03 - Where Are You, Oh Princess?

Hello, all! Sorry about the long delay. The holidays were riddled with travel and family, life and experience, and I found myself more than a bit exhausted and off of my normal schedule once I returned. Things are getting back to normal now, though... which of course means it's time for me to expound all over all of you again like Boomer. Only with less subsequent rabid mob beatdown. One can hope.

[INFORMATIVE DISCLAIMER: This post includes a number of illustrative video links designed to accompany my words. If you're the sort of person who never really takes the time to let those things speak to you, or can't be bothered with the complexity of multiple ideas all coming together to form one woven point, you'll probably not get the maximum intended effect of this post. That isn't to say they're all meant to be watched start to finish (though I did mostly choose palatable 1-2 minute clips, when I had a choice). But if you can spare the time and attention span, let the whole thing speak to you. *shrugs* It's really up to you, though.]

Today I'm thinking about stories, and the woman of my dreams. Here's a diagram that allegories my quest for her hand, which I hope comes attached to the rest of a woman or I probably won't keep it even if I do get it:

Last night I wrote this:

"You know what makes my life worth living? *Stories.* Nothing 

more, nothing less. Everyone thinks I love video games, but it's stories I love. The game is just the supreme medium through which to tell one."

Roger Ebert and I would have one hell of an argument about that one, I'm sure. Maybe I'll bring it up at our next celebrity poker night. He bets more carelessly when he's upset, you know. 'S how I got that yacht I haven't told Sister about just yet.

At any rate, I was touching on a thought I've had semi-frequently over the years, usually whenever I encounter someone a bit too comfortable categorizing others and making tandem assumptions based on those categorizations. A person who plays video games more than once or twice a lifetime is now acceptably called a "gamer," which I guess started off as a description of a person who played a great many. Soon that became known as the modified "hardcore gamer," with the less-frequent devotees being known as "casual gamers." These denotations seemed odd to me from the very start, I have to admit. If you enjoy watching movies, as most people do, are you a "film buff"? A "movie nut"? How many movies a week would you have to watch to be known as either of these? They all carry the connotation of uniquity through excessiveness; the only reason it's worth inventing a specific term to describe is because it's understood to be an anomaly that someone likes the thing that abnormally much. Another common (and particularly pet peevey, for me) butchering of my native language that people tend to perpetrate in this sphere is the adding of the suffix "-holic" or "-aholic" to the end of a word to indicate excess or exaggerated addiction to that thing.


Lemme 'splain something to you. 

You are an alcoholic if you are afflicted with an addiction to alcohol. That is a word, "alcohol," combined with a suffix, "-ism," conjugated to a noun as "-ic." Alcoholic. Alcoholism. There is no suffix "-holism," no matter how new-wave online-ordained priesty you may be about things. You cannot be a "chocoholic," even if you enjoy the everloving pantaloons off of chocolate at every turn and have a secret love affair with the fruit of the cacao tree in your neighbor's back yard. This is not possible, because that word makes no inherent sense. Unless you dip your Hershey's bar in a snifter of the finest bourbon before each and every bite, in which case you are riddled with addictions and food combination fad diets and should seek help squared*, you cannot make any kind of case for that word making any sense whatsoever.

* Help x help = thehell'samattawithyou

Anyway. Gamers. Yes. I have a theory that this term didn't originate externally at all; that is, I don't believe the first person to refer to a human as a "gamer" was a non-gamer, but more likely a person who enjoyed video games and felt a need to self-define based on that aspect. This isn't all that hard to understand; most of us present at the beginning of the Nintendo wave are of a particular generation who discovered we had this brand new tool to retreat to whenever things got tough out there in the real world. For a long time the people who played the poop out of some video games were also, by and large, the same people who were regularly stuffed into, slammed against, or lifted first and then stuffed/slammed into lockers at school*. Naturally, these folks eventually felt a need to embrace something internally as a source of pride, and what better than the escape hatch itself? Besides, I don't know if you ever got your chops with video games back in the Nintendo era, but them shit's was hard. I'm not even joking. This is a thing. Even without all the armchair psychology I just Boomer'd out above, anybody who's ever played and beaten the goddamn Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES deserves some actual pride. Terrorists use that game during waterboarding to make the whole experience even worse; you get dunked, you think you're drowning, you're upside down and it's going in your nose, then suddenly someone's roughly shoving a tiny controller in your hands and there's a goddamn underwater TV down there with TMNT on it. And you're on stage 3. And you've already lost Donatello.

* Who's brilliant idea was it to line the walls within nearly every public school

 in the country with hollow metal spaces that make an incredible barbarian-

pleasing clang sound when a human body strikes one, anyway? That person 

deserves a swirly, and no lunch money. And then another swirly.

I am, by the common definition, a "gamer." I might even be considered a "hardcore gamer." I have been known to complete all sidequests, just to do so. I have been known to obey a hidden OCD urge to collect at least one of every item possible just to punish my pretend character's pretend spine from the pretend weight of his pretend backpack and make him pretend hate me a little more. I have bred a gold chocobo. I have killed Crawmerax the Invincible. I have collected 120 stars and met Yoshi on the roof. 

Splinter never turned back to a human
anywhere in the TMNT storyline but
in this stupid game. He wasn't even
originally human at all in the comics!

And yes. I have beaten Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES without the use of a cheat device. And I have a witness. Nobody's offered to pay me (yet) to do video game reviews, so I won't go into all the gritty detail about this game's inherent bastardy. Besides which, no one could possibly do it better than the esteemed James Rolfe, a.k.a. The Angry Video Game Nerd. Watch his awesome review here, if you're curious. Not Safe For Work, though; hilarious language. Fair warning.

These and a hundred other particularly notable video game accomplishments are things I can provably claim... but I don't really mention them very often (he said ironically; yes, I am talking rather a lot about them right now, but I'm pretending to make a larger point, so shut your hole). This has two major reasons.

1. Who really gives a crap? I mean, seriously. If you're not really into video games, you aren't gonna know what the hell I'm on about anyway, all you're gonna hear is that I spent a collective number of hours holding a little thing with buttons that made a thing do a thing for pretend. That's not terribly impressive, and it doesn't really translate. And if you are really into video games, I'm genuinely sorry to say it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred I don't really give a damn about impressing you. It's an uncomfortable reality, but a true one: the kinds of fellows who define themselves vocally by their fantasy accomplishments aren't generally the same people whose opinions about things or people move any mountains. So yes. I play games. I even tend to excel at them. Yet you will pretty much never catch me standing around in a Gamestop nonchalantly tossing off my accomplishments to another "gamer" in lieu of a real conversation. The paper-thin wispy castoff shadow of the illusion of actual prestige is not the reason I play games in the first place. Which segues directly into the other reason...

2. That isn't why I play games. Xbox 360 and PS3's development of an online network connecting players inevitably spawned a system of in-game achievements, little nothing trophies visible to every other player that range from fun to chase after along the way you were going anyway, to ridiculously specialized herculean trials of patience and time investment. Either way, though, they're still just digital trophies, without secondary function or value beyond pride and braggadocio. I like earning achievements; most of them are spikes of fun amidst the already-fun game itself. But I don't really get anything out of having them afterward. I don't buy a new game with the thought "there's another thousand potential points for my Xbox Gamerscore!", I buy it because it looks like it would tell an intriguing story. Nothing more, nothing less. As I said before.

Later on, after a few people had responded to my original post above about stories, I penned this lengthier followup:

The best written, filmed, or audio adventures still impart above all else the wish that you, the one reading/watching/listening, could be there. Be a part of it. You watch Avatar, you wish Pandora was real; you'd want to walk places they didn't film, climb a tree just to do it. You read the Belgariad, or A Game of Thrones, and you wonder "How would I fare in such a world?"

Only in a well-made video game can the story transcend that tactile barrier of immersion, where the enjoyment doesn't have to stop at "I love this and wish I could touch it, change it, interact with it. I wish I could be a *part* of it."

People tell stories. People ARE stories, walking living tales of where they've been, what they've seen and heard and done. But in the end they're really just audio tracks of those stories, unless they write something or paint a picture. You can't go back in time and live an already-done story alongside someone else; you have to join your lives and go forward in synced stride to find one together. There's such beauty in that idea, so much so that we idolize it as the crystallized perfection of what human interaction can be, and call its basis "love," and it's execution "marriage." Yet through a video game I can sit down, log in, and immediately be sharing an adventure with the person sitting one couch cushion away. Is that any less beautiful of an experience?

I wrote in the original post that stories are the reason I most identify as making my life worth living, but I may have been slightly off-center. I think sharing stories, a hundred, a thousand adventures both real and animated, films, books, and absolutely video games, with someone special out there whose heart soars at the thought of taking her mind on a brand-new rollercoaster ride alongside someone she can forever count on to grin and be at the ready...

That's her. That's my wife. "Where are you, oh Princess?" I write here sometimes when I'm feeling lost and lonesome or whimsical, and it's she of whom I speak.

I call her Princess out of in-advance affection, and as a strong (if subtle) signal that I seek a woman of steel and inner quality worth genuflecting to from time to time, but in reality she's probably not a monarch's daughter, which is good because I'm far more Aladdin than Prince Ali*. Actually, she's probably just a regular woman, by most approximations. Maybe she has red hair. She's probably short, but has a closet full of tall shoes. She might have a passion for something I don't have the slightest idea how to do, but we'll both laugh a lot when I give it a first honest try (secretly believing, of course, that I am about to reveal myself as the supreme lord of the activity). The one thing I do know is that she will see the value of stories the way that I do: with endless hunger and almost childlike, wide-eyed wonder. An insatiable desire to cuddle up to me and watch a movie together, or play a lengthy epic RPG from end to end, maybe taking turns or divvying up characters to control, reading (and laughing) out loud in affected voices all the dialogue if it's a game without voice acting. Going on a journey, hand-in-hand, over and over again and every chance we get. And when there isn't an easy chance, we bloody well make the time.

* Fabulous he, Ali Ababwa

This is what that real-life love story should look like, done in combat allegory. All alight with united thought and incandescent magical light and perfect tandem motion toward a shared victory against all the demons and hardships of the world:

I'd love you anyway,
droolyface. ...I have no idea
who the girl in this picture is.

I want to travel. Widely. In the future, if and when I'm not eating cereal out of the box with one hand while I type to stave off malnutrition, I see trips to Europe, to Japan, to Australia and New Zealand and Hobbiton. I imagine long plane flights with tiny pillows and never quite enough space to spread out, or a week-long trip on a passenger ship with the crispness of salt air laden with spray ever evident, or idly passing hours doing pencil sketches of a woman's eyes while sitting in a comfortable train seat. I imagine those adventures in a dozen different forms... but no matter how I daydream it, someone is there with me. I can reach over and enclose her hand in mine while she sleeps. And I even gently wipe up a bit of drool, and never tell her that she drooled a little, because the secrets that make people feel better without ever knowing it when they're kept forever are the best secrets of all.

It's real-life adventures I crave. But right now I'm fairly poor, and have no manner nor method nor means to travel much of anywhere, so the number of true adventures I can undertake are sadly limited. Not to mention there isn't yet a Princess of my heart to go with. So I sometimes ask, Where are you, Oh Princess?, but time and again there is no lasting answer. Yet. Whichever way I turn in real life, the pieces just aren't in place right now. Not yet. Maybe not terribly soon, either, unless someone reading this blog finds my nigh-insufferable sarcastic wit and general amazing character to be of such quality that a well-paying job writing funny columns materializes out of thin air. (This would be absurdly acceptable to me, just so you know, Senior Editor sir/ma'am.)

It's okay, though. I'm not an impatient man. I hardly have anything to offer at the moment anyway, save some wit, a lot of heart and a rakish grin. Yet in the meantime, before all of the expenses of real-life adventuring can be met with the means I'm already casting huge fateful dice on earning for myself... there are always simulated adventures to go on. Stories to experience, just for the beautiful sake of the journey through them. And to share, if I can just find a woman who isn't afraid to dive completely into ideas the way that I do, and who doesn't see a story as nothing more than a way to spend a couple of hours and then proceed to start forgetting immediately.

We are sentient beings. Our stories are our goddamn legacy. Every ounce of beauty and sheer horror that has ever come forth from the hands, hearts and minds of our entire species since the dawn of time has come through the stories that we live, craft, speak and write and film and animate and tell. This isn't idle entertainment to me. It's the cornerstone purpose of my entire existence, and whether you acknowledge it or not, it is the very foundation of yours as well. You are living a story every day, one all your own, and someone somewhere thinks that it is the most beautiful story ever told.

So where are you, oh Princess? You who can see the endless potential beauty, the story just sitting silently and waiting to be told in every porcelain figurine in a roadside gift shop? In every person sitting, head-down, with their back against the front of a strange building on a clammy, drizzly day? In every single hand-crafted, visual extravaganza ever put onto the screen with a place carved right front and center, exactly sized for you with a controller in your hand?

I'd sure like to make your acquaintance, wherever you are. 

And don't worry. I'll never stop looking. You're just too worth finding.

Stay tuned.

02 - It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ego

Merry almost-Christmas, you guys! I'm gonna be out of town for a few days after this and probably won't get the chance to post again until at least Monday the 27th, so I thought I'd take the time to post about something that's been on my mind lately before I skip town.

Namely, my ego's deep, inner desire to commit inevitable suicide off of a high rise of its own meticulous construction. Here's a diagram illustrating the process:

This shows the process by which my ego spontaneously decides (upon little more than the merest glance at a new idea, skill, or dangerous martial talent) that I am and have always been the secret hero of that activity, the tragically-wasted-until-just-now natural master of its every nuance and secret, and that the world has been breathlessly awaiting my unveiling as such so it can shower me with laurels and other delicious spices of victory.* I truly believe that I can do anything... and that constant, passive belief brings to my existence great amounts of potential damage to emotional health (and sometimes to body). This is because in twenty-seven years of life, it has at times become evident that my ego's gaseous willingness to expand and fill a space of virtually any height, length and depth is actually not all that supportable all of the time.

*A laurel is not a spice; do not try to eat one, as they are poisonous. Also, Wikipedia was in 

no way involved between the original comment and the creation of this corrective footnote

Sadly less than a rare disaster; For me,
this is just a Wednesday afternoon.

Don't get me wrong; I am a reasonably talented guy. I drew that diagram, after all.* A part of my problem actually centers around the fact that I am not terrible at many of the new things I try. If I were just absolutely godawful at the majority of whimsical waterfall endeavors off of which I cheerfully paddle my personal life kayak, I might eventually learn to fear the crushing embarrassment and woeful damage to my confidence that the end results brought every time. This would in turn lead quite naturally to me thinking I should probably cease attempting to be the definitive Platonic form of literally everything that crosses my mind at any point, ever. Unfortunately, so long as I can continue to take a stab at new things and succeed at more than half of them, it would appear as though my psyche's ability to take normal embarrassment damage is permanently numbed. This may be attributable to my early-life experimentation with paste-eating, glue-eating, and marker sniffing back in pre-school.

*Circa nineteen hours of work, including extensive research on how to draw a bird professionally

Let's follow along with the diagram, and punctuate it with a notable example or two of some of the personal experiences I've had which highlight this mental trend of mine. We'll start at the beginning.

My ego doesn't just talk, it puts contractions within
contractions, like Kanye. Wait... did that sound egotistical?

Here at the starting line we have a fairly standard ego moment. It's doing well. It's enthusiastic about life; it's not huddled in a ball in a cupboard under the stairs begging for a magic letter to arrive and change everything. So far, we're doing good. Life is a challenge, and our ego is a little stick man with its arms thrown wide to take it all on. Unfortunately, it's also afflicted with a level of ADHD which makes it compulsively start doing things without the standard steps of stopping, thinking, or tying its shoes first. So it, upon perceiving anything resembling a challenge, dashes straight into whatever the situation may be. For the purposes of fleshing this out, we'll follow just two of my own personal examples from my mental DO NOT OPEN PLEASE EVER AGAIN file cabinet:

- An evening of karaoke at a friend's birthday celebration,

and

- A two-day hiking/camping trip that served as a friend's bachelor party

My ego proceeds cheerfully into the building to see what's going on.

I feel like he needs to slow down, or he's gonna pull a groin muscle or something.

STAGE 1: CONCEPT

In this stage of the Kung-Fu Pagoda of Ego, some Concept is idly introduced. This may be someone mentioning something in passing, or me sitting on my own watching YouTube videos of highly-trained parkourists (sorry, traceurs as they're properly called, you methodical twit*), or more rarely someone triple dog daring me to do something.

*Yes. You.

Note that the little ego man doesn't hesitate at all, but cheerfully starts ascending the stairs of that concept. This isn't a thought process, because I am a committee of one and my ego is sort of chairman of that particular board. There was no election, either. It was a hostile takeover.

I arrive at the restaurant for She-Friend's birthday celebration, Sister and Girlfriend-At-The-Time (GATT) in tow. She-Friend and her group already have a table, so we join them. Offhand, somebody mentions that it's karaoke night. My reaction? "Great! Pass me that book. I wonder if there're any songs I know." I do not generally sing.

I receive an email from Best Friend's Best Man, informing me that the bachelor party will be consisting of zero (0) strippers (mixed reaction; I'm sort of fond of boobs, but also sort of afraid of strange suddenly-naked women, so I'm both dismayed and relieved), zero (0) pints of beer (happy face; I hate the stuff), and one (1) grueling hike with overnight camping trip up and down a mountain about two hours drive from my home (as the crow flies; it's around nine hours on a burro, because burros are lazy). My reaction? "Sure! Sounds great. I'll gather up my stuff." I own no hiking nor camping gear.

Look, dude, you think this level of professional-grade artwork is easy?
Fine. YOU draw the next one.

STAGE 2: WITNESS

Here at the second floor of the Kung-Fu Pagoda of Willing Ego Suicide, my ego gets to Witness someone attempting, completing, or even downright acing the holy hell out of the action I am currently failing to adequately contemplate (while also attempting to navigate stairs that were apparently made for Paul Bunyan, or Clifford or something). Someone somewhere has done it before, and I get to watch them try, with varying degrees of success that are usually in some way attached to the first-floor Concept mentioning. If the person who first mentioned it doesn't then proceed directly to providing a Witness example, I will usually go curiously exploring around later on my own time for a visual/audio source of the idea in action. Which inevitably goes back to online videos, and stuff like this*, or THIS**, or even this***.

* 1:22 - No hands!

** 1:45 - 0010100011

*** 0:32 - No effing joke

She-Friend and Sister get up to sing a duet together, while I watch. They make it look pretty easy; Sister had a couple of drinks to get loose before she took the mic, sure, but everyone seems to be laughing, enjoying and cheering them on all the same. I bet I can do this, too, without needing to be buzzed or drunk first (I don't generally drink). In fact, I probably don't need to prepare at all.

I've been hiking before, even if it isn't exactly the same. It'll be similar, right? Well, I've taken long walks. Sometimes whole rooms at a time, crossed. On foot. I haven't been exercising, lifting, or running for about two years, and I spend most of my time eating and then secreting food, but pssshhh I know how to hike. 'Snot even hard. One foot in front of the other. Duh. And camping? Try sleeping. I am the sleep master. Hours of drilling each and every day. I'm golden for this.

He seriously does climb every one of
these metaphorical buildings he happens across.

STAGE 3: HYPOTHESIS

On level three of the Kung-Fu Pagoda of Willing and Often Assisted Ego Suicide... a hypothesis forms, a worming little snake of an idea in the dark corners of my mind. It starts as a tiny little nubblin, poking its head out of the topsoil of whatever passes for earth inside my mind, just saying hi to the air. Then it sort of wriggles up, and whispers a tiny bit, something like "pssswsssyourdestinyssssswwsspsspsssw," and I cock my head to try to hear better and it obliges by crawling out more and getting a bit louder, "pspspsswsswwwyouwerebornforthisthingyoujustnowdiscoveredssspssswpsssswsss." And I think, yeah, what if? You know, what if I was actually made not for writing, or for someday helping to make a baby and perpetuating my genetic line like a normal carbon-based human life-form, but in fact was created solely to be, say, the very epitome of all martial artists anywhere, ever? Hm? What's that? What evidence do I have to even consider such a thing as a possibility, having never had any training nor practice nor even a basic affinity for combat, violence, or flawless perfect grace in motion? Well, what evidence do you have that I'm not, smart guy? Huh? Yeah, that's right, Voice of Reason. Sit your sensible ass back down and be quiet. I'm listening to Sinister Hypothesis Worm right now.

This idea, having taken root, somehow acquires a megaphone without even doing anything to earn one. It's just there, in its hand. Also, it has a hand.

Karaoke's a pretty good idea. Hey, you know what would be neat? Man... what if I turned out to be, like, great at it? Or no... better than great. What if everyone I ever met for the rest of my life following tonight told me I should be on American Idol, all the way up until I was on there but left the show of my own volition before the final vote, stepping down in a cloud of mystery and nobility to pursue my own deeper calling somewhere? All the ladies would be like, "where'd that one guy go? I wanted to vote for him six times a minute," but I'd be halfway up a Tibetan mountain on a pilgrimage by then, singing myself gently to sleep each night with the newfound voice of a sexy masculine angel. That would be fun.

That guy at the bar has hair like Ryan Seacrest.

...That's it. I'm gonna do it.

I'm a little older than all these other guys, come to think of it. Best Friend's always been a bit stronger than me, physically... hm. Seems like the kind of thing that would be an advantage here, if I didn't already know that I was born to hike without even having to try. Clearly I haven't tapped into my deep inner physical potential, which I now realize can only be brought to full flower by the act of hiking with other, better-prepared people, yet still doing it better than them. Can a person win at hiking?

I'ma find out how, and I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna hike the shit out of that mountain.

This is exactly what I look like when I go up or down stairs in real life.

STAGE 4: BELIEF

By the fourth floor of the Kung-Fu Pagoda of All-Too Willing and Often Assisted Ego Suicide... we've left reality entirely, though I know it not. I've traversed the most precarious, unwise, backwoods, thin-ice, overgrown game trail of a line of reasoning to get to the place where I feel (very unwisely) comfortable throwing some dice on something. I don't look at the dice, either, or notice that there are, like, four ones on each die and they're hissing in my hand with obvious hatred for me and any luck I might have brought with me. I'm too ready to go to be bothered with those niggling details. I actually Believe that I am destiny's chosen son for [insert idea or activity here]. And because I've managed all of this entirely within my own head up until this point (the entire process described here, mind you, takes me roughly sixteen seconds to start and silently complete), not even the most protective, well-meaning friend has even the slightest chance of stopping me from making an ass of myself. Most of them aren't at all aware of how they're about to be dazzled, and that's okay. The surprising memory of my debut attempt will be forever burned into their souls. This is true, but not in the way that I have misled myself to think.

...I'm not just another guy here at karaoke tonight. My goodness, how could I not have seen it before? I haven't really worked my voice out in years, or practiced singing where any living being could possibly see or hear me, but I can see now the way fate has chosen to direct me. It brought me here tonight so I could stand up, take that mic, and belt out a song so beautifully, so flawlessly, so incredibly alluringly heart-stoppingly arousingly perfectly, that Sister would be amazed. GATT would take me home that night and ruin a full set of perfectly good clothes by ripping them off in a passionate furor, which would be sort of annoying once I had the time to slow down and think about it but in the moment would be totally okay. She-Friend's birthday would nevermore be the celebration of the anniversary of her birth, but the memory of the day I found my one truest calling, redefining music itself.

You know what? I'm young, I'm physically capable of being fit. I'm healthy. I don't smoke. Obviously these base prerequisites are more than sufficient to ensure my ability to get up and down one silly mountain in front of four other guys. I mean, getting down the other side isn't even a challenge. People fall down mountains all the time just by stepping poorly and sort of losing themselves in the joy of the moment. I could probably just sprint to the top, leaving a dust trail for the other guys to coughingly follow for the next four hours only to find me sitting serenely at the top inside the hastily-built summer house I constructed while I was waiting for them to catch up. I won't do that, of course, because I'm a nice person. But they probably feel in their hearts that it's a definite threatening possibility, and will be grateful to me when I don't, and give me extra food at dinner in unspoken tribute.

I wish there was a trapdoor for roof access on every building. I really
like climbing ladders, for some reason.

STAGE 5: ATTEMPT

On the fifth and top floor, the Really Effing Longname Pagoda finally brings its A-game to the table. This is what it's all been for, the grand culmination of the huge buildup. I'm all set on confidence (completely ethereal) and practically overprepared with hard, factual knowledge (an amalgamation of rumors, hearsay, and things I just made up entirely over the past quarter-minute) on the subject. It's time to dance. Or sing. Or jump off of something.

I stand up and make my way to the front. I grip the mic in my hand, which is a little bit sweaty for some reason I don't have time to think about, because I'm completely distracted by my rapid heartbeat which is suddenly so loud I start to worry that they won't be able to hear the music over it. Then there's some problem with the CD player, and it takes a minute to get the music queued up properly, and as I stand up there awkwardly in the silence during the time perfectly allotted to actually giving some thought to why my hands might be sweaty and my heart racing (like oh as if THIS IS A REALLY, REALLY BAD IDEA AND YOUR PALM IS IMMUNE TO YOUR PAGODA NONSENSE LISTEN TO MEEEEEEE), I instead turn my mind to the snacks and appetizers back on the table. Those were tasty snacks, and I can't wait to get back to them after I blast this song off the books and into the hearts and minds of the audience. They'll taste sweeter with the sauce of victory on them anyway. The music kicks in. I grip the mic, leaning into it slightly, and put my sexy face on. Time to change some lives.

The morning of the hike arrives and I stumble out to the car to meet the others. A good hike begins at whatever the hindcrack of dawn happens to be, it turns out, minus one hour for luck. I've packed myself a backpack full of the barest essentials (six small flashlights, ONE [1] bottle of water, my Nintendo DS, a steel hatchet, my buck knife, a change of clothes, and no food; who needs food in the forest? I have a hatchet. I am Natty effing Bumppo, bitches). When we all arrive at the base of the mountain hours later, the sun is just beginning to rise. The other guys pull out their rigs, great big backpacks that look like tiny buildings complete with girders and scaffoldings. They've got tents, bedrolls, and food. Everyone looks at me, but I'm examining the sky. What a pretty sky. We'd better get going. I don't want to have to stop for you guys too often.

If real birds would just look like m's, everything
would be easier for everyone to draw.

That last moment, there? That exclamation point? That's the moment when it finally occurs to me by a sudden landslide of inescapable evidence that my entire approach to the situation I now find myself lost within was a crisis of errors. Pompeii erupts, and the tiny citizens of the like-named ego city I've built at the base of the mountain burn and die one by agonizing one at a time, cursing the SimCity experiment of creation and wanton destruction they turned out to be in the end. It's hideous to experience. I can only imagine how hideous it is to watch. That moment goes something like this:

The music kicks in. The song I chose? "Lose Yourself." By Eminem. 


Oh, no. 


OH NO. 


WHAT HAVE I DONE? I have to perform this right now? Who am I? How did I get up here?!


Oh, shit, the music... Uh... "Look... if you had... one shot... or one opportunity... to seize everything you ever wanted..."

Two minutes up the mountain, my feet start to hurt. Oh, no. I forgot my insoles. 


.....kinda hungry.


Wait... insoles?? What about food? What the hell am I going to eat for two days of heavy physical activity? Really? I didn't bring anything? Where have I been these past weeks? Was there no food for sale near there? What am I going to sleep on? This is a goddamned forest. The woods. I don't have any fur. I'm going to freeze and die. Best Friend is forever going to remember his bachelor party as the morning they awoke to find me lying dead in my own poop, with a deer eating my stupid video games. This was a terrible plan. There was no plan. I'm going to die and be an embarrassment, or live and be a burden on the other guys. Well. Damn. It. Nothing to do but keep walking.


...Why the hell does this mountain have to go up all the time?


I don't want to keep being like this. It gets me into trouble. But on the other hand, since I apparently am possessed of a shining nucleic internal confidence center that is (for some reason) naturally immune to such diseases as "embarrassment," "shame" and "fear," it's probably only these periodic backfires of colossal ridiculity that keep me from floating away entirely full of myself. A good thing in immensely complex disguise? Perhaps. Should you ever spot a slow-moving, oddly-me-looking dirigible moving across a beautiful sunset sky some twilight evening, we'll both know the Pagoda has failed me. In the opposite way.

...And yes. I really did spit some Eminem on the mic in front of a crowded restaurant full of strangers. Someone threw an ice cube at me, but I think it's only because some kinder person stopped him, mid-heave, from throwing the entire stocked bar at me, and one cube slipped out.

Welcome to the ongoing glory of my life.

Stay tuned.

01 - 'Tis the Season for Goddamn Bees

Happy Monday, everybody (assuming that's not a contradiction in terms all on its own).

Winter's upon us now, and in full flower. We've had our first snow, there's been talk of the construction of an igloo, a snowfolk man was designed to inhabit it, it was decreed he would be armed with a twig spear, and tiny snowseals were promised for him to be able to hunt with said spear... you know, all the classic hallmarks of nature's annual wardrobe shift. Here are the detailed prelim design schematics:

We have an opening for "design team" currently.
Please submit all applications via carrier pigeon.

And with all the earmarks of the seasonal shifting upon us, we... ...we...

Hang on. That man... that snowfolk man. Did you really look at him?

At first glance, he merely looks happy. Then you look again, closer.

He's... he's terrifying. He's like something out of a child's snowy nightmare.

FLEE, TINY SEALS! FOR I AM HE WHO IS CALLED DEATH!!

*coughs* Anyway...

With all the earmarks of the seasonal shifting upon us, we had nothing on our plates but the leisure to turn our minds to the joy of the holidays, the peace and calm comfort of the love of our families, and the general underlying sense of peace and joy that so suffuse this time of year. Right?

...Right??

Let me start at the relative beginning.

Some months ago, when the sunlight lasted for more than five minutes every day* and the sky didn't periodically throw the most passive-aggressive tiny snowballs ever at you every time you turned around, my little sister and I found a bee inside the apartment. This was briefly terrifying to Sister, and she scampered away at a rate of speed usually required for aircraft to achieve lift, or for when I point in a crowd and say "isn't that Patrick Stewart over there?"

* Observation made by a gentleman accustomed to awakening between 12-3pm each day.

I managed to catch the bee by placing a cup against the window, and sliding a piece of paper between the lip and the glass, then folding the edges carefully over in a circular pattern so there wouldn't be room for it to crawl out in a crease, and then carefully double-checking the edges to make sure I hadn't missed anything. By the time I was done and felt comfortable pulling the glass off of the window, the sun had risen and set twice more, and I needed to shave again. I could have probably made a perfect scale origami model of the Statue of Liberty in less time. Sister didn't seem to notice the inherent hypocrisy of my mocking her for being so afraid of a single bee, then painstakingly building paper Shawshank around it before I felt comfortable moving it a single inch, though, so I kept my illusions quiet and to myself.

We put the bee outside. By that I mean I carried the flawless prison model outside and down the front steps, out into the grass, and threw them apart while simultaneously turning and running away. I'm not even sure the word "running" describes it correctly. My escape actually looked more like this:

Have I mentioned what a manly man I am?

That was the end of the saga of bee, or so we thought. It turns out we were living in the shadow and illusory safety of false assumptions, having assumed that the bee had simply snuck inside while one of us was coming in or out of the front door one day. Thus had he been returned the same way (albeit slightly more confused and with an urge to seek out Andy Dufresne), and all was well and balanced in the universe. Mistake.

The bee, it was later to be found, most likely responded to these events by shaking off his wings, taking off, flying twenty-six feet around to the back of the apartment building, and crawling right back into the vent where he and his dark brethren had constructed their evil nest of evil. The bees were our neighbors, though we yet knew it not. Slowly we started to learn.

As the autumn came to a close, a few more bees made themselves known within the apartment. We would always locate them by their telltale buzz against one of the windows, fighting valiantly against the glass (which I can only think bees everywhere must see as some kind of insidious other kind of air that hates bees and loves to play tricks upon them). The cup-plus-legendary-origami method worked great for these scattered few as well, and little attention was paid to any possibility of an alarming trend just getting started. I suppose in the back of my mind I thought that with the waning of the autumn the bees were, like, lined up and waiting underneath the awning outside our front door for one of us to open it so they could stealthily make their way inside under a tiny cardboard box like Solid Snake. My mind is funny like that sometimes. Given the unspoken choice between the likelihood of bees having some interior entrance to the apartment, or bees who are highly-trained stealth operatives watching and memorizing our patrol routes to take advantage of a maybe twice-daily opportunity, I will always predictably assume the more complex possibility and begin cheerfully planning totally unnecessary countermeasures in the wrong direction. This makes for fantastic adventure stories, and absolutely ineffective efforts.

One night after letting a bee out the door again that morning, I was sitting at this very keyboard having a think, when I heard an odd sort of *clink* sound above my head. A glance up at the light fixture showed an odd little shadow on the other side of the frosted glass. A shadow that was moving. I stood on my bed to have a peek in, and saw from about one foot away that a bee had crawled through one of the screw holes in the light fixture and fallen into the glass covering, but had apparently broken something necessary in doing so. It sort of writhed around for a minute, then fell still... and I finally had the thought that maybe the bees weren't coming in through the front door all this time after all. I cocked my head and had a quick mental count and realized I had so far put nine bees outside using my patented method. They were somehow living in the ceiling between our apartment, and the one upstairs?! Either that, or... dear god. The apartments upstairs were entirely full of bees, and we were just catching their imperialistic, expansionist overflow. Had they overtaken our neighbors in a daring blitzkrieg weeks before, their decomposing bodies still lying at this very moment underneath an undulating carpet of living bee not seven feet above my head?? I had to plan for any and all possibilities. I picked up the phone, my most determined look on my face, and slid out the keyboard sexily. It was time.

Time... to tweet.

Here follows the Twitter posts from that day, detailing the events of what I started out calling "Operation Intercept."

The realization that the bees would not, as I had believed before, stop coming in as the weather got colder, but would instead probably double or triple their efforts, pushed me to action. Military action. I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Operation Intercept was a go. It was time to find out where the enemy kept striking from, once and for all. I took a prisoner. Same method.

I had good men under my command. (I was alone in the house.) A little field commending never hurt anybody. The bee was probably a bit confused as to whom I kept addressing loudly as "soldier!" though, as I paced around talking to myself.

This was a great way for me to avoid having to admit that I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get the bee to "talk" to me about much of anything. I tried striking up conversation the way I usually do with cute girls at the grocery store, but I don't think it had ever even seen a single episode of Glee.

I'd had a genius idea. I took him outside and let him go, but didn't Swan Lake my way to extremely gay safety this time. Instead I watched him collect himself, and shake off the horrors of his brief imprisonment. After a couple of years of heavy drinking, a tough-loving family intervention, and a brief stint in rehab, he took flight and traveled... right around the house. I followed. It was seriously like twenty-five feet. I had spent collective hours catching and releasing bees that were then turning around and climbing right back inside and down into the apartment again. It's actually feasible that I caught the same bee twice at some point, but due to reprehensible levels of hitherto-unintentional bee racism thought they all looked alike and didn't notice.

The vents serve as exhaust ports for the bathroom fans in each apartment. I took some small measure of revenge in the idea that the price the bees had paid for their little occupation was having to live within the smell of every good-sized poop Sister and I had used the fan to clear away over the past quarter of a year.

The vent had around thirty bees lazily flying in and out of the cracked edges, and I could see the shape of a small nest just inside. It was time to get serious. My real-life backup arrived as I was standing outside taking these photos. What I had been referring to as my "First Recon sniper unit" in each Twitter post was actually the weary-eyed maintenance man wielding about eight full cans of spray poison.

I scampered in after he was done going to town on the vent to take this casualty photo of the ones that had fallen below. Some of them were still twitching and writhing around from the poison. It was morbid of me, I know... but this was war.

And war... war never changes.

The bees lay defeated. Their dark stronghold... destroyed. We were victorious! First Recon put out their collective cigarette with a tired sigh, climbed back into a beat-up old truck and drove off someplace where there was less bee and more beer. I went back inside, secure in our victory and ready to celebrate with some tasty kettle corn and an episode of Burn Notice. Oh, I was sure one or two more survivors from deep inside might still crawl down after darkfall some night (they were attracted to the light shining up through the light fixture screw holes, it turns out, and would come to investigate at night through any fixture in which we'd left the bulbs burning for any length of time), but we could simply kill them and eventually be done with the whole unpleasant affair.

We were wrong again. The bees kept coming, and in greater numbers. I can only imagine how many of them were actually living in the six-inch space between the two apartments; the nest we'd found by the entrance was the military equivalent of a single guard tower in Warcraft, just a forward position from which they could send out raiders to bring back loot, liquor and captured slave bee women for their barbaric bee nightfire celebrations. In fact, having poisoned and then blocked off their only convenient exit (the maintenance guy came back sometime later and sealed it up with foam insulation, trapping them inside), the bees slowly started to realize that if they wanted their food/booze/beepoon fixes, they were going to have to come inside now and take it from us. Sister and I started to encounter between two and five bees each day, and we lived in constant fear of more. We went nowhere unarmed; a bee-killing gauntlet of death was near at all times (this was in actuality a common foot slipper, worn on the hand for absurdly girly swats at invading bees, or for when Sister wanted to kill one). Our favorite freebies were when the bees would choose the kitchen light fixture to descend through, since it was encased entirely in glass rather than just consisting of a frosted drop plate like the others. This meant that any bee soldier foolish enough to choose that entrance would fall into a small, super-heated glass Thunderdome of death, damned to burn and die in short order with no time to write a will for his family back home, leaving them destitute and squabbling over who would get the deed to the speedboat and grandma's old knickknack collection, and all because of that bee's lack of foresight and bad career planning. At the time of this writing, there are somewhere around twenty bee corpses in there, creating a morbid shadow effect all across the food preparation surfaces in our kitchen and generally bringing good cheer.

No, I'm not going to take it off and clean it out. There could be more bees up there crouched by the entrances, lying in wait for me to do just that. Don't be silly.

In the end, the problem was solved by a different method entirely. I waited until daylight, stood on a chair, and put tape over the screw holes on each light fixture. I used black electrical tape so the heat from the incandescents wouldn't slowly erode its stickiness, and not at all because it was the first and only roll of tape I could find and I'm really quite lazy. Since then, we haven't seen a single bee. The war seems to be over.

But we'll never really know until spring comes around. I shall spend my winter deep in study, practicing my en dehors pirouette over and over and harsh drilling over again until it is flawless, the stuff of legends, for the day the tiny bee Khan living in our ceiling rallies his tiny horseborne banded beeshiks and ventures into our lands again.

Stay tuned.

00 - Let there be blog.

Well, here we are.

I guess I can take another stabby stab at this blogging... notion. I hesitate to say "trend," because that would imply that I think I'm being trendy by creating this little receptacle, and my motivations are really much less substantial than even that. I have this old friend, you see, who rather suddenly told me that my various and sundry musings might be worth putting down in a particular place, which I suspect may have been her very polite and positive way of asking me to stop being weird at her every time we talk and go do it somewhere else (I had just finished telling her that I wanted to make a newspaper hat to put on for when Sister came home on her lunch break, so I could take a picture of the look on her face when she came in and saw her grown brother sitting on the floor wearing a newsprint fedora). And since the majority of discussions on internet message boards tend to be roughly as rewarding as tossing a coin into a fountain (if the coin was bent and ruined first, and the fountain was full of endlessly cascading pee), she further suggested that a blog might be a good idea. That turned into a hesitant offer of "I'll do it if you will," which somehow made the whole notion a lot more fun and palatable to me because now we each get to have one guaranteed follower. That way when she accrues six or eight more and it eventually turns into a couple hundred since she's a pretty girl with actual interesting things to say, I'll be able to look at my list of just her and console myself that at least one person is avidly reading my every post title. And then skipping the text. Our conversation then, quite predictably, turned into this:

Me: I'm kind of excited, now. I have a blog. What if it gets really popular?
Her: It'd be awesome.
Me: What if eight thousand people a minute are reading my goofy thoughts and try to make me the leader of their city-state or something?
Her: "Omg, Stacy, did you read the pen in the stone this morning?" "Loved it!" What if people FB link it?! Oooh.
Me: What will I do with all the ladies' panties when they start arriving in the mail??
Her: ...

I've attempted this before, actually. I love to write, you see, and fancy myself a storyteller, so a couple of times in the past I've come by various winding roads to the reasonable idea that writing something down regularly might not be an awful endeavor. Unfortunately, my brain's tandem desire to maintain the attention span of a goldfish conflicted with this, and so somewhere out there in the ethereal mists lie the abandoned corpses of two blogs, with around two posts each. Not much of an epitaph, but for all I can remember they were just recipes for corned beef hash, or my grocery list for that week or something anyway.

So who am I? If for some reason you don't personally know me yet and have found your way here, my name's Gabriel (sometimes), and I'm a not-getting-any-younger freelance novelist and writer. There's more to me than just that, of course (like, one more detail, maybe, that probably has to do with a video game), but we can figure the rest out as we go... wherever it is that we're going with this.

Well, I don't really have anything else to say that moment, and I'd better get cracking on finding a newspaper if there's gonna be hats to roll eyes at (I have quotas to meet), so I guess we'll find out more later on.

Stay tuned.