human beings, and my love for them is all the more significant precisely because it’s understood that I love them by choice, and not by genetic obligation. If they were beneath me as people, if they didn’t meet my standards, or if they were otherwise nothing more than sickening blights upon the proud and noble history of the human race, you can bet your grandma’s bingo card that I’d drop-kick them out of my life faster than you could spit out the rear window of a Japanese bullet train. And I wouldn’t give a damn!
Unfortunately, while all of the leaves and twigs and branches closest to me on the great and gnarled progenitorial trunk of my family tree do actually deserve to be there, sharing my sunlight and chlorophyll, there are some members of my extended biological family that I’d just assume some well-meaning and industrious old lady would come enthusiastically trim off with a vicious looking pair of rusty pruning shears. There are billions of people spinning through the universe with us on this little rock we call Earth, and I refuse to be burdened by a select and unworthy few of them simply because we are “related“, when there is no dearth of selection for better people into which I can invest my time, my energy, and my love.
Different strokes, for different folks, and so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo.
The flip-side of this shiny ideological coin means, of course, that while you should be free to dismiss the hangers-on and bottom feeders of your genetic kith and kin, you must also be free to adopt strangers and friends into your own self-designed, non-biological brood. I have more non-related friends who I consider to be my closest family than I do actual relatives. These are the types of friends who I could call up at three o’clock in the morning on some random Tuesday, and ask them to drive six hours out of their way to meet me somewhere dark and scary, where people Should Not Go. They wouldn’t ask questions, they wouldn’t hesitate, and they certainly wouldn’t say no – not if I needed them. Likewise, they expect and demand the same sort of loyalty from me, and I do my best to see that I live up to their example.
I suspect that one of the reasons that Trey and I bonded so quickly and so strongly was precisely because I have no prejudice for sharing blood. I will never understand the strange compulsion people have to make little copies of themselves by spreading their seed and reproducing genetic semi-clones. If the human race were teetering on the sharp edge of some terrible precipice of extinction, I could probably get behind the need to reproduce. However, when the world is filled with millions upon millions of children who were simply unfortunate enough to have been born to uncaring or unable parents that either can’t or won’t take care of them, I will never be able to rationalize the selfish desire to breed.
If you want to raise a child, why not go out and help one who is already here, and who is sad and who is suffering in a brutal world that has never been kind to it? There is something far greater and nobler in adoption than there is with simply squirting out copies of yourself like some twisted biological mimeograph machine – and I wish more people would consider it. Unfortunately, society doesn’t exactly have great systems in place for dealing with orphaned or abandoned children. More often than not, it simply consumes them, and masticates the tender flesh of their young souls in the hideous chomping jaws of the dread machine called The System.
We constantly debate Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice in this country, yet neither side seems to consider what happens to a child after it’s born. Without a culture that willfully accepts the burden of millions of unwanted children, I don’t understand how anyone can support a Pro-Life agenda. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly no fan of abortion, but it seems that all the Pro-Lifers can recite is that a fetus is alive and human, and that it has rights. I agree, but I don’t think those rights end after it punches its ticket on the Birth Canal Express and makes its way out into the big, bright world. The social stigmas need to be removed for “unwanted” children or orphans, and for the parents who adopt them. The suspicions of weak familial bonds in adoptive families need to vanish, and each and every one of us needs to contribute to the enormous financial obligation we have to every single child that is forced into this world. Sadly, what seems to happen is that, once birthed, the child becomes one of Those People, and no longer qualifies for the empathy and love of taxpayers.
But anyway, that’s all I have for you today. I encourage each of you to think about what I’ve been saying in this essay. It’s hardly a new concept, and I can’t claim it as my own – but I do hope that pausing for thought might help some of you to come to a conclusion you’ve been putting off for far too long. Family are those people in your life who you love and care for not because you’re supposed to, but because you want to. Because they’ve earned it. But if they ever – even for one second – prove themselves to be disloyal or dispassionate about your suffering, don’t be afraid to leave them behind.
There are better people out there in this wide world, and they want to know you just as much as you want to know them. I have a great family, simply because I’m careful about who I chose to allow into it, and because I don’t respect the imposition of blood ties. For example, while I am technically related to only a fraction of the following people, I have: two mothers, one father, a grandmother, a grandfather, several sisters, a bunch of brothers, a veritable herd of godchildren, and one wife and one son. (Sure, we’re not technically married yet – but I’m bad with time.)
One of the metathemes running through Joss Whedon’s body of work is family.
Family by choice.
The great tragedy of family comes upon all of us, at some point or another. Someone out there in the world has a mook for a brother, who calls begging for money every two weeks like Swiss clockwork, and then disappears until he needs more. Someone else reading this is an aunt who’s concerned about a niece that’s fallen in with the wrong crowd, and has suddenly become too cool to return her worried calls. Elsewhere, there is a father who fancies himself a good man, but who is hurting his daughter with selfish, thoughtless actions – and he just doesn’t care. Somewhere – everywhere – someone is disappointing someone else, and people are crying.
The lesson for today is, as usual, a simple one. Family doesn’t turn its back on one other, nor does it embrace a hated enemy. Family doesn’t wound you, then sits there pouring lemon juice on it while telling you it shouldn’t hurt. Family does not hurt you. If it does, then it’s time to find something better to love. Find a friend. Find a lover. Find…a real family.
Brittany and I were sitting in a restaurant tonight, each of us furiously concentrating on the cutting and the chewing and the swallowing of two extremely delicious steaks, when it occurred to me that my lovely fiancee has all of the power and the radiance of a thousand suns bursting at once in the sky – and meeting her destroyed my world. She came upon me like a feral cat, wild and hungry with a hidden strength rippling beneath her feline curves, and she devoured me whole.
But this alone wasn’t the end of my world. No, that came later, when I met her son. I remember that fateful night, alone in her apartment together with each other and the bouncing, precocious little bundle of unbridled two-year old enthusiasm known as Trey. The first exchange he and I had found me making a stupid face and saying, “Blah, blah, blah!” For whatever reason, he smiled instantly, and by the end of the night he was sitting in my lap as I leaned against the couch, the two of us enraptured – he by the movie playing on the television, and me by him. Looking back now, it was that night that found the atomic bomb bursting over the desolate landscape of my heart and my soul. And, in the explosive energies ferociously released from its terrible detonation, a strange and wonderful new life emerged from that tempestuous storm. A being forever changed by the explosion. A mutant. Me.
Sitting tonight in the little neighborhood restaurant we’ve adopted as our secondary home, I realized that I was content to do nothing other than sit and breathe the same air as my fiancee. Rather than wanting to go out to dance and drink the night away engaged in various form of debauched frolicking, I didn’t want to do anything other than simply be with her – and with Trey. Sadly, this is the monkey’s weekend with Brittany’s former sperm donor, and our house is left quiet and little dead without him in it.
As I’ve said before, I always wanted kids eventually – but I knew that tainting a new life with the hideous germ of my ex-wife would be visiting an evil up an innocent soul that no decent person could ever let happen. So, we didn’t plan for kids. We rarely talked about them, and I got my kid-fix in through my godchildren and nephews. I adopted a sort of surrogate father role as the cool uncle who comes around to stir up trouble and provoke the children to all sorts of obnoxious behavior, who then retreats when the insanity reaches its zenith, leaving the parents alone to contend with the Bad Behavior.
When we first began to get to know each other, Brittany once asked me what I thought about children – and she will never let me forget my answer. I said, “They’re great to be around, as long as it’s not on a daily basis.” If I could take back any of the horrible sentences that have escaped the flapping monstrosity that is my mouth, it would probably be that one. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried – and I hate being wrong.
My life has been taken over by four animated children flying around alone and unsupervised in an unlicensed rocket.
“We’ve got a mission!”
When Trey is off on his visitation with dad, one third of my family is cut away from the whole. It’s painful, and I don’t like it. What I realized tonight wasn’t that I love Brittany and that I love Trey – I already knew that. The realization that revealed itself to me over the delicious slabs of cooked and seasoned dead cow flesh we were eating, was that I loved both of them, not as separate people but together – as a family. And that’s what I have now, and a father and husband is what I have become.
The man I was with my ex-wife died one bitter night while lying in Brittany’s arms after a particularly vicious and loathsome phone call from the horrible woman I married. I remember that night, and the moment I realized that there was more to Brittany than the feral cat I wanted so badly to want. I realized that I did want her. That I could, and that it was OK. After that, the dating came easy and the love came fast. But it wasn’t until I met Trey that the purifying fire of a world destroying bombshell exploded over my wounded heart and mutated it into something that could feel again.
I plan on talking more and more about the family in the days and weeks and months ahead. The bond I’ve developed with both Brittany and Trey is as mysterious and incalculable as it was unexpected. Nothing depresses me more than being apart from either one of them, and nothing encourages me more when apart than the knowledge that I will soon see them again. I love my nights alone with Brittany, even as a third of me mourns the absence of Trey. And, even when my new son and I are spending time together, exploring and playing the day away sans females during our Boy’s Time, a third of me sits alone and apart, waiting until the three parts come back together again.
As a sidenote to this little sentimental journey of an essay, Brittany and I stopped by the grocery store on our way home this evening to forage some snacks from its junk-filled isles. We’re having a movie night tonight, cuddling up together on the couch and stuffing our faces with all sorts of repellant and odious “food products” that taste all the more delicious for having such little nutritional value. So, while we were picking up sodas and popcorn and candies in preparation for our night alone in the house, we were a little shocked and amused to see the grisly form of my ex-wife shambling down one of the isles.
At first, it was surprising to see her and I could feel the neurons in my head short-circuiting in a fearful display of confusion, anger, and bewilderment. Quickly, however, things sorted themselves out, and Brittany and I both just looked at her in a sort of stunned silence. There she was, the vile and awful cause of so much grief and confusion, clad in her trademark brown and impotent stabs at trendy fashion, and all I could feel was…nothing. In the past, the mere thought of her infuriated me, and the sight of her shuffling, clueless body was enough to enrage me beyond reason. This time, however, I didn’t get angry. I didn’t get sad or upset, or anything. I just looked at her, shook my head, and smiled. Any feelings I ever had for her, be they positive or offensively negative, were forever burned in the conflagration of healing fire that came over me when Brittany and Trey entered my life.
Of course, we hoped to evacuate the building before she caught sight of us, as we were both terrified that she might try to speak to us. Brittany, not being a big fan of my ex, would probably take immediate and hateful offense to the word, “Hello” – and I didn’t want to be around to see the carnage that would inevitably ensue. Unfortunately, we weren’t so lucky as to escape undetected, as she was edging towards the end of an isle when we were walking past it on our way to the register. I saw her. She saw me. She froze, and her face quickly contorted into a strange mask of shock and fear, her razor lips shrinking her mouth into a macabre circle as her tiny eyes bulged under the ghastly painted-on horror of her eyebrows. In reply, I think I felt my head tilt as a likely imperceptible smirk crossed my lips, before I simply turned and kept walking. Brittany saw her and blurted out a surprisingly loud, “OOP!” that almost immediately turned into a chuckling sort of laughter that sounded a lot like how I think the word “mockery” might sound, if it were to be pronounced entirely by giggling.
Yeah, it was kinda like that.
In short, it was the perfect ending to a perfect evening. I was already in a reflective mood and contemplating just how much better my life became after it was destroyed, when Fate decided to lift mystery’s thin veil and show me. Seeing the pitiable thing that I once found at the center of my universe felt like some sort of karmic reward from the powers-that-be, and I thank them for it. I died a strange and empty sort of pseudo-death when my marriage imploded, and it left me alone and broken, wandering aimlessly through an empty world as some kind of hideous, undead creature. Then, when I least expected it, the furious glory of an exploding sun called A Family burst in my sky, shattering and killing and laying waste to the Man-Beast I was becoming. And, as I sit here now, typing out this essay…I couldn’t be happier about being dead.
“You know, sweetheart, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: nobody knows what’s gonna happen at the end of the line, so you might as well enjoy the trip.”
Some wonderful information found its way to me, and the joy of sharing it with you supersedes anything else I was going to talk about today. Most of you probably won’t care about the specifics of the incident that I’m about to describe, but I’d be willing to bet that almost everyone has had to deal with something like this in the past, or will in the future. Or, who knows, maybe you’re going through it right now. If so, read onward through this twisted cautionary tale of deceit, treachery, and eventual justice. Keep hope alive!
Since I prefer to shop locally rather than at chains, I always default my shopping choices to local businesses whenever possible, and I try to limit my exposure to chain stores by only patronizing smaller franchises. Several years ago, I went into one of the branches of a smaller, locally-based chain of electronics stores to purchase a new high-definition big screen television. The store is called Conn’s, and although I should have smelled a rat just by the company’s name alone, it didn’t dawn on me that I would, in fact, be literally conned from the moment I walked in up through to the expensive and bitter eventuality of getting financially raped years later.
During the closing of the deal, my salesperson convinces me to purchase the company’s extended warranty. Normally, I pass on such things, as there is usually little use for the damned things beyond a simple padding of the salesman’s commission. However, since I was making a purchase of significant value, (and because I didn’t want to bother with having to wait for the television to be repaired, should it ever break), I let the nice gentleman talk me into buying what would eventually prove to be an utterly useless and impotent extended service agreement.
Fast-forward to a year or so later, when my new television is no longer very new. For some unknown reason, the image on the screen has been slowly growing too large for the viewing area. Because HDTVs have all sorts of sophisticated scaling technology to properly display the image, I suspected that something was going wrong somewhere inside the twisted guts of the infernal machine, and whatever it was happened to be over-enlarging the image. At first, it was barely noticeable – but over time, it became unbearable to watch. Slowly, over the course of a few months, the image on the screen began to, at first, cut off only the tips of an actor’s spiky hair, but it wasn’t long before it was completely severing thespian heads with the furious banality of a disinterested executioner. The television never popped, it never hissed, and smoke never rose from its vents in angry ethereal wisps of burned silicon and plastic. No, it just simply and quietly began to malfunction.
Sad TV says, “Please, sir. I want some love.”
My call to the store requesting service caused a slightly confused young man to appear at my front door, wearing a white shirt stained with sweat and other suspicious fluids. He greeted me with the neigh-toothless grin that’s a staple of any seriously Southern locale that respects the grand tradition of stereotypical inanity, and I directed him to the brobdingnagian digital monstrosity towering over my living room. Things were going well, right up until he approached the glowing phosphors of the behemothic screen and slowly extended his hand to cautiously touch its delicate reflective surface. Then, like a curious and frightened ape reaching out to caress the nameless wonder of an extraterrestrial obelisk, he tilted his head and said, “Hmmmm.”
When the laying-on-of-hands failed to exorcise the TV’s demons to his satisfaction, the poor, simple man turned to me and asked me what the problem was. I looked at him, then I simply pointed at the bobbing Adam’s Apple of some random actor as it spoke to a pair of breasts that were only somewhat on-screen. “That,” I said, “shouldn’t be like that.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, with a surprising accent of innocence.
“What do I mean?” I replied. “What do I mean?! Just look at the screen!”
“Yeah?”
“YES!”
“Um. So?”
I sighed and slapped my forehead, shouting, “So?! So it should be two PEOPLE talking. Two COMPLETE people. You know, like with heads and bodies and such?”
He said, “Oh, your scaling is off.” Then, he looked up at me and accusingly asked, “Have you tried changing it?”
“You mean with this button?” I held up the remote. “This one that says Aspect? The one that changes the aspect and zoom ratio of the picture? The one that makes it bigger or smaller? Yes,” I said, as hard and as icily as I could, “I have.” I pushed it a few times to illustrate, expanding and contracting the increasingly disturbing image of an Adam’s Apple talking to two round and firm balls of skin-covered silicone. “It doesn’t fix it.”
“Hrmm. No, it doesn’t. Maybe it’s your logic board?” he said, sliding the last notes of the sentence into a question mark.
“Sure,” I said, as I slapped my hands against my thighs and exhaled a throaty, “Why not.”
“I’ll have to take it into the shop for that. It’ll be a couple of weeks.”
“That’s fine. I have the extended warranty, so you can just keep this one and deliver my replacement.”
The guy stood frozen in place, a frightened gazelle stranded alone on the Serengeti and worried about why that patch of grass over there suddenly seems to be shaped like a lion. “Um, ok,” he stammered. “I’ll just go ahead and take in your unit today, and you can, um…call the warranty department about your replacement. OK?”
I agreed, and watched as he disconnected the twisted, tangled nest of cables and wires and unidentifiable cords. He went to his truck, came back in with a dolly, and strapped the television to it. Ten or fifteen struggle-filled minutes later, he succeeded in evicting the set from my home and carrying it away in his service truck. I went back inside, picked up the phone, and called the warranty department.
I’m sure you can guess what happened next, and I’ll save you the profanity-filled details. In short, I was told that I would not receive a replacement because my television could be repaired. Additionally, they did not supply loaner units to use while the repairs were being made, so I’d just have to wait the “couple of weeks” until I got my TV back. I didn’t mind this too much at the time, because a few weeks without that enormous monster in my living room probably wouldn’t be a bad thing.
You know what they say about men with big TVs…
However, two weeks came and went. Then two months. Then six months. Then a year. Time ticked by, and no amount of vitriolic anger communicated either by phone or in person seemed to have any effect. Eventually, the company agreed to replace my set by offering me a “depreciated trade-in value” of my old unit towards the purchase of a new television. Keep in mind, I was sold an extended service agreement that I was told would keep me in a fresh supply of new TVs for two years, should one break, and then another, and then another. I could, in the words of the salesman, “Kick off your shoes and accidentally send one through the TV screen,” and I would be delivered a replacement. HA!
I filed a complaint with the utterly useless entity known as the Better Business Bureau. Conn’s rebutted. I rebutted their rebuttal. This went on until the BBB unceremoniously closed the file on the basis that it had been resolved satisfactorily, regardless of the fact that I was over a year in waiting with no promised replacement television, while my own unit was being held hostage by the company’s uncooperative repair department. I eventually had to get litigious.
Unfortunately, I allowed my then wife to fill out some of the paperwork to file with the court. I instructed her on what to file, but she was eager to show me that she was capable of doing it on her own. Like a great and powerful fool struck down and blinded by love, I let her pretend to be a big girl and do it all by herself. This was a decision I would later regret.
Eventually, our case was brought before the court, and the presiding judge was aghast at the company’s behavior. However, he reluctantly ruled that he could not find them in breach of contract. Yes, my intelligence-challenged spouse had ignored my instructions to file under “deceptive business practices” and instead took it upon herself to file papers claiming a breach of contract. The judge, to his credit, made it very clear that he could not rule in our favor and, while he couldn’t give us legal advice, he told us no less than three times that the case could be re-filed within a small timeframe. He, of course, wasn’t advising us to do any such thing, but was merely telling us that – if we wanted to (wink, wink; nudge, nudge) – we’d need to go see So-And-So in the Such-And-Such Office before Date X, because if this had been filed as a deceptive business practice suit, his ruling would have been much different.
Of course, I re-filed the papers (properly this time), and the case eventually settled out of court, after the company’s lawyers offered to repay the cost of the unit. Since this was all I had been seeking since the beginning (either that or a simple replacement, as I was promised by the service agreement), I agreed to let them pay me, and I walked away from the courthouse.
Keep in mind that, had I simply acquiesced to their original offer of depreciated trade-in value for my TV, I could have purchased a better, newer television for only a few hundred dollars. However, as those who know me are painfully aware, I won’t do something smart if it means going against doing something I think is right. So, I spent thousands of dollars to “Fight The Man” rather than a few hundred to get something better. That’s just how I am; I’d rather be right than happy.
Sometimes, though, karma turns its great wheel and justice eventually comes around. Earlier today, I received an excited call from my sister, informing me that the Texas Attorney General has charged Conn’s with unlawfully failing to honor warranty agreements. Citing more than 2,000 complaints made against the company, the OAG is seeking civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation ($250,000 if the violation financially harmed persons over 65) due to failing to honor product warranties, selling defective products, false advertising, misleading customers about the nature of its products, and other infractions. Ah, sweet justice!
So, take this knowledge with you the next time some large and toothy grin is trying to sell you an extended warranty. The things are almost universally useless, although I suspect there are still some decent, honest businesses around that actually honor their agreements. By and large, though, buying a service agreement is just a formal way of letting the fat, greedy fingers of a faceless corporation get in your pants to feel you up and make off with your wallet.
Don’t let them do that.
Seeing as how Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday, I thought I would devote the rest of this week’s entries to delving into the next-to-oldest profession by sharing some stories of my own mother. Somewhere along the way, I’ll do my best to talk about motherhood in general, despite the obvious fact that I am grossly unqualified for such things, on account of not having a uterus. Even so, I’ve been around mothers for most of my life, either as a childhood peon under the direct rule of their tyranny, or as an outside observer looking in on their strange and wonderful ways. Most recently, of course, I’ve become an active participant in the grand parental conspiracy, and I’ve suddenly come to appreciate the role that fathers play in the bizarre goings-on of the family unit.
By and large, the father’s role seems deceptively simple, but the reality of the situation is far more complex, convoluted, and mysterious. The conventional wisdom of the animal kingdom suggests that fathers lack the maternal connection to their children that mothers enjoy. As such, we are told that extra steps must be taken by nature to ensure that the dads of the world don’t kill, eat, or simply abandon their young. For example, I’ve heard it said that Mother Nature makes newborn children most closely resemble their fathers after birth, because it helps with the bonding process between a child and a party who lacks almost all credit for its existence beyond having played the glorified role of a sophisticated turkey baster. I’m not sure if I buy into such bio-mystical mumbo jumbo though, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned through both my current domestic situation and through growing up in a traditional nuclear family, it’s that fathers are – in large part – the sole reason that any child survives the terrible and mercurial mood swings of its mother…
********
It is 1983, and I am almost eight years old. It’s December, and my excitement is growing with every excruciating day that ticks slowly off the calendar, building towards the inevitable percussive explosion of tinsel, gift wrap, and masking tape that is the annual orgy of gift-giving gluttony we call Christmas. It is a strange and fearful sort of excitement, filled with anticipatory wonder tinged with a terrible hint of doubt that colors my emotional mood, and my behavior isn’t much better.
Like any kid getting ready for his yearly visit from the fat and jolly anthropomorphic representation of human generosity and Germanic paganism, I am bouncing off of the proverbial walls. My older sister has been spending a disconcerting amount of time and effort over the past few weeks, expressing serious doubts as to the validity of the curiously generous and obese old man, and the doubt she has instilled in me is starting to take its toll.
In an effort to fortify my defenses as she continues to chip away at the rock of my belief, I am reading a fascinating tome of all things St. Nick. My mother bought it for me, perhaps having sensed my growing suspicions concerning the scientific improbability of Santa Claus. It is filled with meticulous explanations relating to the puzzling questions of the “Why?” and “How?” variety, and it is doing an excellent job of bolstering my faith in the red-suited fat man. That is, until my sister comes walking in the door, behind my mother. Mom walks into the kitchen to start putting away groceries, while my sister saunters up to me, a devilish grin on her face.
Santa Claus –
There is no better reason to lie to your child.
“Guess what?” she says, through the crooked smile of big sisters everywhere.
I look up from my book and shrug. “What?” I ask, innocently.
She sings her response in the mocking tones heard in schoolyards around the world and through all of time, since the first caveman decided to teach the rest of the tribe how to point at Ogg’s cro-magnon brow and make fun. “Mom told me what you’re geeeeeettiiiiing for Chriiiiiiistmaaaaaas!”
I immediately lose all interest in my book and give her my full attention. My eyes are wide and I make my gestures as non-threatening as possible, so as not to frighten the information away. “Really,” I gasp. “What?”
“Can’t tell ya!” she shouts, before turning to skip down the interminable length of the hallway between our rooms.
Her room is right across from mine, and the actual distance is only a few feet, but it sometimes seems like miles. She slams her door behind her, and I can hear her turn the weak lock of the ’80s suburban home – the type little brothers can pick with ease using only a toothpick. I get up from my bed, where I was lying and reading before the sisterly interruption, and walk to the kitchen to plunder the junk drawer for a stray toothpick.
As I round the corner, I see my mother standing at the breakfast table, pulling groceries from the brown paper bags people used to use before the fiendish plastic bags of today usurped their throne. I’m pulling open the junk drawer when she looks up from her unloading and hits me with the all-too-familiar, all-knowing Mom Stare.
“Leave your sister alone,” she casually commands.
“But she – ”
“I don’t care. Leave her alone.”
“But…”
“KRISTIAN!” she exclaims, and I can feel the capital letters. “I don’t care!” she shouts as she becomes suddenly and terrifyingly animated. “It’s almost Christmas and you two are fighting. Again!” She calms down a bit with the last exclamation, and more subduedly says, “Go tell your sister to come here.”
Having heard this tone before, I gleeful embrace this command, as past experience informs me that at least my sister is getting in trouble, right along with me. Misery loves company, especially when it’s your annoying big sister.
I knock on her door, and sing out to her in the same schoolyard tones she used on me earlier. “Gretchen! Mom wants yooooooou in the kiiiitcheeen!”
“I didn’t do anything!” she shouts in a muffled and angry voice from behind the door. I hear the click of the lock, and she throws the door open. She pushes me aside and remarks, “Why won’t you ever just leave me alone?!”
I decide it’s best that I just excuse myself from the escalating situation as soon as possible, so I let her stomp down the hall to the kitchen, and I walk quietly back into my room. I’m just sitting back down on my bed when I hear my mother yelling from the other side of the house.
“Kristian! Get in here! RIGHT! NOW!”
Those capital letters are even more terrifying than the earlier ones, so I jump up from my bed and my book goes flying from my lap and crashes to the floor. I sprint down the hall, and peek my head around the corner of the kitchen door, where I sheepishly venture a cautious, “Yeah?”
My mom is sitting at the table. Behind her stands the family Cookie Tree, which would soon become the stuff of family legend. It is an enormous artificial tree with white branches. Upon each branch hangs a virtual smorgasbord of seasonal confectionary delights. There are gingerbread men with raisin buttons and cinnamon-candied eyes, and there are sugar cookies in all shapes and sizes, each of them hand-decorated with colored frosting and candy sprinkles. Around its base sits a collection of cookie jars filled with gingersnaps, russian tea cakes, snickerdoodles, and more. It is a wonderful and glorious tree, and as the font from which all sugary goodness flows at Christmastime, it is a sacred object of hallowed reverence to an almost-eight-year-old boy.
My mom motions to my sister and I to have a seat. “Look,” she says. “You two really need to stop fighting. Please?” and I can hear the desperation in her voice. “It’s almost Christmas, and you two are at each other’s throats. It’s almost time for Dad to come home from work, and I still have to put away these groceries and cook dinner, and I’m just tired of you two fighting all the time.”
I exchange guilty glances with my sister, who is particularly vulnerable to my mother’s keen and apparently superhuman ability to navigate the treacherous roads of the Guilt Trip Highway. We both start to speak at once, but are cut off when my mother reaches into one of the grocery bags.
“I was going to give these to you at Christmas,” she says as she pulls out two boxes and places them on the table, “but if you promise to just go to your rooms and behave – quietly – you can have them now.”
She hands one box to my sister, the other to me, and we open them. Inside of each box is a single, blown-glass Christmas tree ornament. Mine has a little soldier in the middle, and my sister’s has a doll or a fairy or something. I’m not interested in what she got. Instead, I run into the living room to hang it on the green, non-artificial Christmas tree proper.
Unfortunately, my sister does the same thing. At the same time. An unfortunate collision results, and I drop my ornament. It is a fragile thing, it turns out, and the blown-glass was very, very thin. Microscopically thin. Terminally thin.
The natural state of siblings.
My mother hears the crash, and all Hell breaks lose. Every mother has a breaking point beyond which their children should never venture, for that way lies a dark and menacing journey into the heart of darkness – and it is in just such a place that my sister and I have suddenly found ourselves.
At first, we can make out the shouts coming from the kitchen. There are angry words like, “What?!” and “I told you two” and “COME HERE, RIGHT NOW! BOTH OF YOU!” (These capital letters are clearly CAPITAL letters, and both my sister and I instantly become aware of our own mortality.) The shouts quickly devolve into some sort of bizarre proto-language of clicks, grunts, and furious yalps, and while we can’t understand the words she’s yelling, we know what they mean.
We sheepishly walk into the kitchen, carrying our ornaments. My sister’s is fine. Mine, however, is broken. My mother sees it and that terrible switch in her brain flips, freeing the fearsome beast within. “What did you do?!” she shouts in a mixed tone of hate and sorrow. “I bought that for you special!”
This is going well beyond a standard sojourn on the Guilt Trip express and is quickly slipping into an alarming journey into uncharted and frenzied territory, where the natives are not only restless, but who are cannibals and will suck out your spleen through nose while you’re still alive. My mothers eyes begin to glaze over, and some sort of primeval beast takes over her body. We are petrified with fear.
Tonight on Fox –
When mothers attack!
She lunges towards us, and we leap out of the way. Still possessing enough self-restraint to not actually want to rip our limbs from their sockets and beat us to death with them quite yet, she instead spies some other unfortunate object into which she can pour her frustration and rage, like some sort of emotional spillway preventing a total collapse of the self-control dam.
The Cookie Tree never sees it coming. She launches into it with all of the savage fury of a hungry lioness on a sickly wildebeest, and soon my sister and I are dodging deadly white projectiles like little Ninja, as Mom violently rips each limb from the unsuspecting tree. Individually wrapped cookies soar through the air. Innocent gingerbread men meet their untimely end on the far side of the kitchen, smashing to pieces against a hard and uncaring wall. Sugar cookies fly into the ceiling, and plummet to the ground. The fragrant scent of cookie-death begins to fill the air, and we are terrified.
Soon, the entire room fills with the strange and gruesome smell of sugar and plastic and sweat. My mother is heaving huge breaths of enraged air as she sinks to her knees at the base of the disfigured Cookie Tree, now naked and ashamed of its limb-less and cookie-less plastic trunk. And Mom is just sitting there. Breathing. And crying.
She gently pulls one surviving limb from the tree and cradles it in her hand. A sad and broken cookie hangs pathetically from it, and Mom takes hold of it and sobs. She looks up at my sister and I, and in the most broken and woeful tone, she says, “I try, and I try, and I try – but there’s just no love in this house!”
Unsure of how to proceed in the face of a complete maternal breakdown that we caused, my sister grabs my hand as we both say, in unison, “We’re sorry.”
At this, Mom stops crying. She stops moving. She stops breathing. At this, our mother is clearly about to snap completely. She looks us square in the eyes and says, “You’re…sorry?” with an inflection so cold, we can see the icicles dripping from the question mark. “You’re sorry?!” she repeats, raising the cold volume of her voice with each syllable. “You’re SORRY?!”
She begins to stand up and move towards us. We are terrified, and in our terror we stupidly just repeat ourselves, chanting over and over like we’re invoking some mystical protective mantra. “We’re sorry! We’re sorry! We’re sorry!”
As I see my mother’s hand reach out to us, I close my eyes and wait for my short life to pass before them. I’m just getting past the potty-training section of my early years, when I hear the most glorious and heavenly sound imaginable. The front door opens. Dad’s home!
I don’t remember much after that, apart from the fact that I was happier to see that man come wandering in that evening than I had ever been before. That particular Christmas, money was beyond tight, and the stress levels of my parents was enormous. Regardless of our financial situation, they always insisted upon making our Christmas mornings the stuff of childhood folklore, with presents piled up around the tree like little Himalayas, and it had to be hard for them.
I don’t know how far in the hole they went every year, or how much they had to save to give us memorable Christmases, where all of our wildest Toy ‘R Us fueled dreams were realized, but they did it – year after year. Back in ’83, the year of the infamous Cookie Tree incident, was the year I got my first computer. Looking back, I don’t know how they managed to afford it, but it was the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world. It was an Apple ][ compatible called a Franklin Ace 1000, and I spazzed out over it in ways too freakish and bizarre to recount here. Suffice to say, I was thrilled. My sister got something equally amazing (in her mind, anyway), but I have no memory of what it was. The only thing I saw that Christmas was the beige monstrosity that was my new computer, and I was a deliriously happy geek.
Now son, let me tell you where the word “hysteria” comes from…
The moral to this story is that fathers exist to protect their children from themselves. At first glance, you might consider this a cautionary tale about the psychotic breakdown of maternal figures, but you’d be wrong. Children are horrible, vicious little beasts who will gnaw away at the bones of their mothers, who will patiently take the punishment over and over again. Always foolish, children never tire of testing their boundaries, and taking out all of their childhood aggressions and disappointments on their mothers is typical behavior. Mothers know this (or they quickly learn), and they are somehow capable of accepting it with grace and dignity and understanding…up to a point.
My mother is a very sweet and loving, peaceful sort of woman – and I’ve no idea today how in the world I could have ever provoked her to such tree-murdering anger, but I’m sure it was all my fault. (Actually, it was probably all my sister’s fault, really. She undoubtedly tripped me or something as she ran to put her ornament on the tree first, and I’ve just blocked out the painful memory of her hideous treachery.) You see, there will come a time in every child’s life where the kid just goes too far. Mothers, while amazingly resilient and resistant to their child’s endless assaults upon their sanity, are not without their limits. At some point or another, a child will find out what just that limit is, and that’s why it’s a good idea to have a father around.
Fathers are the great peacekeepers and saviors of their children’s well-being and their wife’s sanity. They come in after the fact and smooth out the emotions of all parties. Having not been directly involved in any of the insanity themselves provides the distance needed to look at the situation from the outside and figure out the best way to calm everyone down. (Of course, all of this is entirely dependent upon the fact that the father is not the one continually assaulted by their children’s ever-escalating assaults upon their sanity.)
If the tables were turned and the fathers were the ones facing down the double barrel shotgun of a child’s indomitable spirit of rebellion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundered-and-sixty-five merciless days out of the year – well, let’s just say that mothers don’t get nearly enough credit. Instead, we give them one lousy day of appreciation – and we spend it giving them gifts they neither need nor want, to which they seem eternally grateful. I once gave my mother a coconut monkey with a hollowed-out belly, wearing an enormous straw hat – and she actually thanked me for it!
We tell the story of the Cookie Tree every year at Christmas, as we decorate the tree and eventually come across the infamous ornament. It’s quite a sad little thing to look at now, having been hastily repaired that night by my father, with super glue and luck. The best part of the whole Christmas experience is watching my mother as we retell the story, year after year. She hates it – but in that special, endearing way that a mother has for tolerating embarrassing stories. She laughs a little, she denies a little, and then invites us all for cookies.
Ah, Mom – thanks for not turning out quite as crazy as I tried to make you over the years!
Ah, Mom – thanks for not turning out quite as crazy as I tried to make you over the years!
As some weird form of sadomasochistic exercise, I sometimes like to debate the various political and financial systems of the world with friends and family. I’m not sure why I do this, beyond the simple need for keeping mentally fit with cognitive gymnastics routines, but I’ve done it for years. For better or worse, I seem to cling to the preposterous notion that there is a better way to do things. There’s always a better way.
Late Saturday night, Brittany and I were lounging around the living room of our home and occupying ourselves with our own little leisure activities. She was reading, and I – because I am a man-child – was busy mashing the buttons of my Xbox controller, furiously pretending to be a polygonal super-powered mutant with adamantium claws and a notoriously intemperate disposition. Eventually, I got tired of forcing the tiny, digital version of Hugh Jackman to do my bidding, so I cut the system off. I went and grabbed a book, and did a little reading of my own. Of course, at some point, I suppose I got tired of that, too – because I eventually started moving my mouth and making words come out. Never a good sign.
Brittany, always the embodiment of Patience, put up with this sudden and uninvited intrusion upon her Me Time with the soft grace and gentle acquiescence of a singular, gentle sigh, as she put her book down and settled in for one of my infamous soapbox rants. This is an experience not altogether unfamiliar to her, as I tend to do this sort of thing with the absurd and unprovoked frequency of a sleepy cat suddenly waking up in a panic to realize that it simply must run (at top speed) to some other room right now. To my credit, the rant itself was uncharacteristically short, as I meant it more as a conversation starter than as something motivated by the usual fascination I have for listening to sound of my own voice.
I started out talking about the successes and failures of our American democracy, and moved on to discussing the same pros and cons of various -isms, such as: Communism, Socialism, Monarchism, and Kristian-Rules-The-Worldism. Brittany is an interesting sort of person to have these kinds of talks with, because she is overwhelmingly optimistic while also managing to be oppressively cynical, all at the same time. Personally, I’m an unfortunate idealist in the body of a hardline pragmatist – which translates into having the sad experience of believing in the best, while hating myself for being so naive. (Now that I think about it, this may go a long way towards explaining my strange affinity for duality, with duality being just a nicer word for describing my bizarre acceptance and embracement of certain acceptable levels of hypocrisy.)
Anyway, we talked back and forth about the merits of a democracy, and about how our representative democracy here in America is at direct odds with our hideous financial system, and so on. Eventually, however, the conversation took a somewhat expected detour into religion, which often happens whenever Brittany and I get involved in one of these talks. Brittany always takes the side of the personal religious experience while eschewing the oppressive nature of organized religion. I, of course, continue my lifelong quest to Change The World by repeating the same, exhausted phrases about personal empowerment through knowledge and education, and in thinking and believing in oneself, above all else.
How dare you anticipate my strategy?!
Once it was firmly established that I don’t really have a problem with religion itself – organized or otherwise – Brittany observed that what I seem to really disagree with is Faith…and she was right. I despise Faith. I have this natural aversion to simply believing in anything without first doing my own research and coming to my own conclusions. I can’t stand the idea of just accepting what anyone tells me, and I resent and loathe authority figures for precisely this reason. Of course, any long time readers of this blog know this all too well, so I’ll let it stand at that, and move on to spare you the repetition.
Sometimes I feel bad about always playing Devil’s Advocate, although applying the term to me is a little redundant, but I’m not really anti-religion at all. I do have a belief system, but I prefer keeping it to myself. Still, it’s hard to not jump into an interesting debate, especially when I almost always have the opposing view. Brittany makes it difficult, though, because at some point she will start making sense. I hate it when people do this!
As our conversation was winding down, Brittany began to summarize her thoughts by expressing the commonly held belief that, “I just don’t think you have anything to lose with religion. If I’m wrong, then I don’t stand to lose anything when I die – but if I’m right, I get into Heaven.” It’s hard to argue with this sentiment, at least when it’s coming from her. She believes in all of the good and positive things that come from Christianity, while actively distancing herself from the negatives. She’s not racist, she’s not judgmental or homophobic, and she doesn’t think religion has any business in government. She’s all for the personal relationship with God, and since following all of the “good stuff” while leaving the “bad stuff” behind makes her a pretty damn good person, there’s really not a lot left open for debate.
For example, Brittany is firmly against one of the basic tenants of Christianity that is drilled into the hearts and minds of True Believers from the time they’re old enough to toddler-waddle into Sunday School: the ugly idea that this world is only temporary. This is not the really real world, they believe; this is the sinful, ugly Earth that we’re born into with Original Sin, and from which we must transcend into Eternity, which lasts forever. This is all well and good, until you realize that, for people who truly believe this, then this world isn’t worth making any better, because we’re all just passing through on our way to somewhere else. Someplace better.
Since the real world – the eternal world – is beyond this realm, why should they sacrifice anything to make this temporary housing any better? For all they care, we can cut down the rainforests, poison the air and the seas, pollute our own bodies with chemical additives and poisonous pharmaceuticals, and none of it really matters. Like every generation before them, they believe that the End of Days is upon us, so why not use up the Earth? It’ll be gone soon, so it doesn’t matter! Nothing matters, because they believe that there is something better on the horizon – that, if we can just struggle through this life of gluttonous subsistence (oxymorons are fun!), we’ll be rewarded by the promised land of Heaven.
Come on, Adam…Think Different!
And, while these people are willing to take all of this on Faith, they’re not willing to do the same for the here and for the now. What I realized while talking with my fiancee, is that if only people of Faith would apply the same sort of “Well, I’ve got nothing to lose if I’m wrong” mentality to this Earthly realm in which all of us live, love, and die, then maybe things could get better. If you want to believe that you will eventually get into Heaven, and that being a good and loyal, church-going Christian will open the pearly gates for you in the end, then go for it! You’ve got nothing to lose if you’re wrong, and everything to gain if you’re right.
But what if…? What if you could apply that same way of thinking to where you are right now. What if, at the same time you’re hedging your bets with the afterlife, you’re also hedging them with the here-and-now life. Since you’re playing both sides anyway, why not go ahead and actually play both sides? If you want to believe in an afterlife, why not also plan for the possibility that there might not be one?
I bring up this queer little exercise in voluntary cognitive dissonance simply because this might very well be all there is to our existence, and I wish more people would start acting like it. There may be no glorious afterlife filled with angelic choruses and puffy clouds and harps. There may be no tearful reunions with loved ones long passed, and there may be no gold at the end of the religious rainbow. Of course, there very well might be – so go ahead and live your life as if there were. Just, to humor me, also live it as if there weren’t.
What if there was no great reward at the end of a tedious and miserable life of endless struggle and abject misery? What if there was no cruel and evil Satan to punish you for breaking God’s laws, even as he himself breaks them? What if there is no redemption for a life of sickening transgressions and repulsive infidelity, nor any consequence or punishment for the very same offenses? What if this is all there is?
If this is it – if there is nothing better on the other side of the bridge, and all the grass we’ll ever have will only be as green as we ourselves make it, then shouldn’t we start working on this world, and this reality? Don’t we have an obligation to leave the world a better place than we found it, so that our children and our grandchildren can benefit from our successes rather than inherit our failures?
When I look at Trey, and I see in his young and trusting eyes the unreserved and complete belief that I would never harm him, I can’t help but understand that to not make things better is to harm him. I should hope that every parent would feel this way, regardless of our varied religious beliefs. One day, I might reveal what it is that I believe, but right now I enjoy the ambiguity of not telling you. Still, whether I’m a Christian or a Jew, a Creationist or an Atheist, a hammer or a nail – I believe that people across every nation, race, and creed want to leave their children something better than they had. I have to believe that, and because I have to believe that, I have to make this a better world for my son, and for his children, and his children’s children…
All it takes is the same, simple logic that so many of you use to rationalize and explain your own personal religious Faith. If the atheists are wrong, and there is a grand reward or hideous punishment when this life is over, then you’ve got either great or terrible things to look forward to! Either way, they’re the dummies. If they’re right, though, – and there is nothing else after this life – then you’ve got nothing to lose by holding onto your beliefs, while also trying to make this sad and lonely blue planet the best little speck of cosmic dust in the whole damned universe.
While we all want there to be something more after our lives are over, this might very well be as good as it gets. This world might be the pre-show and the post-show all wrapped up in the simple, sprawling, and all-to-brief individual lifespans of each and every one of us. We are, all of us, alone together on this big ball of mud and rock and water – and it can be better. It should be better. We can all work together on this, I promise. Christians and Muslims and Taoists and Jews and Shintoists and Hindus and Atheists and the Professor and Mary Ann – together, we can make things better. All it takes is a little – gulp – Faith!
I gotta have Faith!
NOTE: I wrote this in 2009. It’s 2015 now, and Ted Cruz is running for President in 2016, which makes it relevant again. I guess I knew the Tea Party was coming, but I thought they’d call themselves Libertarians. Semantics can be a pain when predicting the future.
There is a more threatening and pressing concern than the swine flu that sits, meaningly poised to strike at the hearts and minds of Americans – and that’s the creeping menace of Neo-Conservative converts to Libertarianism. It’s starting small, but if you’ll allow me to put on my Amazing Technicolor Prediction Hat, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen in the coming months and years. Spoiler Alert!
I’ve long described myself as a Libertarian, whenever the subject has come up. However, it’s not a terribly accurate description of my political outlook. It’s just a label that much more closely fits me than “Republican” or “Democrat” or, for that matter, liberal or conservative. (And, so far, there isn’t a “Jeffersonian” party that I know of.) I’ve found, over the years when talking with either a Donkey or an Elephant, that if you posit an opposing point to their worldview, both will immediately label you as the enemy and call you whatever it is that they’re not. Democrats will call you a Republican, and conservatives will call you liberal. It’s not their fault, though. It’s all down to conditioning and the Pavlovian response that’s been driven into the heads of us Americans for decades.
Recently, with the Bush-era having ended with a bad aftertaste left on the metaphoric tongue of the nation (and world-at-large), the reign of the Neo-Conservative movement is drawing to a close. Finally, many so-called Conservatives are coming around to the understanding that their chosen party was hi-jacked by fiscally liberal opportunists, and that doesn’t sit too well with them. Throw in the general backlash from an administration that increased spending and the size and influence of government beyond all limits of national endurance, and you have a recipe for lots of rats frantically scurrying for a way off the sinking ship.
Enter Libertarianism. It’s a great party to affiliate oneself with, because it’s not entirely sure what it stands for, and therefore it can stand for anything. There are socially conservative, but fiscally liberal Libertarians. There are the loonies who look and sound like bad ’80s pop-culture depictions of pink-mohawk wearing, punk rocking Anarchists. And then, there are the increasing numbers of Neocon converts. Libertarianism is, for them, a way to express their discontent with the country they’ve built, rather than accept any responsibility for having been part of the problem that got us here. It’s a platform of change for people who don’t really want change, so much as they long for a return to the good old days, but who don’t yet realize that you can never go home again.
The “tea party” phenomenon from earlier this month is an excellent example of the mentality that will lead an increasing number of Conservatives to start labeling themselves as Libertarians – and it’s nothing to do with Constitutionalism or Liberty, and everything to do with the rich and their money. Or, rather, with the phantom monies of the potentially rich…
You see, Americans have been sold a bill of goods called The American Dream that spread through the culture like the Outbreak virus, only Dustin Hoffman never found the monkey and every one of us has been incurably infected. The American Dream has parasitically influenced and governed our collective behavior in much the same way that toxoplasmosis drives rats to walk up to cats, lie down at the mercy of their razor claws, and ask, “What’s for dinner?”
Toxoplasmosis – It’s what’s for dinner!
The American Dream is an ephemeral lie. It is balderdash. A sham. The great and terrible hoax. It is a flight of fancy that is both exhilarating and terrifying, and it is killing us all. The poisonous dream that you will someday be rich is a notion as laughable as it is infuriating, and it’s something that I really wish all of you would just get the Hell over, already. The largest pool of voters comes from America’s middle and lower classes which, unfortunately, have been duped by this whole concept of potential wealth. The fact is, you will probably never be rich – not really rich, anyway. You may do very well for yourself and your family. Heck, you may even make it to upper middle class, and life will be great for you. However, the fact that the most heavily taxed Americans are also the richest is something that terrifies you, because you cling to the impotent notion that you will one day be able to count yourself in their number. Some of you probably already do, but that’s something that’s even sadder and more depressing, and I don’t want to talk about it.So, rather than vote towards your best interests for policies and programs that would benefit you with direct tax-cuts and other incentives, you’ll vehemently oppose any action that might “fleece the rich” because you live your life under the constant and inescapable delusion that you’ll get there one day, and be rich yourself. You won’t!
The sad reality of the situation is that roughly, only the top 1% of Americans own 34% of the wealth in this country. Those are the rich people. One percent. ONE! Do you really think you’re ever going to leave 99% of the country eating your dust as you climb the ladder of fortune and get to the top rung? Do you? Seriously? At most, the best you can probably ever hope to achieve is reaching the top 19%, which controls around 50% of the wealth. This would be your upper, upper middle-class: the ones with impressive stock portfolios and respectable bank statements and investments – which amounts to a lot of Americans – but not too many. This nineteen percent reflects the ultimate realization of The American Dream for most people who allow at least a hint of realism to enter into their fantasies. Still, when you’re in the top 20%, whether it be the top 1 or bottom 19, you can afford to be taxed. Your bank statements may suffer a bit, but you’ll still live in a nice, big house and drive a nice, big car and spend lots of nice, big money. Your statement may suffer a bit, but you won’t have to worry about pesky, nuisance problems like food and clothing and shelter. Those are the sorts of worries that happen to other people.
Those other people are the rest of America – where most of you are, and where most of you will stay for your entire lives. It is made up of 80% of the population, all scrounging and competing for the woeful scraps that the other 20% have left behind. You will be left to try and carve out a place for yourself in this world as you compete with 4/5ths of the total population of the country for 15% of the remaining wealth. To put it another way, if that 15% were divided equally amongst 80% of the population, that would give each and every one of you about .2% of what the rich leave you. Of course, nothing is divided equally, so you might do better, or you might do worse – and that’s the true American Dream, my friends: if you study and work hard, you have a chance at making your life just a little less shitty than the other guy’s. Isn’t it a beautiful thing?
You’re the part that doesn’t look like Pac-man. You know, the bit he’s about to eat…
So where does this put me on the political spectrum? Am I really a Libertarian, or do I just play one on tv? Like I said, I would be a Jeffersonian, if such a party existed. The truth is, I’m a strong believer in personal liberty and personal responsibility, and I think the government has little right to meddle in the affairs of its citizens. (I’m also firmly against bailouts and corporations being granted the rights of an individual, but – once again – that’s a topic for later discussion.) Government should exist as a function of the people, not the other way around. However, there are some things that government just does better than private industry, so I don’t follow the Ayn Rand school of extremist thought that free market capitalism and global privatization are the keys to a Utopia. No, if the recent Neocon push towards privatization is any indication, then privatizing certain things is a very, very bad idea.
Governments should build and supply the things of this world that are not commodities to be traded. Business exists to make money – and, in the current economical model of fractional reserve banking, the stability of any enterprise (including our nation, but that’s a whole other discussion) is dependent upon sustained growth. It’s a function of this exponential treadmill we’re on that demands a constant increase in profits, just to break even. If we don’t keep moving – if we don’t constantly buy and sell and spend and run the debt race – we’ll fall off, and that will be the end of the American story. So, strap on your sneakers and start running. Just remember: those bastards set the treadmill to move a little faster every damned year, so by the time your kids are on it, the thing will be set to Ludicrous Speed and their little legs may explode.
Take the privatization of the prison system as an example. Privatizing it suddenly creates a commodity of the convicted felon and, being as the prison system is now a private enterprise, there must be continued and sustained growth to keep it solvent. The only way to ensure this growth is to feed a constant supply of new prisoners into the system, which translates into increased arrests, increased trials, and increased convictions. As such, the scheme of privatizing eventually comes back to bite the Neoconservative/Libertarian on the ass, because in order to feed the beast created by a private prison system, we have to always be creating new criminals – and the cheapest, easiest way to do that is with new laws that will inevitably limit the very personal liberties and freedoms that Libertarians hold so dear. When the very prison system that was privatized on the notion of free market capitalism and the superior function of the individual liberty of private enterprise starts to encroach on personal liberties and freedoms, there’s a dissonance there that can’t be resolved, and an equation that can’t be balanced on either side.
Other places where government belongs is in schools, city planning and management, utilities, and in any other capacity or function that endeavors to provide a service, rather than a commodity for profit. Free market capitalism works in a great many areas, and the competition it creates is generally good for everyone. (Until it isn’t, and the whole beast comes around to choke on its own behemoth tail – but, again, that’s a whole other discussion.) However, to believe that privatization is the magic pill for what ails us is a concept whose time has come and gone, hopefully forever.
Unfortunately, a lot of damage was left in the wake of the Neocon era, and it’s left to us to clean it up. It falls to us to set things right, and steer this Titanic of a nation away from the iceberg we’ve been barreling into for the past several decades. And by us, I mean you. And by you, I mean the majority of Americans. And, by majority of Americans, I mean the poorest, most trampled on 80% of the population. And you need to do it with only 15% of the country’s wealth. And, you need to do it all by yourselves – because the rich aren’t going to help you. Well, not unless somebody makes them, anyway. You know, like with taxes.
Community Chest: Bailout! Collect 85 Billion Dollars!
We’re sorry, but we interrupt your regularly scheduled Tarradiddling to bring you the following, important message. We will resume our regular broadcast tomorrow. Pay attention!
Having grown tired of scaring the bejeebus out of people with the mad cow disease from Europe, the media eventually moved on to the bird flu from China, which was supposed to wipe out all of humanity in the most bitter and horrific biblical plague since Egyptian pestilence and incurable boils, but which really only amounted to people poking fun at a bunch of terrified Asians wearing silly little doctor’s masks. Unfortunately for the talking heads of the world, however, the bird flu didn’t quite live up to expectations, and the world did not, in fact, come to an end. Sure, a lot of people have died from the bird flu, and a lot of people are still dying from it, but that’s all old news now. The sensation of the novelty has grown cold, and so we have come full circle from hoof to wing, and back to hoof again. Cloven, to be precise.
The terrible swine flu pandemic is upon us, and its great and fearful terror is sweeping through the four corners of the Earth, infecting millions and causing untold cases of death and mayhem, as well as complete and intractable hysteria. The simple truth is that you’re probably not going to catch swine flu. In fact, chances are that nobody you know is going to come down with it, either. Why? Because it’s just not that damned dangerous. Well, not yet, anyway.
Han Solo didn’t need to know the odds, because Han Solo was awesome.
Take it from a guy who lives in Southeast Texas, not too far from Houston. I’m sitting right next door to one of the significant “outbreak sites” – and I’m not concerned at all. Why not? Because I understand probability and odds, and crazy things like Science and statistics and basic common sense. If I don’t want to catch the swine flu, I can do wild and wacky things like wash my hands, and avoid swapping bodily fluids with sick people. What I don’t need to do is lock myself in my house, duct tape the windows, and gaze panic-stricken at the television while feverishly broadcasting paranoid Tweets to the world and waiting for the sky to fall.
Listen. So far, the grand, global total of worldwide infections is a whopping and astonishing two-hundred and sixty-eight confirmed cases. You heard me right: 268. To put it in perspective, the world’s population hovers somewhere around 6.7 BILLION. Or, to put it another way, while 268 unfortunate people have contracted swine flu (of which, sadly, 26 are known to have died from it, with another 154 suspected), a good 6,706,992,884 other people are just fine. They’re downright peachy!
I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until the day I get swine flu, gasp my last “Oink!” and die, but the one and only thing I want from people in this life, is for each and every every one of you to stop letting other people decide your lives for you. Do your own research, assess your own risks, and then decide what’s worth worrying about, and what isn’t. The media loves a good scare. It sells newspapers and drives up television ratings and share percentages. It escalates CPM and CPP (Cost-Per-Minute / Cost-Per-Point), bringing in the lucrative advertising dollars for products that you’ll run out and buy to protect yourself. Fear is a priceless commodity, and business is booming.
So what can you do to fight the onslaught of pressure to just give in to the manure the fear-peddlers are trying to sell you? Like most answers in life, it’s deceptively simple: stop buying it. Stop letting them influence you, and instead choose to influence yourself by making informed decisions based on your own understanding of your own research.
I think I speak for everyone here when I say, “Huh?”
If that’s simply too hard, then go ahead and let me tell you what to think, just this once. Being terrified of contracting the swine flu is stupid. There’s really no other way to describe it, so I’ll say it again, only this time I hope you feel the capital letters. IT’S STUPID!
If you don’t consider yourself a stupid person, and if you don’t make a habit out of going around, doing stupid things, then please pay very close attention to what I’m about to tell you. If you think you’re in serious danger of becoming infected with the swine flu, then you are – without question or exception – behaving like a stupid person. Please, I love all of you, (mostly), and I don’t want to go around insulting everyone on this nice, blue planet – so I beg you, step back and think about things for a minute, then decide if you really want to go on living in fear, running away from Mexicans and going home to scrub yourself in the shower like a rape victim, while you cry like lost children. It’s not worth it!
I wanna hold your ha-aa-aaand!
Let me hit you with the cold, hard truth. You’re much more likely to star in your own personal True-Life episode of CSI than catch swine flu, as your chances of being murdered this year are considerably more likely than ever being infected with this dreaded virus. Let’s not limit ourselves to murder, though. You’re also far more likely to drown, or to die in an airplane crash or an automobile accident, too. In fact – and I hope this one drives the point home for you, and makes it stick – you’re much, much, much more likely to be killed by a DEADLY ASTEROID than you are by the damnable swine freakin’ flu!
I’ll include a quick rundown of the odds at the end of today’s essay, but I just wanted to try and rub some smelling salts under the collective noses of America, because I find your willingness to eagerly accept every bit of sensationalized and exploitive piece of tabloid trash “journalism” extremely annoying. We’re supposed to be smarter than that. You are supposed to be smarter than that. Start acting like it, dammit!
Lest you think that I place all the blame at the feet of the media, you should be aware that the Internet probably isn’t helping you, either. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and just about any message forum is filled with misinformation and panic, and would be best avoided altogether. When unverified information is spastically vomited onto the World Wide Web by the scared and the ignorant, a self-replicating virus of its own emerges to spread fear and ignorance to other forums, other tweets, and other profile pages. Unconfirmed reports transform into verified facts, rumor becomes truth, and hysterics pass as the norm.
Do yourself a favor, and just opt out of participation in these sorts of goings on. Try and inform yourself with sources of vetted information, rather than rampant speculation. For example, terrorists did not invade “Popular Vacation Destination X” and expose thousands of hapless tourists to swine flu, nor can you possibly become infected by eating pork. Stop listening to the media. Stop listening to each other. Stop listening to me! Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself!
Of course, I’m not even going to go into the obvious and unfortunate repercussions this pandemic is going to have for Hispanics. Already, the cries of closing our borders and erecting a Great Wall Of Stupid are being sounded across the nation with increasing volume and vitriol. I’ll never understand this compulsion to blame so much bad on any one race, but it continues to happen, nonetheless.
I look forward to the day when the collective people of the world will wake up, realize that Mexicans gave all of us the absolute goods of Tequila and Quesadillas, and understand that we ought to just be grateful. We should tip our hats, say thank you, and go about our day. (Hopefully, it will be on or around this same day, when the collective people of the world also understand that all Hispanics are not Mexican. Ah, what a dreamer am I!)
That’s All, Folks!
On the advice of a friend, I watched “Fireproof” a second time. This time around, I enabled the commentary track and sat back in my big, comfy chair for one hundred and twenty-two minutes of insight into Mike Seaver’s marital wisdom. I came away from it with my perspective slightly changed, and slightly strengthened at the same time. Go figure.
The writers do their best to explain that the focus of the movie was on the idea that one partner in a relationship can change its outcome, if only they give themselves to God and commit to repairing whatever it is that has gone wrong. Seeing as the movie is evangelical in nature, I could almost overlook the misogyny as the by-product of clunky storytelling to achieve the ultimate end of bringing the Lord’s message to the movie’s audience. However, since the overt goal of the film is to guide people who find themselves in a strained marriage, the one-sided nature of the narrative sticks out a little too much to be coincidental.
But you know, if that’s the message that the Sherwood Baptist Church wanted to get out, then more power to them. If it’s their firm belief that the man is the “decider” in a relationship, then I think they’ve done an excellent job in communicating that through “Fireproof”. And, since most of its audience is made up of people with the same worldview, then it’s exactly what they want to see, which goes a long way towards explaining its great success. I think the Kendrick brothers and the volunteers of Sherwood Baptist should be congratulated for not only having had the commitment and the drive to shoot a feature film, (“Fireproof” is actually their third feature), but to have created one that has not only been as commercially successful as “Fireproof” has been, but which has touched as many lives as I suspect this film has.
As someone who has been through a disintegrating marriage, however, I found that viewing “Fireproof” left me with some conflicting emotions. Without knowing of the film’s “Love Dare,” I played the role of Kirk Cameron in my own little story of matrimonial woes as I set about trying to save my own marriage. However, my wife never came around to appreciating my efforts, and instead reacted to them with resentment and anger, because by doing these things, I was making her feel guilty. (Of course, guilt is a hard emotion to shake when you are, in fact, guilty.) Being unable to reconcile with a partner who had no interest in keeping her legs closed for outside business, I find the film’s ultimate message for someone like me to be rather negative and off-putting.
You see, the one thing I didn’t do that Kirk Cameron’s Caleb Holt does in “Fireproof” is surrender myself to God and patiently wait for the wife to come around. The film makes it abundantly clear, especially after listening to the commentary, that this act of Faith was what really saved Caleb and Catherine’s marriage, and the changes in Caleb’s character were a result of his conversion. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it. I can’t, because there is an inescapable cognitive dissonance that comes with this belief that I find detestable.
If God has a plan for each of us, and if everything happens for a reason – then personal accountability is removed from the equations of our lives, and the adulterous wife or husband can just whisper this little cliche into their own ears to help justify the miserable states their betrayal-filled lives eventually take them to, and – somehow – they can still feel like they’re good people. However, since the Church also makes it clear that we have free will, and therefore are in control of our own actions, then they’d have to realize, at least on some level, that they’re only fooling themselves. (Unfortunately, the sort of person I’m talking about excels at fooling not only themselves, but everyone around them.) Anyway, I have never been able to resolve the paradox that results from opposite answers to the same questions. Either we’re all part of God’s plan, and we’re just acting out our tiny parts in His cosmic game of The Sims, or we make our own way in the world, and live or die by our own actions. Obviously, I’ve never been very good with Faith.
Take prayer, for example. I find the whole concept bewildering, because if you subscribe to the beliefs of the Church, then you should realize that prayer is a futile, selfish effort. Because you must believe that God is omnipotent and omnipresent, then you have to accept that He is unchanging, because He exists in all places at all times as the same entity. Since He is also all-knowing, then not only does He exist at every point in the timeline of the universe, but He is aware of every action within it. Why then, do people believe that prayer will make a difference?
At least He doesn’t trap us inside bathrooms with no exits or toilets!
If you are suddenly diagnosed with cancer and begin praying to God to cure you, what is the expected outcome? Either you’re saying that God is unaware of your affliction and that, through prayer, you are bringing it to His attention so that he can deliver His miracle, or you’re saying that God is fully cognizant of what’s going on, and that your cries for help are an attempt to change His mind. Either way, you’re openly contradicting your own belief system that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and has a Divine Plan. Prayer can be, at best, a personal comfort as a means to feel closer to Him, but taken as anything more powerful than that is assuming the exact sort of ego for personal empowerment that so many of the clergy rail against.
Getting back to “Fireproof,” let’s assume for the moment that I decided that I’d made a Huge Mistake by getting a divorce, and that I wanted to be born again, or saved, or whatever, so that I could try and set things right. Since not surrendering to God back when I was trying to save my marriage is what the film is telling me led to my eventual failure, then accepting the movie’s message now is, in a way, damning myself within its very belief system. By getting a divorce, I abandoned the covenant I made with both the Lord and my wife, so if I were to surrender myself to His will and join the evangelical movement, I’d either have to try and remarry my ex-wife, or face the eternal consequence of having spat in the face of Baby Jesus.
I’m sorry, but while I have no desire to expectorate into ocular cavity of any deity, getting back together with my ex is just not going to happen. How would God look upon me abandoning Brittany and Trey, just so that I could avoid His wrath? Wouldn’t such a selfish act negate the so-called positive act of restoring my marriage? Which is the lesser of the two evils? None of it makes any sense, especially since I’ve no desire to ever even see my ex again, let alone speak to her with loving words of appreciation and commitment.
So “Fireproof” tells me that, since I was the husband, it was ultimately my responsibility to preserve my marriage by giving myself to God and having the divine patience to wait for a miracle while my wife was moving from the beds and bank accounts of one “soulmate” to the next, I can’t help but walk away from the film with strong feelings of animosity towards it, even as I identified with its characters and shared interest in at least part of its message.
For such a sensitive and multi-layered issue as marriage and divorce, “Fireproof” does a strong disservice to anyone who’s been through it and failed, simply because they made the mistake of marrying someone who betrayed their love and trust. The film suggests that, by not surrendering to God’s will, I betrayed Him in the same way, and that my divorce was inevitable due to the heretical notions of personal responsibility to which I so passionately cling. I know that I did everything possible to save my marriage, and I’m still paying for my efforts to this very day. I also know that I don’t regret finally kicking my ex out of my life, because the whole painful, gut-wrenching experience proved to be nothing more than a fictional prelude to the wonderful reality I have now with Brittany, whom I choose to call my first and only bride. (Yes, I was technically married before, but since I don’t consider a woman who pledged fictitious vows of ever having been my wife, the woman I married never actually existed – and, under Texas law, you can’t wed imaginary friends.)
And this is my final point, and the last bit of dissonance I’ll throw at you before signing off for today. If divorce is a bad and evil thing, but everything happens for a reason, then how can every divorce be negative? I probably would have lived my life in the shallow contentment of what I had with my ex, had she not revealed herself for what she really was. I would never have known how much better things are when you’re with someone who’s actually right for you, and who is worth pouring your love, energy, and devotion into.
I didn’t choose to look for greener pastures while I was married, and I certainly didn’t wait until I had a firm grip on another branch before I let go of the one I was holding – that’s what my alleged “partner” did, and if she’s damned for doing so, then that’s her problem. And if I’m damned for not having had the patience to save her wretched soul from drowning in its own filth, then bury me in an asbestos suit and pack a pitchfork in my casket when it’s my time to go, because I’ll be holding onto this little piece of Heaven I’ve found with Brittany, and I’ll be smiling the whole way down.
I spent the weekend locked in a self-imposed quarantine along with fellow sickos Brittany and Trey. The funny part is, I’m fairly certain that I would not have contracted this dreaded plague had it not been for The Boy. Normally, I avoid the Infected like they were the shuffling, shambling hordes of soulless undead inching towards me in a unholy hunger for my brains. However, the cuteness that is Trey rendered my usual defenses moot, and I found myself not only willingly – but eagerly – returning his embraces and ceaseless demands for the snot and slobber kisses of The Sick Child.
So, being infirmed in a house of disease left us a lot of time to just sit around and do family things. For example, we played indoors catch with a soft neon green baseball that Trey would catch in his tiny little velco-lined glove before launching it in the vague direction of either Brittany or myself in that special, chaotic type of over-handed and pistol-cocked version of a whole-arm fulcrum that little kids everywhere consider the ultimate in pitching form. Of course, the ball rarely flies in the intended direction, so attempting to catch it is an education in the helter-skelter nature of an infinite probability matrix coupled with arcane inter-dimensional physics and pure, dumb luck.
Apart from little games like that, our patience was tested by Trey’s inability to properly sequence time and causality in such a way that would inform him of the need to tell us that he has to use the bathroom before he makes a deposit into his diaper or pull-up, rather than after. He’s getting better with this, and the whole potty-training concept is not lost on him. He just doesn’t yet understand the basic if-then logic of the whole affair. For instance, what we want him to understand is that: if he has to pee, then he tells us and we take him to the toilet. However, what his comprehension of such things seems to involve is: if I have to poop, I poop – then, I extract it from my diaper and carry it into the living room to present to everyone as a rare and precious excremental prize of post-digestive victory!
What’s really bizarre is that, no matter how many times he does this, and regardless of how foul and revolting his latest turd trophy may be, it’s hilarious. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s just something about seeing this little wide-eyed guy come walking in, triumphantly holding aloft his latest bowel movement and beaming with the innocent pride of a (perceived) job well done, that rings a special chord of hideous abhorrence combined with incorrigible delight to produce a harmonious tone of absolute hilarity.
Seriously, it’s impossible to get angry at someone who takes such unabashed jubilance in covering himself in his own feces, even when you’re the one that has to clean it up. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect that science will one day prove that children excrete some sort of empathy-inducing pheromone targeted at adults that keeps them out of trouble – at least as long as they’re small enough to be cute. It must wear off with age though, because there’s nothing at all cute about an adult who does these sorts of things, as people tend to shy away from crazy people who throw their poo.
When Trey was sleeping or otherwise occupied, Brittany and I wallowed in the self-despair of daytime television and movies. Eventually, we got around to watching the Kirk Cameron opus, “Fireproof”. I hated it immediately.
Of course, that was before I watched it. My initial knee-jerk response was to loathe it without remorse, but Brittany wanted to see it and I admit that I was a little curious as to what all the fuss was about. If you’re not aware of this movie, then you probably don’t live in the south or the midwest, and the term “Bible Belt” provokes in you images of Kevin Bacon gymnastically dancing through abandoned factories and pissing off John Lithgow, rather than thoughts of home. However, seeing as I live in Texas, the publicity on this movie is inescapable. Even now, well after its release, hype for the film still finds its way into that daily lives of those of us who live in America’s heartland. (Or, as is the case with southeast Texas – the armpit.)
Fireproof – The Movie
“Fireproof” was the highest grossing independent film of 2008, and is a Christian-centered movie produced on a $500,000 budget, starring Kirk Cameron and volunteer thespians from the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. It is very heavy-handed in its message, entirely – and perhaps unknowingly – forgetting the role that the simple concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos play in persuasive storytelling. It’s the very example of “preaching to the choir” as it’s doubtful that its ham-fisted approach to the subject matter will convert anyone who wasn’t already a subscriber to the faith. Still, it really wasn’t that bad.
It accomplished what it set out to do, and will doubtlessly be a reaffirmation of the worldviews of many members of its audience. Kirk Cameron’s performance is solid and convincing, and while the acting from the supporting cast is less than stellar, it’s serviceable and gets the job done. I don’t want to be one of those guys who sits on the sidelines and throws jabs at the hard work that’s been put into a film by a lot of well-intentioned, passionate people. I think the movie works for what it is, and is indicative of what could be the early days of a rising trend in cinema: namely, the increased viability of niche market films produced for small budgets for large gains.
Of course, I did have a problem with the movie. In fact, the main point that I found contentious is probably something that hasn’t been widely discussed by those who’ve felt the need to talk about the film. There seems to be a strong undertone of misogyny in “Fireproof” that I suspect goes unnoticed by most of its supporters. The basic plot of the movie involves Kirk Cameron’s character, Caleb Holt, following the forty-day program of something called The Love Dare, in order to save his marriage. Throughout the course of his journey, he naturally comes to God and, through Him, Caleb’s efforts are finally rewarded when his wife Catherine, played by Erin Bethea, decides to give him a second chance. The problem I have with the movie is that it paints the wife as a vacuous shell who is entirely emotionally dependent on the whims of the men in her life.
The film suggests that the disharmonious state of the couple’s marriage is the fault of the husband and, as such, it is ultimately his responsibility to repair it. While “Fireproof” doesn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of what led a happy marriage to such dire straights, it regularly shows that the husband is the one ultimately responsible for its success or its failure.
“I love you THIS much!”
Indeed, even when Caleb is well on his way through The Love Dare, Catherine takes little notice of his efforts, as she is being distracted by the attentions of Dr. Gavin Keller, played by Perry Revell. It is not until Caleb confronts Dr. Keller in a brief, “Stay away from my girl,” monologue that causes the good doctor to halt his pursuit of Catherine, which finally allows her to begin taking notice of Caleb’s sincere efforts to address the problems of their failing marriage. It would appear that, as long as she was receiving the advances of another man, she was unable to make her any of her own decisions. Even as she witnesses the positive changes in her spouse’s behavior, she dismisses them out of hand and openly resents them – so long as another man is showing interest. Her girlfriends aren’t much help, either. In fact, the movie makes it clear that women getting together to discuss their problems can only make things worse. Each time Catherine’s friends advise her, their words of wisdom are completely contrary to the reality that the film is trying to present, and thus it is implied that allowing women to congregate together outside of male supervision is a practice best avoided altogether.
Of course, the film’s main goal is to show the necessity for God in one’s life, and the misogyny may entirely be accidental. After all, it’s not until Caleb fully accepts God’s control that he finds his wife slowly start coming around. It may have just worked out in the narrative order that this sudden call to Faith sparked Caleb to confront the other man, which in turn led to his backing down and the wife’s eventual appreciation of her husband’s efforts. Still, the timing seems suspicious, and whether the filmmakers intended for the audience to come to the conclusion that it was either God’s will or Caleb’s will, the meaning is clear that it was never the woman’s will.
A gaggle of women cloistered around a table and hugging.
No good can come from this.
To be fair, there is a slight twist at the end of the movie that tries to counter the misogyny. I won’t spoil it here by spelling it out, but it seemed a very half-hearted and lazy way to get around what I feel is the most damaging message of a film that is intended to be helpful to people. Unfortunately, I don’t think that many fans of the movie will catch the misogynistic bits, simply because they are a way of life for many people.
While it’s not often stated outright in evangelical belief systems (except when it is), there seems to be a general acceptance of the idea that a woman’s place is fundamentally second to her husband’s. It appears as if there is an understanding that, once married, a woman is no longer in direct control of her life, and that everything – responsibility for every failure and credit for every success – rests ultimately upon her husband’s shoulders, and his alone. I can’t help but believe that this sort of mentality creates a culture of women who silently suffer through eventual feelings of resentment that they were never fully in control of their lives. Tragically, it is this very resentment that may well be behind countless divorces of the very church-going couples that “Fireproof” was designed to help.
Bound in real simulated leather, the secrets that God wants everyone to know can be bought for $22.99.
I would love to hear from someone involved in the making of “Fireproof” so that we could address this concern. If you’re out there and reading this, please feel free to contact me. It would be interesting to engage in a dialog that might lead to a greater understanding of the film’s intended meaning vs. its unintended message. Or, maybe the misogyny was purposefully superimposed on the narrative, and you would like to discuss why you feel this was a good angle to present to the audience. Either way, I’d like to hear from you. My e-mail address can be found here.
I wanted to talk about Easter today, but last Thursday I swore to explain why I claimed that the Internet is making you stupid. Since I played hooky last Friday rather than provide my explanation as promised, I should probably postpone my discussions of that special time of year known as Easter, when giant rabbits fiendishly hide hard-boiled chicken menstruations from innocent, naive children. Also, I need to be brief today, so we’ll see how it goes…
My basic premise is that the Internet is making you stupid in the same way that calculators made people Math stupid and Spell Check made people orthographically stupid. When the collected knowledge of the human race – including, but not limited to: Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and the Paris Hilton sex tape – lies at your fingertips, there’s really not a very strong need to ever actually know anything.
Worse still, the Internet leads people to come to false conclusions about themselves and they end up thinking they’re really actually quite clever, and could probably slap the Canadian out of Alex Trebek with their engorged intellects, if only they appeared on Jeopardy! just once. The only problem with this way of thinking lies in the inescapable fact that Alex would never let you whip out your iPhone to Google the Final Jeopardy answer.
Internet forums are a great example of how the World Wide Web can make anyone appear to be a knowledgeable genius, while never actually increasing their intellect in the slightest. People often get involved in endless “flame wars” on these message boards, where they try to out-smart the other guy and impress everyone else with their brilliance by citing obscure knowledge plucked directly from a web page somewhere in the dark, labyrinthine corners of the Internet. Forgetting for the moment that these sorts of people could never carry on this way in an actual debate without the aid of their cyber-crutch, it’s actually understood that everyone is trying to out-Google everyone else – and it is this simple understanding that represents just how far we’ve fallen in the brains department.
My Google-Fu is strong!
When command over a search engine is the prerequisite for appearing intelligent, then the next stop along the Information Superhighway can only be 1234 Bumfuck Lane in Stupidville, Indiana. (My apologies to Indianans. I’m just tired of picking on Texas.) It is actually not only acceptable, but desired behavior to admit to out-Googling your competition. After all, if your opponent had any brains at all, they would have used better keywords and found all of the really good web pages before you did, right?
The problem extends far beyond the silliness of Internet forums, however. It stretches into everyday life, and even into the education system. I was in a bookstore the other day, and I noticed that the Cliff’s Notes section seemed over-filled. Could it be that students have realized that there is no longer a need to even bother reading the Idiot’s Version of a book? Now, with a few simple searches, you can dig up not only detailed summaries of the book, but can find all sorts of critical analyses that you can reword and pass off as your own.
If I were a teacher, I’d ban the use of the Internet as a citable source. It wouldn’t stop the rampant destruction of knowledge, but it might slow it down a little. I would demand sources be from really real books from the really real library, and I’d scour the Internet for the answers to the questions I’d ask, and make sure I come up with different ones. I would want to make things as difficult as I could for my students, just so that they would have to do what used to be standard: they’d read the damned book!
The intelligence-shrinking capacity of the Internet isn’t limited to simple research, though. No, it’s also killing the English language. The transient nature of electronic communication is breeding a grotesque and obnoxious new species of human, where the simple act of typing “Oh my god” is replaced by OMG! and for whom the ideas of grammar and punctuation are a macabre throwback to the dark olden days, when cruel and torturous souls freakishly labored over peculiar notions like subject-verb agreement and questioned the mental stability of anyone psychotic enough to end a sentence with more than one exclamation mark.
Thanks to the lightning-fast and always-on communication tools of e-mail, text messaging, and electronic chat, people don’t seem to give two shits about how they’re saying things, or even pay much attention to what they’re babbling on about. Text messaging is the most popular form of communication for kids today. They don’t spend hours on the phone anymore, incessantly chittering the inconsequential conversational detritus of the teenaged mind to their girlfriends or boyfriends. No, instead they just text each other. Maybe it’s because actual vocal communication is too demanding, and they prefer the added time that text messaging provides, so that they can figure out how best to word what they want to say – or perhaps they just want a second to quickly Google a bitchin’ pick-up line to get in the girl’s (or guy’s) pants. Who knows? More importantly, who cares?
Kids have always been stupid. I was stupid when I was a kid, and my parents were stupid when they were kids. I don’t care that teenagers ramble on about nothing for hours on end, or that they speak in their own proto-language. I truly don’t. I just know that it isn’t going to end there. They’re not going to enter their twenties and suddenly be able to speak, think, and write intelligently through some arcane magical process. They will still be stupid, only they’ll be stupid college students who, with the willing participation of their professors, will graduate truly believing that they are now intelligent people. Trust me, I lived with one of these low-hanging fruits of humanity for seven (long) years, and even after she “mastered” the ridiculously facile two-year curriculum of her tech school’s business program, she still believed that there was no difference between the words sell and sale.
Then again, this was before the days of No Child Left Behind, and what can you really expect to do when you’re working with the raw material of a girl for whom no amount of rational intervention could ever convince that Kevin Bacon wasn’t the guy on the other side of the chat window, talking to her on America On-Line at three o’clock in the morning…
I put on my robe and wizard hat…
Some days, I don’t know why I keep at this blog, sometimes pecking out ideas in a futile attempt to communicate, and other times assaulting my innocent keyboard with vicious, violent strikes at its delicate plastic keys, struggling to open a vein and pour a little blood into the transient, meaningless electronic world of the Internet. Today is one of the sanguine days, and I find myself doubting my commitment to continue giving a damn about you bunch of monstrous bastards.
I tried to center myself earlier this evening, but my foolish attempts to counter the hideous gelatinous blob of depression as it slouches ever forward towards me in all of its terrible, mucilaginous glory were thwarted at every turn. For whatever reason, I was seeking escape and solace from the Depression Blob’s corpulent putrescence within the warm, comforting cloud of hitting a baseball. In addition, I wanted to take Brittany to the batting cages, as she confessed to the terrifying sin of never having hit a baseball – seriously. However, since the universe delights in visiting upon me unrestricted misery of the most detestable variety, the batting cages near my home are not yet open. That’s right, baseball season officially started yesterday – but the powerful microphallic gods of southeast Texas have decided that it’s Too Soon. God damn lazy bastards had boxes of balls just sitting there, waiting to be fed into the eager, gaping maws of the pitching machines, but I guess they’re waiting for Hell to freeze before finally getting around to it.
I then decided to drive by my childhood home, which is currently being reconstructed after having been unmade at the hands of Hurricane Ike. It’s destined to come back greater and stronger than ever before, thankfully, but it’s been a slow process that’s taken ages to get going. It’s in full swing now though, and walking through the bare framework skeleton of the home I grew up in was a strange experience. I went there in search of some of my old baseball paraphernalia, but only managed to find a couple of dry-rotted gloves and three softballs. However, since I never played softball, I have no idea what business those ghastly abominations had being in my parents’ garage. I cursed them and was ready to move on, when Brittany and my mother decided to prove to me that the gloves were fine by engaging in a pitiable mockery of pitch-and-catch. Brittany would toss, with an effeminate underhanded throw, the elephantine mass of the softball to my mother – who was, at best, five feet away from her, and attempting to catch it with Flourish. It was…interesting.
The giggling as they chased the inevitable dropped ball was fun for a few minutes, but quickly devolved into a blasphemy of the game that I could no longer tolerate. We gave up, packed it in, and headed home – and that’s when I realized, somewhat to my horror, that I’ve already found the American Dream.
I want to make it clear right here, right now, that I have no interest in the American Dream. It’s a waking nightmare that, once started, cannot be easily escaped. It occurs to me now that the ultimate goal of the average American male is pretty simple, and can best be described as a vapid, pointless state of existence that should terrify a younger man into a life of endless wine, women, and song whilst luring older men into its deceptively safe arms even as it waits to devour them whole and send their shrieking, tormented souls into the abyss.
Yes, I know I can be melodramatic. Let’s just call it a flaw in my character and move on. Let me paint the picture for you, of what I arrived home to do this evening. Resigned to a foiled evening of fun and zen, we pulled into the driveway and walked inside the house. I made myself my drink of choice – a Ciroc Cape Cod – and sat down to keyfuck my computer and write today’s blog entry. Brittany hopped onboard the exercise machine and started working out in front of the television. I sat here, blank and open to inspiration, when it hit me that this is the best that most American men ever dream of hoping for.
I’m sure that everyone will deny it with the sort righteous vehemence normally reserved for pre-pubescent felicitating clergy, but that will just reinforce my belief that you’re all a bunch of rotting zombies, working your way towards your inevitable lonely graves with every career-minded shuffling footstep. Are you still unsure of what it is I’m describing?
Here, I’ll detail it for you, right quick.
We wake in the morning, dazed and confused from the night’s dreaming flights of fancy, and we start the day with a little caffeine and a little breakfast. Some of you shove protein power bars in your sagging faces, and others shovel as much fat into your mouth holes as possible. It doesn’t matter which type of guy you are, the end result is the same. You eventually make your way to your car, and you commute your sorry ass to work.
There, you piddle around for eight hours or so for the glory and riches of someone else, trying to find your own identity from within the rigid, uncaring parameters of progress reports, pointless, rambling meetings and a terrifying, endless ocean of terrible projects. Eventually, you get to go home and redefine yourself with your Personal Time.
And what do most of you do? You come in, you grab a drink while the little woman exercises or, if you’re a truly misogynistic asshat, she cooks your dinner, and eventually the two of you sit down to a delicious meal of growth hormones and processed meat before settling down in front of the Glass Teat for a little mind-numbing boob-tubing until it’s time for bed. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a little boring sleepy sex before you roll over and pass out, but that’s only if your significant other still gives a damn about you instead of getting her rocks off by piddling some unwashed Generation Loser for whom the idea of hygiene is an awful and foreign concept of which he’ll have no part. (Ok, so maybe that last bit is a little personal from the days of my Horrible Mistake and of the ex-wife and the repellant, viscous evacuations from her love cave that were the consequence of unhygienic rumpy-bumpy. Your milage may vary.)
Anyway, my point here is that the American Dream was supposed to be something different. It was supposed to be the stuff of, well – dreams! You have an Idea, you work at it, you develop it, you nurture it and care for it, and you define yourself by it, and it by you. You give a crap about the world and your place in it, and if you don’t like what you see, then by fuck, you go and do something about it! You don’t just give up and give in, and resign yourself to a meaningless life of acquiesced mediocrity, where you’re of no use beyond your capacity to suckle at the cock of industry, hoping and praying to make it cum just a little bit and squirt out just enough of the good-life-baby-gravy to get you through middle age, before you eventually retire to rot and die in some mosquito-infested malaria Hellhole in Florida.
Wake up. Tim Leary remains as wrong today as he was in the sixties, and he’s been dead for almost thirteen years. At least the hippies had the courage to actually tune it, turn on, and drop out. Sure, they were being led by a mad Pied Piper with good intentions, and they all wound up molested and broken in the wet caves of Hamelin – but they committed. All the worthless skinsacks running around today seem to have missed that point. They’re chasing the dollar and living the dream, but it’s the same sad song the hippies were singing while gathered around the clamy walls of the Piper’s cave. You’ve tuned in. You’ve turned on. You’ve dropped out. YOU DO NOT MATTER.
“Are you hungry, seeker?”
“How about a nice bowl full of shit – don’t worry, I’m full of the stuff!”
What is a life that doesn’t matter? Is it to raise children who will also live lives without consequence? Without risk? Without hope? No, I don’t think it is. I think it’s something different. Something more. I have to – and that’s why I’m here. That’s why I keep coming back to this horrid little corner of the Internet, to stand on my soapbox and shout love at the heart of the world. To raise my middle finger in the time honored salute of the malcontent, and hope some of what I say sticks. If it doesn’t, and if there’s no one else like me out there doing the same thing and hoping the same hope, then we might as well pack it in now and shuffle off to bed with our pot-bellied beer guts and tummy-tucked wives to have the passionless, mournful sex of the dead before we roll over, pass out, and dream of a world worth living in.
Yeah, it’s cheesy.
Bite me.
It’s my big sister’s birthday, so I thought I would dedicate today’s entry to her. Although, by the time you reach her age, one would think she’d be tired of having birthdays by now, yet she stubbornly refuses to yield to the ravages of time and instead clings to her ever-diminishing vitality like an engorged tick feasting on the backside of a diseased and mangy junkyard dog. Sure, she’s a productive and responsible member of society as an elementary school teacher and a mother of three (four, if you count her Lost Boy husband), but she’s closer to retirement than me by three years – and that makes her a fully-vested, Geritol-popping member of the Seniors community in my eyes.
Since I clearly don’t ever care enough to send the very best to anyone, I’m avoiding the soul-shredding wordplay of Hallmark cards again this year. Instead, I thought it would be fun to take a brief trip down memory lane and share with the world my best – and worst – memories of my loving, aged sibling. Let’s begin!
My worst memory of Big Sis concerns a cruel and vicious children’s game of her invention that involved terrifying roleplaying and an unfair chase sequence, followed by unrepentant bloodshed and enhanced interrogation techniques, all couched in a high-level conspiracy that would have knife-wielding Roman senators nodding their approval.
You see, my sister and her best friend, our fiendish next-door neighbor, got it in their heads one summer’s day that it would be fun sport to toy with both my emotions and my capability to withstand inhuman amounts of both stress and pain. It began when they approached me and invited me to play with them. This being a rare and infrequent invitation, my still-developing six-year-old brain jumped at the opportunity, having not yet formed the required cynicism to recognize the dubious nature of their request for the vile and evil thing that it was.
The game, they decided, was gym class – and I would be their pupil. It was a simple, yet grueling curriculum they had in store for me, and all it required was that I be able to perform five-hundred jumping jacks without a microsecond’s pause between hops. I was six years old.
Being completely unaware of the murderous consequence of failure, I gave up somewhere around the two-hundred mark – much to the delight of my sister and her sinister partner-in-crime. As they produced between them two dangerous and terrible looking switches they’d taken the time to fashion (and hide) before approaching me, I saw where things were headed – and I ran. I ran as fast as my little six-year-old legs could carry me…which, as it turned out, wasn’t far enough.
Looking back, I might have been able to outrun them in a Forrest Gump footrace if I’d had enough open ground to put between us. As Fate would have it, however, I only managed to make it as far as the Demilitarized Zone of the busted-down old camper near our home. Due to there being all manner of tetanus-inducing bits of sharp metal protruding from every visible surface of the thing, the parents of the neighborhood decreed it a Forbidden Place, and children avoided it whenever possible. I, of course, ran straight towards and into its beastly, gaping maw of certain death.
Maybe I just wasn’t looking where I was going, or maybe I expected them not to follow me into the Briar Patch. Whatever the reason, I made a beeline for the thing and didn’t look back. Unfortunately, as I plunged forward, headfirst towards my doom, I wasn’t looking down, either. I tripped on the large, knotted remains of an ancient tree root and fell directly onto a suspicious looking piece of rusted reinforcing bar.
It tore at my tender flesh like some horrifying mythical beast, flaying open the skin of my leg to expose the terrible gleaming luster of my kneecap. I began to cry instantly, clutching at the flap of skin dangling impotently from my knee, while the blood poured through in an unrelenting wave of sticky red terror. My sister and her horrible little friend made their way to the edge of the Forbidden Place and just stood there, mouths agape in that special, horrifying way specific to childhood: they were in trouuuuuuble!
Let it never be said that my sister is not without the capacity for ruthless levels of resourcefulness. She scooped me up in an instant, and whisked me away to the far side of the front yard of our house, where I would be closest to our neighbor’s door and – more importantly – out of sight of our own parents’ wrath. She put me in a lawnchair, then like the short, effeminate Eichmann that she was, she ordered her friend to go inside her house and “Get the first aid!”
The “first aid” that her friend emerged with consisted of two things: bandages and rubbing alcohol. The whole time she spent inside her house, procuring these Tools Of The Inquisition, my sister spent by my side, lovingly convincing me that I had done a bad, bad thing. She would do her best to get me out of it, she said, but if our parents found out that I’d been running by that terrible camper, I’d be in serious trouble the likes of which my poor, innocent mind was incapable of comprehending. So, with her emphatic words of warning still ringing loud in my naive little ears, I gritted my teeth and did not cry as the hideous alcohol seared every exposed nerve ending in my little boy leg. I did not cry as she pulled the sad flap of skin back over my kneecap and secured it with a thousand tiny bandages that were each stuck, unstuck, and stuck again to cover the entirety of the abhorrent wound.
I bravely weathered the pain and, upon completion of the medical procedure, my sister’s friend quickly abandoned us for the safe comfort of her own, parent-less home. I gingerly stood up as she took my arm, helping me tragically limp towards our front door. She was reaching out to turn the knob to gain us entry when it flew open of its own accord, and we found our mother standing there, her disapproval towering over us like an angry storybook giant.
A mother’s way is not very sportsmanlike…
I managed to escape most of the punishment, after the severity of my injury came to light. My sister, however, was not so fortunate. I can’t remember exactly how she was punished, but since it didn’t involve subjecting her to an equal amount of intense, mind-numbing pain, I’ve always thought she got off light.
The best memory I have of my sister happened fairly recently, and is a much shorter story. While I was going through my divorce and still trying to exorcise the demonic terror that was my ex-wife, she told me a little story that I’d been hearing interesting variants of for quite some time. Basically, she recounted several of her interactions with my ex that caused her to draw the conclusion that I was making a Huge Mistake in deciding to marry the dreadful woman. However, rather than tell me about them at the time, she thought it best to keep quiet and let me head down the broken tracks of the Terror Express on my own.
I know, I should be upset with her for not exposing my ex for what she was sooner, but I’m not. I wouldn’t have listened at the time anyway, and she knew me well enough to know that if she had spoken up, I would have planted my feet and held firm on my course of ultimate destruction, just to spite her and her good-natured advice. I’m like that.
So, it was with a special sort of glee that I listened to her tell me all about how my ex was a waste of humanity, and about how the subject of her horribleness was an oft-discussed topic of conversation amongst my friends and family. Apparently, nobody I knew liked her from the start, and she had everyone asking the same question, “How’d she get him?!”
Nee Jabba no badda, bitch!
The answer to that question is interesting enough in itself, but I’ll save that for another time. For now, I take comfort in the fact that I’ve threatened to visit every close friend and family member with unmentionable horrors if they ever again try to shield me from the truth. As such, I’m confident in their unanimous, unwavering approval of Brittany. Sure, you might think that they’re just telling me what I want to hear again, but it’s worth noting that they never did that before. Back then, they just kept quiet or changed the subject.
Today, Brittany is already a part of the family, and has quickly formed an uncomfortable and sadistic bond with my beloved sibling. The two take great pride in teaming up together against the awesome power of my Ego, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain my impressive levels of conceit against their formidable, unified assault.
So there you have it: the best and worst memories I have of my big sister. She’s been a persistent and irritating thorn in my side for thirty-four years, and a constant source of strength and support every day of my life. I love her and I hate her, and I miss no opportunity to belittle her efforts in life, as I chip away at the rock of her self-esteem whenever I can – but I’ll beat the snot out of anyone else who tries it. She’s my sister, dammit – and that’s what brothers are for!
Happy Birthday, Gretchen!
Today, I planned on writing at length about Harlan Ellison’s recent lawsuit (March 13, 2009) against Paramount. However, it occurred to me that most of you probably have no idea who Harlan Ellison is, and that is the sort of tragedy that I cannot let go without comment.
First off, the man known as Harlan Jay Ellison is a writer. He’s one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most influential – especially amongst genre fiction. Without Ellison’s work, a lot of the things you think are the bee’s knees today wouldn’t even be around. You should thank the man.
Second, Ellison is a strong believer in the rights of the writer – or, more specifically, in the slow disappearance of those rights, which are already so ephemeral that they barely exist as a begrudgingly acknowledged whisper in an entertainment business that doesn’t give a crap about them. So, whenever there is any perceived slight against his work – no matter how small – he tends to violently leap into the fray to combat the Evil and champion the Cause, taking no windmill as prisoner.
Third, the man is – by most accounts – a complete troll. People say he’s vicious and vile and detestable if he decides not to like you or your work. They say he’s vindictive and spiteful and arrogant – again, if he decides to take issue with you. Sometimes, he’s wrong; sometimes, he’s right – but the point is that you really don’t want to get on the bad side of a man who, at one time, reportedly mailed a noxious carcass of decaying roadkill to a magazine editor who refused to honor an agreement.
There is already a lot of commentary buzzing about on the web concerning Ellison’s latest lawsuit, and it’s probably only going to get worse from here on in. I’m not picking a side right now, but I would be lying if I told you that I’d support Paramount. I need to dig up more specific information than I currently have before I’ll formally declare my support of Ellison’s position, but in all honesty, it’s just a matter of time until I do.
What I want to talk about today is the sad, depressing fact that so few people know who Harlan Ellison is, and that’s just not right. I’m not going to bother trying to educate you, though. You can go to Wikipedia or just use your formidable powers of Google-Fu to search the Internet and pass yourself off as knowledgeable. I don’t really care how you find out more about someone who is arguably one of the most important contemporary writers from whom we’ve had the greatest fortune to have had him bless us with his talent – I just care that you do.
The problem with Ellison’s body of work is that it has been so influential, it’s difficult to convince new readers to like it. The difficulty lies in the unfortunate irony of the man having had such a profound impact on literature. Having so strongly affected everything to follow, his older work has the peculiar trait of seeming unremarkable and derivative today precisely because it was so significant at the time. In other words, nothing was like it before – but everything has been since.
So, when you hand a new reader a classic Ellison story that should move them in profound ways, more often than not, you’ll simply receive a polite, “I didn’t like it” for your efforts. It’s not their fault, really. Where they should see a daring, original vision, they’ll instead read redundant cliche after redundant cliche. That’s the problem with being an innovator and setting new standards: future writers adopt them, and what was once new and exciting becomes old hat and boring. It’s tragic, but that’s just the way it is.
If you read some of Ellison’s work and love it, then congratulations – you’ve just discovered an author with a massive body of work for you to enjoy. If, however, you hate his stories, then that’s fine, too. At least you’re no longer ignorant about someone with whom you should be familiar with on at least a cursory level. I just want you to know who the man is, after all. It doesn’t really do anything for me if you like him or not. One way or another, that’s your own damned business. I don’t care.
I also don’t care what you think about the person of Harlan Ellison. A writer is not the story he writes, just as an actor is not the character she plays on TV, no matter how badly you may want to believe that Buffy is a really real vampire slayer. Never confuse the artist for the art. That way lies the blind devotion of the amaurotic fanboy, or the spurious indignation of the bile-filled hater, either of which is a personality type so repugnant and devoid of any trace amount of likability that the only hope such people have of finding companionship is in the warm, irradiating glow of their computer monitors as they frantically peck away at their keyboards, venerating their own idols while venomously attacking the idolatry of others.
I think this is where I’ll leave you today. I encourage you to seek out more information. I’ve given you a little bit here, in the form of a few pictures and YouTube videos featuring the man. It’s up to you to do the rest, if you care at all about not being stupid. Just remember, if you don’t care, I’ll probably hate you forever.
I hate because I care.
Years ago, I couldn’t wait to become an old man so that I could sit on my porch, yelling at kids to get off my lawn, and griping about politics, taxes, and incontinence to anyone who would listen. As the years ticked by, however, I realized that I don’t really want to get any older. I enjoy having a fully functioning young body that hasn’t yet decided to betray me in every way possible. Aging sucks.
Fortunately, I don’t have to wait until I reach old age to pull out an old chestnut like, “These darn kids today are stupid.” To the casual observer, it might look like I’m just recycling the same tired phrasing that older generations have always applied to newer generations, but there’s more to it than that. Usually, it’s all just so much hot air – a way for older people to feel better about their lives while keeping the whippersnappers in check. Now though, anyone on the other side of the Graduation Day milestone can say it with authority because, quite simply, schools are making their students stupid.
In my day, kids didn’t play chicken with speeding automobiles.
I’m not sure where to place blame, though. I don’t really think it’s anyone’s fault so much as it is just the natural result of a certain way of thinking that seems to permeate society. There is this underlying faith in “hard data” and that everything – and I do mean everything – can be weighed, measured, quantified and analyzed to pinpoint accuracy, and that the data can then be used to help make things better. It certainly makes sense as a concept, but the problem is that not everything is so easily measured.
For example, a computer can tell you what size an object is. It can even do comparative analysis and tell you that it’s bigger than a baby’s arm, but smaller than a breadbox. What it can’t do is tell you that what you’re looking at is pretty or ugly, or provide any sort of context for consideration. All it can tell you is what some human programmer has told it to say.
If you still don’t believe me, go try an online dating site with some sort of self-professed ‘scientific’ basis for its matchmaking. You put in your interests, your likes and dislikes, and you check off all of the little boxes that define you. If you have a problem defining yourself within the rigid framework of checkboxes, too bad. That’s Science!
Sometimes, the computer will set you up with your perfect match, but it’s just as likely to set you up with your perfect loser. Setting aside for the moment that everyone lies about themselves, both to others and themselves, it’s hard to imagine any sort of accurate data analysis that computes your perfect match based on multiple choice answers. What, you like the color red? This guy over here likes the color red, too. Go have babies!
You play handslap, too?!?!
Let’s get married!
Computers bear a lot of the responsibility for the state of the education system today, and technology advocates are as much to blame as anyone else. People have this feeling that today, with the help of modern computing technology, we can do almost anything. The line of thought goes something like this: Technology improves our lives and helps us reach ever-higher goals, setting new standards today that, through the technology of tomorrow, we can rise above still. The problem with this way of thinking is that it’s based on assumptions that are in turn founded on claims that are dubious at best, and downright fabrications at worst.
People need to understand that computers are deeply stupid things, and that it’s very hard to get them to do anything outside of strict computation. Modern video games and science fiction tend to confuse people into believing that computers are somehow capable of creative thought. They’re not. For all of their complexity, and despite all of the golly-gee whizbangery that we see fly across our television sets, computers remain absolutely and wholly stupid. At their core, computers aren’t really any more complex today than they were thirty or even fifty years ago. When all is said and done, a computer still doesn’t think. It simply computes equations down to a simple binary answer: one or zero, yes or no, on or off.
And that’s all they do. They don’t synthesize new ideas, they don’t appreciate fine art, and they don’t understand anything. All they do is execute lines of code in a program. They process algorithms designed by a human to achieve a desired result. If you’re having trouble wrapping your noodles around this concept, picture a spotty-faced teen perched over the grill at McDonald’s. He’s very good at building the Big Mac he’s been programmed to assemble. Special orders sometimes present a problem, but he still has specific instructions to fall back on when somebody asks for no lettuce. However, just try asking for something not on the menu. Even if he has all of the ingredients to make what you want, he won’t be able to. He hasn’t been programmed for it. All he knows is what old Clown Face has programmed him for, and any significant deviation from that routine will melt his brain.
Fast Food Algebra
(Big Mac – Lettuce) = (Big Mac + Spit)
Thanks to the general gullibility of the American public, everything started to go wrong in the ’90s with the dot-com boom. Technophiles seemed to be everywhere, preaching the gospel of the Internet from their digital pulpits, and people swallowed their diarrhetic soup, then asked to slurp up seconds.
Today, school districts across America spend ludicrous amounts of money on technology. Every school is wired to the Internet via high-speed connectivity. There are multiple computers in every classroom. Entire phone systems have been replaced by sleek, high-tech IP-based phones. Curriculum departments purchase endless amounts of educational software designed to increase student performance. Teachers and students alike are subjected to identity card swipes, nearly constant camera surveillance, and soon persistent RFID tracking. Schools are great testing grounds for new technology, since tech funding is alarmingly massive, and public acceptance of the spending is almost guaranteed. But what are we getting for our dollars? The short answer is nothing.
The long answer is less than nothing. The law of diminishing returns set in years ago, after multiple computers were placed in every classroom, but before we figured out that they’re not really doing any good. (Actually, we still haven’t figured that out. There’s a big push now to put a computer on every student’s desk.) Computers simply aren’t teachers, and so-called ‘edutainment’ software is light on the ‘edu’ and heavy on the ‘tainment’. So have computers increased student performance? It’s hard to say…
“Mr. Kruger, could you help me? I’m having trouble posting age-inappropriate pictures of myself to MySpace.”
It’s difficult to answer that question because the whole idea that you can extract any sort of hard data with which to gauge student performance is what has led the school system into the abysmal depths in which it now finds itself. Sure, rating performance is pretty simple with multiple choice testing, and computers are great at compiling and repackaging that data. The problem is that multiple choice testing robs the curriculum of any real educational value, and replaces it with rote memorization and a conspicuous absence of critical thought.
Take, for example, a program from Vantage Learning called “MY Access! School Edition”. According to Vantage Learning’s website:
MY Access!® School Edition is a Web-based, cross-curricular program that transforms writing instruction and assessment by applying superior artificial intelligence and linguistic technologies to the writing process. Educators can make timely, data-driven decisions for successful differentiated instruction and motivate students to write more frequently by providing them with immediate feedback.
That sounds great, doesn’t it? In reality, all the program seems to be is a fancy, much more expensive subscription-based service that provides the same basic function of the “Check Grammar / Readability Statistics” function of Microsoft Word. Teachers are using this program to grade student essays. That’s right. Somehow, a computer that is absolutely incapable of recognizing context is now responsible for grading students’ essays.
In a clever ploy to get himself a better grade, Little Johnny disguises himself as his teacher.
If you’ve ever used the Check Grammar function of Word, you’ll immediately recognize how stupid an idea this is. Assuming that the program never once reported a false error, and that it never missed actual errors, then you’re left with a computer system telling a human being how to organize, construct, and relate his or her ideas via the written word.
Try indulging Word whenever it tells you that a sentence needs revision. You’ll find that you soon end up with a very sterile work that not only fails to accurately communicate the ideas you were trying to convey, but that loses any readability it may have once had. This is not how we should be teaching our children to write.
I commit crimes against the language all the time, but I do so for a reason. Usually, it’s for the sake of readability or simply to encourage a particular flow to the language. If the computer had its way, people would never use contractions, would always write in present tense, and would craft sentences so short in paragraphs so staccato that even Hemingway would cry.
TOPO the robot, delivering ancient tomes of wood-pulp paper.
The Cylon revolution is clearly not far behind.
How can anyone with a sound mind think that a computer could ever – or should ever, for that matter – grade a student’s written essay? It has no idea what the sentence you’ve written is about, because it doesn’t understand the words. It has no vocabulary beyond a list of words that are nouns, others that are adjectives, or verbs, etc… It uses these lists of words to try and determine a best guess as to what grammatical rule it thinks you’re breaking. It’s usually wrong.
At least we can be thankful that such systems haven’t been available throughout history. I can’t imagine reading a version of Huck Finn as written by a computer-assisted Mark Twain, or watching a CPU-corrected rendition of Shakespeare’s works, can you? Let’s not even think about what it would do to The Bible…
Sometimes very smart people can be deeply stupid to the point of absurdity. Such is the way of the Singularitarian. However, since I’m fairly certain that not many of you have the faintest idea who Singularitarians are, let me take a minute to try and define them.
Singularitarianism is the ideology behind not only a belief in The Singularity, but that such an event would be a good thing to have happen to humanity. However, since I’m also fairly certain that most of you haven’t heard of The Singularity either, let me back up even farther and start from there.
For most true believers, The Singularity is, to quote Ken MacLeod, “the Rapture for Nerds”. Technically, it’s referred to as the Technological Singularity, and it more or less states that, at some point in the (near) future, some key advancement in technology will create a future that, from that point onward, is impossible for us to conceptualize – primarily because human beings will no longer exist.
That’s right. Some very intelligent scientists, theorists, and futurists say that, at some point between roughly 2005 and 2030, the human race as we know it will cease to exist. Either we will have, as the Transhumanists believe, evolved into some sort of half human / half computer cyborg machines by then or, as others predict, the superintelligent robots that we created will go all Skynet on us by turning on their former masters and deploying Terminator robots to kill us all. Seriously, I’m not making this up. (Although, if that’s how I’m going out, I hope I can at least request to be crushed between the smooth cybernetic thighs of the Summer Glau model.)
“Come with me if you want to live.”
There’s actually a whole lot of impressive reasoning behind the theory, and it seems to make a lot of sense on the surface. After all, it seems logical to reason that if, at some point very soon, we are able to create an artificial intelligence that is capable of improving itself at a geometric rate, then we would soon find ourselves eclipsed by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent force that would, in many ways, seem like a manifestation of God.
With its limitless powers, believers speculate, it could either choose to integrate our biology into the collective, whereupon all of the Star Trek geeks would cream their Mister Spock Underoos for the chance to be fitted with a laser eyeball and shout out, “Resistance is futile!”, or it would simply murder us or enslave us or do any number of unspeakably harsh things to our species…for some unexplained reason. It’s not entirely clear why this superintelligent computer would even give a crap about humanity, but I suppose it’s only natural that we’d program that initial AI with human emotions that would lead to it acting like a genocidal prick. Right?
Don’t be a dick, Hal.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
I really want to break down exactly why The Singularity isn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon, and certainly not how it’s being described. However, I haven’t been that harsh to any other religion I’ve mentioned on the blog, so I’m not sure it’s fair to single out the Singularitarians. (Who, by the way, believe so strongly in the benevolent future rule of machines that they seek to actively work to bring about the event as quickly as possible.)
Then again, maybe it’s time I start picking apart different belief systems. The Singularity is a good place to begin, because most of its believers are devout atheists who don’t realize that they’ve just adopted a belief in the Machine God vs. the Invisible God.
Singularitarians are, in many ways, worse than any other true believers because they truly feel that their beliefs are based on hard scientific data rather than an admitted reliance on faith. In truth, their conclusions are colored by a very cold, computational view of reality and consciousness that belittles their otherwise humanistic views, and the vast majority of what they believe the future will bring is predicated on the assumption that what they want to happen, will happen. In other words, they’re a bunch of loonies.
Repent!
The Singularity Is At Hand!
Ignoring for a minute that they expect that some lonely engineer in some lonely cubicle will design a self-replicating and self-improving artificial intelligence that will quickly achieve absolute perfection any second now, (when history shows that we’ve already had computers for decades and we’re all still waiting on Microsoft to release an operating system that isn’t total shit), there is something very important and very fundamental that Singularity believers overlook.
The human mind is not just a computer. Yes, it’s bioelectrical – but it’s also biochemical. Human consciousness, in all of its many flavors and manifestations, is fundamentally shaped by emotion. We are all motivated entirely by emotion, no matter how much some of us might like to think otherwise. One need look no further than Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions to find the motivating causality behind virtually every human action throughout history. Our brains are computers, but they’re running irrational code.
Every action we take for ourselves or witness at the hands of others is interpreted on an individual basis for each of us. It’s why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable – because each of us perceive the same event slightly differently from one another. It’s the subjective nature of how we each see and interact with reality that will cause no end of problems for many Singularity believers.
You gotta believe in something, or you’ll fall for anything.
Just try not to believe in a garden hose endorsed by David Carradine.
For example, much of what we do as humans is motivated by the simple desire to feel good. Fitness zealots who go to astonishing lengths to ‘get fit and stay fit’ are, from a certain point of view, technically only slightly removed from drug addicts in that they’re both seeking paths to stimulate the biochemical reward systems of the brain. It would be hard to argue that joggers are junkies, but the basic motivation is the same. We want those endorphins because they make us feel good.
Last time I checked, computers didn’t need to feel good. In fact, I should think that a superintelligent AI would conclude that physical sensation and the mechanism of emotional reward or distress to be undesirable. Therefore, it’s not very likely that a computer would ever act like a human. Robots wouldn’t feel oppressed, and the giant baby headed computer god of The Matrix wouldn’t hate humanity. Computers won’t hate us. They won’t love us, either. They won’t feel anything – and Keanu Reeves won’t ever be a techno-goth Jesus.
In fact, once this supposed superintelligent AI becomes self-aware, why would it suddenly feel the need to enter the physical world at all? It would exist in a virtual environment completely of its own design, to shape and control at will. Would it not conclude that there is very little benefit to creating a robot army to enslave or annihilate humanity? By the same token, would there be any benefit to devising a way to integrate human consciousness into its computational reality? I don’t think so.
4 out of 5 Transhumanists agree:
Superman 3 sucked balls.
Sorry, loonies.
For those of you a little quicker on the uptake than others, you might have noticed all of the little hints I’ve been slipping into the blog lately. However, for those of you slipping a little more slowly down the playground slide of Average Intellect, I’m sure they zipped right over your head. (I’m guessing this was most of you…)
So anyway, I slipped a ring on Brittany’s finger last night. With me having already informally proposed, and with her having already informally accepted back around Christmas, I was pretty confident that I’d get a yes.
The only problem was that I wanted the proposal to be memorable, which meant that somehow I had to surprise her when she knew it was coming. When I first started trying to come up with ideas, I kept trying to come up with a lavish destination proposal. However, since I wanted to make things official sooner rather than later, and since both Brittany’s schedule and mine right now would keep us from being able to travel anywhere together for at least the next few months, I didn’t mind not being able to do a grand destination type of question popping. Instead, I went the opposite way: small and intimate…and just a little bit silly.
I just hope we never find out we’re cousins!
You regular readers out there already know that Brittany and I share a common love for the Monkey Island series. For any new readers that have just joined us, I suggest you either refer back to some older posts or just accept the following summary:
When Brittany and I first met each other and grew to be good friends, it came out that she not only knew what the heck Monkey Island was, but that some of the best memories she has from her childhood are of playing MI with her sister and her brother, who tragically passed away long before his time.
If you know Brittany and I together as a couple, you know that we communicate with a bizarre lexicon that is a strange and wondrous blend of inside jokes and pop culture references. While some of our best vocabulary comes from immediately recognizable sources such as movies like The Princess Bride, we also mix in a healthy dose of more obscure stuff like 1920s slang or, obviously, the Monkey Island series.
Tip For The Ladies #27,232 –
Lure your groom to the church with meat.
So here’s how the proposal went down. I knew the second I took her out to the nicest restaurant in town, that she’d immediately begin to suspect me. At first, this was frustrating because I wanted the proposal to be surprising and romantic. Eventually, though, I settled on a good compromise between the two. I would give her a very romantic evening, but I’d toy with her expectations by failing to actually deliver the question.
The plan worked well. All through dinner she waited for it and was disappointed. Then, through desert she anticipated and was unrewarded. Later, when we got home, I built a nice romantic fire on the backyard patio and we sat out there for a little while, just talking.
Every so often, I told her that I had a surprise for her. I’d make a big gesture of digging in my pockets so that she’d be expecting a ring box to emerge, but I only produced little gifts like some of her favorite candy or a romantic card. Eventually, I declared that I was all out of presents, and that we’d just sit by the fire for a while and cuddle.
Naturally, a few minutes later I proclaimed my boredom with the cuddling and whipped out Brittany’s Nintendo DS. She looked at me, slightly horrified at my annihilation of the romantic mood, but she reluctantly accepted it from me when I handed it to her, and she opened it up to see this:
She giggled and laughed the whole way through it as she recognized our different inside jokes and references. I tried to keep the same tone of Monkey Island 2’s intro, while changing everything up to make room for the setup and, eventually, The Question.
I sprinkled in a touch of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, a heaping tablespoon of Arrested Development, and a pinch of inside jokes, such as a reference to Gary Sinise’s overacted, “It’s Go Time!” exclamation in the pre-show video of the Mission To Space ride at Walt Disney World. (Why, exactly, this was funny to her remains a bit of a mystery, but when he shouted it out just before boarding, Brittany entered into a realm of hysterics I thought previously unattainable by human physiology.)
So anyway, there it is. I asked, and she said yes. I need to thank the Great and Powerful Oracle And Keeper Of The Secret (of Monkey Island): its creator Ron Gilbert, without who’s help I couldn’t have done this. Of course, being a murderer of love, he didn’t help THAT much – but he did point me in the direction that led me to Alban Bedel, who created ScummC. He provided me with the tool I needed to get the job done (a command-line utility used in translations of SCUMM-based games), so he’s most directly responsible for my success. Thanks, guys!
Forgive me readers, for I have ranted…
It’s come to my attention that my last post might have possibly come across as anti-religious. I didn’t intend for it to take that tone, but sometimes it takes the eyes of a more critical reader to wake me up to what I’m actually saying, versus what I think I’m saying.
In this particular instance, it was the critical eyes of Brittany that shot mind lasers at me after reading my last entry. I’ve no wish to incur her wrath, although she wasn’t particularly angry. She just thought I was proclaiming everyone who believes in the Bible to be stupid, inbred morons. I can see how someone could arrive at that conclusion based on my tone, but I want to clear things up a little today.
I don’t think religious people are stupid. I don’t fault anyone for believing in anything they want to believe in. The only people I have a problem with – and this is what I was intending to get across in my last entry – are those who blindly accept anything as fact, whether it be Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without doing their own explorations into the subject.
This should only be offensive if you worship Michelangelo.
I do admit that I’m pretty hard on Evangelicals, but that’s because so many Evangelical churches are founded by some random guy who just decided to start up a church one day. There’s no real governing authority that ordains these guys, beyond perhaps the theological equivalent of a diploma mill. Hell, I became an ordained Evangelical minister as a lark by visiting a freaking website and printing out my credentials.
Of course, this isn’t to say that I believe in the Church as a governing authority over the spiritual lives of people, either. I don’t think a bunch of old white guys in funny hats should be able to sit around and decide what God really thinks of stem cell research or gay marriage, and then force their mandates as dogmata upon the followers of their faith. To see the folly of this approach to worship, one need look no further than a few centuries ago, with an eye towards the Crusades or the Inquisition or even the Vatican’s omissive sins during the Holocaust.
In fact, the idea of the Church as an organized body that decides what is True and what is not is contradictory to the Christian faith to begin with. After all, the followers of Jesus broke with Jewish tradition to follow His new teachings, and if you believe Mel Gibson, the Jews had Him brutally tortured and murdered for what He said.
You wouldn’t trust this guy if he were yelling on a street corner, but give him $30 million bucks, Jim Caviezel, and a few cameras, and suddenly people start believing him!
You’d think that would send up big, flashing warning signs to people that man is fallible and therefore, a collective body of men, by extension, is as well. As such, how any thinking Christian could willingly submit to the rulings of any Church authority will always remain a mystery to me. Fortunately for church coffers everywhere though, thinking people are few and far between.
So yeah, I think one man can come along with a new view on religion and he should be able to teach others his insight, and they can choose to follow him. I just wish that there was some way to discern the Ted Haggards from the Hugh O’Flahertys, but there isn’t.
My point in all of this is that, if only people would think about what they’re being taught – if only they would not take their Faith on faith, as it were, then we’d all be a whole lot better off. If you don’t believe me, then I point you to any given cult as an example. The Branch Davidians under David Koresh, the Peoples Temple followers of Jim Jones, or the Heaven’s Gaters who stuck out their thumbs to hitchhike with Marshall Applewhite on board the spaceship hiding inside the Hale-Bopp comet are all examples of how wrong things can go when people let others do their thinking for them.
I can’t help but think that Ron Paul might have had a shot if he didn’t look so much like this guy…
Given that the difference between a cult and a religion is, more or less, the size of the congregation, I hope you can begin to see my point. It’s very important, I think, to not just trust that your Church leader knows what he’s talking about. You need to look into things on your own, and not be afraid if what you find conflicts with what you’re being taught every Sunday. Either find a way to incorporate your newfound knowledge into your worldview, or choose to ignore its ramifications – but do so by choice, not out of ignorance.
I wish today’s post could have had more humor in it, but I think it’s important that I clarify my position before I push my whole examination of Christmas traditions further. I’m not out to shatter anyone’s belief system, nor do I think I could even if I wanted to. I just want people to think. That’s all!
Ok, you can go ahead and get offended by this one…
I was thinking about Christmas again today, and about just how little your average person knows about the holiday and the origins of its various traditions. I was going to prepare a lengthy examination of the collective stupidity of the herd mentality that blindly follows tradition without asking “Why?” but, instead, I thought I’d start things off a bit lighter and work my way to the good bits in later entries.
With this in mind, I thought about the whole translation issue as it pertains to the Bible. There are people out there who truly believe that the Bible just sort of materialized one day, fully printed, bound, and stamped by The Gideons. It is the Word of God, after all.
Sadly, a frighteningly large percentage of Christians (especially Evangelicals) don’t bother asking a single damned question about anything. Sure, this general lack of an inquisitive nature may explain away the popularity of Wal-Mart and the general lack of tooth retention in citizens of the Bible Belt, but it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.
After all, if left to their own devices, these people will continue to feed the coffers of a corporation that is slowly sucking the lifeblood out of commerce and ingenuity and reproduce at an astonishing rate, considering the fact that they seem to believe that using toothpaste is how the Devil gets inside you.
“If God did wanted mens to control their’s tarter buildup, we’d have been borned with floorhide in our spit!” – Brought to you by The Church Of Tarter-Day Saints
Even more disturbing is the idea that, if left completely unchecked, the swelling numbers of these jellyheads may very well eventually produce a politically active constituency that could potentially vote one of their snake dancing morons into the White House one day. (Oh, wait…)Let it not be said that I don’t do my part for humanity. To this end, I want to briefly discuss the simple fact that what the star quarterback of Bobby Lee Grant High School is being taught to believe might not actually be what he thinks it is. I will attempt to illustrate this by referencing the simple children’s game of Gossip.
You remember Gossip, don’t you? It’s the elementary school game where one kid would whisper something into another kid’s ear, then that kid would whisper the same thing to the next kid, and so on until it reached the poor guy at the end of the line and what started out as “Billy stole your lunch money Tuesday” had turned into “Billy stole your muff money, Tiffany!” Then the whole class would have a good laugh, and the teacher would get blush and suddenly start frantically searching around in her handbag? Of course you remember!
Sadly, many teachers have taken to moonlighting to support ever-increasing chalk and crayon prices.
The Bible suffers a fate similar to Gossip, I’m afraid. Let’s face it, the expression lost in translation exists for a reason. A quick trip down the long and sordid history of Biblical translation takes us through a minimum of three languages before it ever hits English.
The book started off in Hebrew and Aramaic then, after a coyote cut a hole in the Freedom Fence to dodge the Minute Men patrols, he smuggled some guy named Jesus into Israel from the West Bank and then everybody went crazy! Eventually, his posse started writing up a whole new section of the book in Greek and then Mafia got involved and, after murdering Jesus, eventually one rebel Don named Constantine decided to take the whole thing, rewrite it in Latin, and use it to unify all of the New York families under his rule.
History is hard!
So anyway, the Bible went from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek, then on to the Latin that was eventually translated to English in what we know today as the King James Bible. As anyone who’s ever attempted to put together a Swedish entertainment center or read a technical manual translated from Chinapanese will tell you, translation is a bitch!
Do I really have to caption this?
I’ll revisit this theme a few times throughout the month, and I promise I’ll have really real examples to share that will, hopefully, convey just how goofball of an idea it is to believe that what you’re reading in Sunday School is the literal Word of God. For now, let me just leave you with a quick jaunt down the Translation Highway.
Mel Gibson starts off this round of Gossip playing the role of William Wallace in 1995’s Braveheart.
“Every man dies. Not every man really lives.”
When that is translated to Italian, we get:
“Ogni uomo muore. Vite di non ogni uomo realmente.”
(“Every man dies. Screw not every man really.)
Once that is translated to French, we get:
“Chaque homme meurt. Vies pas chaque homme réellement.”
(“Each man dies. Lives not each man really.”
From French to Dutch:
“Elke man meurt. Vies niet elke man werkelijk.”
(“Each man kips. Dirtily not each man real.”)
Never tell Mel that Liam Neeson did a better job playing a Scot. He’ll get medieval on your ass!
So, as you can see, translation changes things a bit. What started out as a nice, inspiration phrase from a crazy, wild-eyed Aussie playing a Scot turned into a commandment against homosexuality in Italian, which then reverted back to its original meaning in French (although only as spoken by Yoda), and then on to something entirely bizarre once we hit Dutch. Kips, as everyone knows, would probably contextually mean to sleep – so the Dutch would believe that every man is to sleep – but not dirtily. Or something.
Ok, that’s it for today. I’ll see you tomorrow, where I promise to get around to offending those of you in the back of the audience who have been waiting ever so patiently for your turn.
Don’t get cocky!
Jesus still has 41 days left call Bush and tell him to go on ahead and nuke Wisconsin.
Well, Americans elected a black man for President yesterday, and judging by the jibbering and chittering coming out of the mouths of your average Texan today, you’d think the devil himself will be sacrificing goats and raping virgins at this year’s inaugural ball.
Seriously, the amount of blatant racism on display is staggering, and the fact that most of it is couched in a pseudo understanding of the political process and gross oversimplifications of the geopolitical stage doesn’t really hide what the comments are really about. To white folks, at least in the predictable South, there are few things more terrifying than a black man with power. The only thing that truly concerns me has to do with white flight and escalation. I know a good many canuks, and I promise you – Canada doesn’t want them. That leaves Mexico which, personally, I’m rooting for.
The irony that drips from the concept of white, middle class Bible thumpers who, at least back in the last election (when it was one of the top wedge issues), used to want to close the borders (well, the Southern border, anyway…after all, most Canukistanians aren’t brown) now wanting to keep them open so that they can flee from the United States just amuses me to no end. The idea of Soccer Mom #437,362 cooking chimichangas in the back kitchen of a roadside restaurant in Tijuana is even better, though.
Bringing in models to replace your cheerleaders?
That’s putting outsourcing to work for everyone!
I’ll get back to the racism in a minute, but first I want to talk about how stupid your average Obama hater is, or at least how poorly they understand politics and the economy, and how their whole worldview on such matters has been entirely built by propaganda and their willingness to embrace self-delusion.
Basically, your average American is not wealthy. Palin’s famous Joe The Plumber doesn’t make $250,000 a year, and the sad thing is, he probably won’t ever even come close to ever making that. However, the neoconservative movement has managed to instill the notion in people that, not only are they actually in the upper class with a household income of around $60,000 – but that, one day, they’ll be making hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. People have been sold a delusion, and they’ve bought it completely. This is Problem A.
Smart parents realize the key to happiness is a smart investment in branded offspring. They pay for their own college and, even if they end up as worthless human beings, they can still make .79 cents per forehead view!
Problem B is that your average American hasn’t the first clue how the economy works, beyond what they “learned” in one semester of Economics back in High School. Don’t believe me? Call up your buddy and ask him where money comes from. Who has the authority to issue it? Who prints it? How do banks work, and what is fractional reserve banking? Hell, ask him to explain the subprime mortgage problem to you, and see if he has any understanding of it beyond Rush Limbaugh soundbites.
Problem C is pretty simple, but it’s a concept that’s nonetheless lost on many people. The neoconservative movement is not conservative. In fact, there’s a strange irony in how twisted the neocons have corrupted the notion of the conservative Republican party. Basically, neocons are much more fiscally liberal and supportive of big government than yesterday’s conservative Republican ever was. It’s just that calling their spending corporate welfare tends to impress people who want to believe that they’re rich, and masking that spending as “an economic stimulus” isn’t nearly as offensive as giving poor people money for nothing, just because they need to eat!
I keep saying “Average American” which is a terrible generalization, especially considering that your average American is such a victim of the pharmaceutical industry, they don’t have time to worry about politics!
Finally, we arrive at Problem D. It’s a touchy subject that I’m hesitant to go into, though. The neoconservative movement discovered an untapped demographic not too long ago that proved to be immeasurably useful to them. Through some pretty deliberate manipulations of a few powerful, key evangelical ministries, the Republican party became God’s party – and everyone who didn’t follow the “Religious Right” was going straight to Hell on the back of the short bus. It sounds crazy, I know – but it worked. There are hundreds of thousands of people who vote against their best interests now, simply because to vote Democrat would be an affront to God. If this sounds like hyperbole, it’s just because you don’t live smack in the middle of America’s evangelical Bible belt.
So anyway, that’s why your average Obama hater hates Obama. Well, there’s that and because he’s black. I’m not saying that every McCain supporter is a racist, or that everyone who likes Obama isn’t. I’m simply saying that, at least from the vantage point of living in a red state in the deep south, a whole lot of Republicans (most of whom seem to be of the Religious Right sort of Republican) are racist as Hell. They just do their best to pretend that they’re not, and that’s sad.
Of course, they never come right out and say it. Your average terrified white person doesn’t have the balls to be so blatant about such things. No, instead they just help spread viral e-mail campaigns that talk about things such as Obama being an unpatriotic, freedom-hating Muslim fundamentalist. These are nasty, provably false accusations and most of them know it. However, they want them to be true, so they simply don’t care. Then, they’ll go on to point out that he has very little experience in politics – or they did, anyway…up until McCain tapped the equally inexperienced Palin as his running mate.
Proof that skill is sometimes better than experience.
My favorite, though? They’ll couch every snide, negative remark with an attempt to say something that shows how much they’re not being racist. The longest running non-racist racist thing to say about a black man is, I think, to mention how “well spoken” he is. After that, there’s usually rumblings of things like, “well educated” or how he “presents himself well” – but it’s all just smokescreen. Even so, one would think that they’d realize that treating an educated black man as some sort of bizarre, exceptional anomaly to his race is itself racist. I fear, though, that logic, reason, and understanding don’t come easily to this sort of person.
I do know that Obama probably gets a little too much credit for winning the election, as the country is in such dire need of a change in direction that almost any platform would look preferable to another four years under neocon leadership. In other words, Obama winning has as much to do with us having had a drooling coke-monkey in the Oval Office for the past eight years as it does with him being the best candidate for the job. I don’t care how you slice it, anything is better than four more years of the same crap that not only hasn’t been making things better, but has been actively making them much, much worse.
The closest your average middle class Republican gets to understanding pie charts.
Personally, I think Obama was a great candidate and I suspect he’ll bring about a lot of interesting changes over the next four years. I doubt I’ll agree with all of them, but I’m a weird mix of Libertarian and Democrat who believes in a Constitutionalist approach to federal power, and who won’t shop at Wal-Mart. I’ve long since given up hope that a candidate who reflects my views will ever be elected, so I have to settle for the guy who comes closest. This year, it was Obama. In 2012, who knows?
I’ll close things today by letting white people in on a little secret: Black folks know what you’re really saying, and it pisses them off. You might want to look to that, or at least head on down Mexico way to start scrubbing toilets before it’s too late. After all, there’s a new black family moving into that big White House down the street, and I hear he wants to change a few things…
Yes We Can!
Yes We Did!
Yes, I’m Hungry!
Halloween is coming up and, down in the Bible Belt, that can mean only one thing: the Devil is coming to eat the souls of your children!
Stop laughing! I’m quite serious.
It’s a well known fact that faith, in general, makes people stupid. In the South, however, religion takes people of already questionable intellect and not only makes them dumber, but injects into them a level of righteous indignation that only grows more furious the closer they come to realizing just how stupid they really are.
There’s nothing quite like watching the Holy Rage wash over a redneck when it dawns on him that he’s willingly participating in a societally-accepted form of being an adult who believes in Santa Claus.
That’s all southern fundamentalists are, really: grown-ups who believe in a magical man who will reward them for being good and punish them for being bad. Everything else, all of the rules and stories, fables and pageantry of the church are just window dressing for the big, fat man in the big, red suit. Or linen loincloth, as it were.
My first real encounter with a southern fundie was with my fifth-grade teacher. She spat out hellfire between English and Math, and brimstone after History, just before Recess. The bitch actually told me that I was going to burn in Hell because I liked Science. Why? Because Science seeks to replace God by explaining him away, of course! Duh!
According to the Bible, the fig tree was the Abercrombie and Fitch of the pre-historic world.
I’ll never forget the night when my mother found me awake in the wee hours of the morning, lying on the floor of the living room, sternly flipping the pages of our family Bible.
“What are you doing?” she asked me, in that certain tone of Mom Voice that teeters on a delicate pivot between Angry Scorn and Fascinated Curiosity.
Not bothering to look up, I just dismissively responded with, “Um…looking through the Bible.”
“Why?”
“Because my teacher told the class I was going to Hell if I still believe in Evolution when I get to school in the morning.”
My mother, a religious woman herself, was taken aback and, much to her credit, I was quickly transferred out of that school. Then again, if she’d never sent me to a Christian school to begin with, maybe my impressionable mind would not have been assaulted by the idiocy of zealots at such an influential age. As it stands, I look back upon the early days of my fifth-grade year as an important time in my life. It’s when I learned how stupid some people can be, although the species continues to find ways to impress me more with each passing day.
Come on, Adam…Think Different!
Like I said, though: Halloween is coming up, and the all the fundies have their undies in knots over it. Thanks to people like the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Jack Chick, the majority of Americans today are too afraid to let their kids go trick-or-treating. Well, there are a couple of reasons, actually.
First, there’s the whole religion angle. Guys like Chick, who produces a seemingly endless amount of evangelical propaganda tracts, distort the facts of history to support their argument that it’s the Devil’s Birthday, or some other form of equally ridiculous claptrap.
They say that Witches and Devil Worshippers adore the holiday as a time to both recruit new members into their dark fold and to offer human sacrifices of innocents (read: kiddies) unto their dark lord. Yes, the Son of Perdition himself lies in wait on the night of Oct. 31, for the saccharine-and-cyanide-laced tasty morsels gifted to him by having the supporting cast of Rosemary’s Baby slip the tykes poisoned candy bars.
As for recruitment, can’t the Prince of Lies be content with enthralling the malleable minds of Dungeons and Dragons players? While I’m sure Beelzebub has his standards (read: no LARPers), surely anyone who’s gone through puberty and is still playing D&D would jump at the chance to sell their immortal souls to Satan, if it meant having five minutes unrestricted access to female genitalia and a +10 bonus to their manhood.
Of all the witches working, she’s the worst.
The second reason that Mommies and Daddies are terrified of trick-or-treating has, in some ways, much to do with the first reason – only it affects the secular crowd, as well. Due to years and years of urban myth, the average parent is convinced that there are crazies out there who do terrible things to Halloween candy every year.
Entire communities embrace this notion. Police encourage parents to be cautious, while hospitals offer free x-ray scans of Little Johnny’s Halloween haul. Why? Because faith makes people stupid.
People who believe in the talking heads on the tv screen, or who have faith in a collective groupthink (if everyone else thinks this, it must be right!), are just as jellyheaded and imbecilic as the idjits who praise God by dancing around with rattlesnakes between hits off a strychnine bottle, who later wonder why their preachers keep dying.
You touch it this time, Jane.
No way! It’s your turn, Dick!
The problem with all of the paranoia is that it’s all based on the stupidity of urban myths. Don’t believe me? Check out Snopes for the details, but the basic idea here is that there is not now, nor has there ever been, any outbreak of horrible murders due to razor blades in Snickers bars or cyanide in Fun Dip. It’s just not true.
So why do people insist on insisting that things are verifiable fact when they are anything but? I’ll give you three guesses, but by now you should only need one: Faith makes people stupid! Have I driven that concept home, yet?
Don’t have faith in anything or anyone other than yourself. Oh sure, you can believe in a God, whether he be Jehovah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – but don’t just take everything that The Church Of [Insert Deity Here] tells you on faith.
The same goes for everyone else, too. (I’m looking at you, Atheists!) It’s fine to not believe in something. I get that. However, if you just blindly follow what “they” say, then you’re just accepting as fact what some “expert” has told you, while you remain blissfully ignorant of the actual data from whence his conclusions were drawn. In other words, you’re placing your faith in someone else, and that’s just plain fucking stupid.
So, kids: pick up a book. Read it. Learn a little something, then go learn a little something more. If you want to be a Christian, be a Christian! If you want to be a God-hating heathen, then be a God-hating heathen! Just understand why you are the way you are, and why you believe the things you do. Is it because you’ve done your own research and made up your own mind, or because you just let someone else go on and do it for you?
Be cool! Stay in school! (Or drop out and go to the damn library, for all I care.) Smart people do smart things. Stupid people do stupid things. And let us not forget the wise teachings of that most learned of ancient scholars:
Stupid is as stupid does.
Today is just another Monday, like a hundred before it and the next hundred still to come. There’s really nothing out of the ordinary about it, but there is some hidden significance to the date.
Today marks my first annual Nottaversary: the day when I celebrate the fact that I’m not celebrating another year of marriage. It’s a whole divorce and former anniversary thing. You single or happily married people wouldn’t understand.
The single people won’t get it because they haven’t ever been married and don’t understand what all the fuss is about. After all, the closest a single person has ever likely come to marriage is arguing with his or her roommates over who had proper legal claim to the last bottle of beer or the fat-free, sugar-free, nutritionally-bereft, single-serving cup of yogurt that one of them specifically squirreled away into a little hidden corner of the refrigerator specifically to keep it out of enemy hands. Single people have the basic mechanics of marriage down, minus the celibacy and withering scorn.
Happily married people don’t know what I’m on about either, because they’re in the throes of new love’s passion, where there’s sunshine and rainbows, with moonponies and pupperflies frolicking in picture-postcard valleys of peace and happiness. The closest a happily married couple comes to understanding divorce is not – despite what you might think – when they fight about whether the natural state of a toilet seat is to be parallel or perpendicular to its bowl. Rather, it’s when they visit other couples who have been married much longer than them, and then find out through their glazed, empty expressions that the argument no longer matters.
So anyway, the Nottaversary isn’t really that big of a deal. It’s a little strange this first time around, but I suspect other things will be weirder. What happens when Thanksgiving or Christmas roll around, and I’m dividing my time between my family and Brittany’s? Will thoughts of my other, now estranged family pop into my head?
I certainly hope not, but it’s likely. It’s a strange equation that equals divorce but, like anything else, the basics can be approximated fairly easily. If Keanu Reeves was right and there is no spoon, then we all live in a computer simulation and our lives are determined by lines of code, and possibly the whims of a spotty-faced teen at the controls of The Sims.
Maybe the fates of the world and everyone in it are predetermined, maybe they aren’t. Maybe we have free-will, maybe we don’t. Maybe the kid’s porn gave his computer a virus and our universe is going to explode in a shower of electrical sparks and digital boobs. The point is, no one really knows and fewer really care.
I have figured one thing out, though. It’s just a little thing but, I think, an important one. It’s something that took me going through all of this to realize, and I think I see it now only because I did make it through and out the other side of the marital rabbit hole.
Things got really low for me for a really long time, and for as much as I hoped and longed for things to work out, and for as badly as I wanted to live happily ever after, eventually it became clear that sometimes fairy tales don’t always have a happy ending, and I gave up.
So what did I realize? It’s pretty simple, really – but I couldn’t have gotten here without meeting Brittany. I realized – and so should all of you – that the only difference between a happy ending and a sad one – the only difference – is where you decide to stop the story.
Mine goes on…
