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An observation: perspective changes everything.

I was up north packing up the old house last week. Around noon, the potential buyer was coming over to review some things with the home inspector, so I thought it prudent to remove our nutty dogs from the premises for awhile. Also, it was time for lunch and I’d already finished off the bag of double stuf (TM) minto Oreos in the pantry.

So I loaded the dogs in the car and hit the road. I had an hour to kill and figured I’d pick up some food and drive around town. They’re had been a development boom of sort since we left and I wanted to see what changed.

I was driving my wife’s SUV, a necessary departure from my more fuel efficient car. You can’t fit many boxes in a compact car. Especially with two nutty dogs. I pulled into Wendy’s, treating myself to some fast food, and then set about exploring town.

Development in Ohio follows the same rules, the same restaurants crowding along the highway so that each exit is indistinguishable from the last. I was happy to see some non-franchise establishments cropping up here and there. I was also to see a little economic development coming to the little town that had lost so much commerce to Columbus to the south.

However, I found myself driving around town in a giant SUV while shoving trans-fat laden fast food in my face. Just driving and eating with no destination, killing time and emitting carbon. I didn’t see my action for what it was until a guy pulled up next to me in a Honda Insight hybrid at a traffic light. He was a young guy, fit and environmentally responsible. I was the portrait of American waste.

I wondered for a second if the universe was in danger, as if the close proximity of light and dark forces might create a black hole or something.

The I just shrugged, killed the rest of my Diet Coke, and pulled into a gas station.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Discard an axiom: Action almost always trumps inaction. The rule itself comes from 43Folders, but I feel it was one of those things that was always floating around in my head without having actual words put to it. Kind of like all those business and self help books (the line between the two is sometimes blurred) where you read some sage wisdom that is really just common sense put to different music. Still, I liked this nugget enough to write it down.

“Just keep moving” is all the rule says. It reminds me of another rule from a book about writing I read just after high school. Something about keeping your pen moving, even if you are writing trash. Action breeds progress. Whenever I’m in a bad mood, I make a list of all the things I want to do. This cheers me up immediately. The world moves from one of dread to one of potential. I’m surprised at the power of a list of things to clean.

This idea is particularly applicable to video games. I used to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein with some co-workers at lunch. I’m currently in the running for the worst First Person Shooter player ever. I’m terrible. Lunch was always humiliating, but I kept at it, hoping a) I would improve, or b) I’d be up against at least one person worse than me. Neither happened. I got myself killed a lot by standing around.

You just have to keep moving.

My wife has done a pretty good job discarding this axiom for video games. We were playing Super Mario Galaxy awhile back and she would just stop and wait something out. To my shock, the tactic worked. No one from IT capped her in the back of the head. The giant floating mushroom head moved out of the way and she moved on.

I’ve tried to discard this axiom in the past when it comes to writing. I’ll quit with a journal or abandon a blog with the idea that I will be able to recharge, to renew. As if my writing muse feeds off of some limited bile within me that I must not deplete. This never works. Every time I start again, I’m a little more rusty. It takes a little longer to find my voice again. My muse feeds on momentum. If I stop, there is an increasing chance I will never start again.

Read a little differently, this axiom tells us to be a little more deliberate, a little less quick to jump in to something. Take some time to consider the path of the giant floating mushroom head before choosing your own course. But I am a deliberate person. If anything, I discard this action far too much. This is what I just learned about myself. Again.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Courage! Courage? Really? How many chances does the average guy have to demonstrate courage? I’m not talking about soldiers on the battlefront. Or Tibetan monks facing Chinese soldiers. Just normal American guys like me.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too many books about the apocalypse lately, but I’m starting to doubt my manliness. The most terrifying situation I find myself in these days is a job interview. And I think I’m getting a little better at these. Think about courage, about what it means to stand up for something, to perhaps give your life for something. This goes a lot further than walking down a dark corridor or snooping through an abandoned house. My tenth grade history teacher said the great thing about the American revolution was that “thirteen loosely organized colonies rose up to fight the number one military power in the world and won”.

That’s courage. I’m sitting here breaking down the cushion on the right side of our couch.

I don’t think I’m alone here. We’ve diminished as a culture. I’d say “consumers”, but would risk sounding like some kind of coffee shop beatnik. But it’s kind of true. We’re insulated, so far from pre-antibiotic hardships.

I feel a rant coming on here, so I’ll go another way.

We watched a couple of documentaries lately, Darkon and The King of Kong. Both movies made me think of courage a bit. At least what courage means in the twenty-first century first world.

Darkon follows a group of live action role playing gamers in Maryland. These are the folks who dress up in full fantasy garb and fight with foam swords and axes. I’ve seen these people in action, but didn’t know how deep the game went. It turns out there is an entire game world the players are experiencing. They fight these battles and wars for lands on an imaginary map. It’s complex: alliances, betrayals, politics. Like a lot of things, there’s a lot more going on once you start poking around.

The King of Kong follows a challenger as he attempts to become the world champion of Donkey Kong. Although it sounds like a simple feat (just get the highest score, right?), the challenge quickly becomes complicated. Alliances, betrayals, politics.

Here’s my point, so far as I can reason. We’ve become diluted. The average person doesn’t face much strife, does not ever face a challenge like previous generations. So people turn to other endeavors to try and win some of this back, to feel some sense of accomplishment. Perhaps it’s an elaborate fantasy game. Perhaps it’s a thirty year old video game. It doesn’t matter. The point is that these challenges are no less real and intimidating so long as the players are emotionally invested.

I’ve said before that I have a lot of respect for people who are way into a hobby. I say game on. Just do something, feel something.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly.

This is a hard thing to do any more. It’s 2008 and our pocket of the universe is enmeshed in electricity, cables and wires, roads, satellite feeds. As we lie in bed at night, the windows glow. Like the city itself emanates some blue power. I could crouch in the downstairs bathroom with a towel tied over my face. But people think that kind of activity is odd.

So, I lie there and listen. I can hear my wife’s soft breathing, the dogs snoring. The baby monitor hisses white noise from the humidifier in our son’s room. Outside, a dog barks and a car drives by: stereotypical neighborhood soundtrack stuff. Below these sounds, you can hear the low hum of civilization.

Even in our old house, home, there was no darkness. Our neighbor had a sodium vapor lamp atop his shed, giving our bedroom window a glow there, too. Last summer, the ballast in the lamp was burning up and it buzzed as we sat on the deck. But the land was dark aside from the neighbor’s lamp. On a clear night, if you put you hand up to block that light, you could see the wash of the Milky Way.

Once, when my wife was still my girlfriend, I stayed in the house alone with her dog while she traveled for work. He was a brute of a dog, two hundred pounds of Rottweiler. But friendly, of course. I’d let him out before going to bed and he wouldn’t come in. So I went to get him. In the darkest corner of the yard, far from the sodium vapor lamp, we met. I had a moment of fear, realizing there was no way for me to make it back to the house before he tore me to pieces. If he wanted to. He looked at me as if considering it.

Instead, he wagged his tail and bounced up to me like Tigger. He would let me live.

On the one lane road that often flooded, there was no hum of the city, of civilization. Occasionally, we could hear a motorcycle drive by. Or a peacock in the woods. Or a dog barking. There’s always a dog barking somewhere, isn’t there?

Houses line up behind us now instead of a cornfield. This leads to far fewer Children of the Corn nightmares. But more self-consciousness. In the back yard, you feel exposed to a hundred windows, a thousand eyes. A kid lives in the house behind us. He cuts across all the backyards on his way home from school. The dogs go nuts, barking and chomping at the door when he walks by, as if he is the advance guard of some invading force.

I wonder what that kid thinks of the neighborhood.

The baby sighs, one of the dogs passes gas. And we go on, sleeping in a protective cocoon of family, hiding from the blue glow outside.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Ask my body? My body tells me I have a cold.

One of the the little surprises about being a parent is the dramatic increase in communicable diseases. This is one of the things no one tells you. Those without children may be shocked to learn that there is anything someone won’t tell you before the day arrives. Everyone has advice. Sleeping through the night, soothing croup, teething, whatever. You get a lot of advice.

At first, the advice is welcome, especially during the pregnancy. After all, this all you want to talk about for awhile. You’re excited. This is the most exciting time of your life. Nine months of anticipation, wondering what little person will emerge from your wife’s womb.

But it gets old. Eventually, you will tire of your neighbor’s aunt rattling off a home-brew concoction for baby shampoo. You nod and smile, but they know you’re not really listening. At this point in the cycle, you get the familiar admonishment: “You’re life is going to change”. A shit-eating grin usually follows.

By the time the nine months rolls around, most people think they know what they’re in for. But they’re wrong. You don’t really understand a three-hour feeding schedule or the compulsion to track daily bowel movements until you’ve been through it. But you figure it out. And then you forget.

Our son is almost a year old and I can hardly remember what it was like in that zombie-like state of fresh parenthood. It’s already hard for me to remember what he was like those first few months, tiny and helpless. Now he’s a fearless brute of a baby, continually grabbing for the dogs’ collars and climbing under tables. And, thankfully, sleeping through the night.

Sometimes I get glimpses of just how small he still is. When I’m changing his diaper, he will sometimes curl his legs in a way that would require me to dislocate hips and tear ACLs. It’s the fetal pose you see in the doctor’s office posters. He curls this way naturally, his body not yet deformed by adulthood. At these times I see how far away from growing up he is.

I think of my own body. In my head, I will always remain twenty-four. My body tells a different tale. I’m fitter than I was was a few years ago, but a much uglier beast than in high school. Hairier, and increasingly odder places. Teeth a little more yellow. Knuckles cracked from winter wind. A shoulder I can’t seem to keep in socket. Bad habits and misspent youth have all marked up this form of mine. I’m still a young man, not yet into my middle thirties. But I understand where my grandfather is coming from when he remarks about my son’s tiny white teeth.

Our pediatrician tells us that a baby in day care will get six to twelve illnesses in the first year. What he–and no one else–bothers to mention is that this means the parents will catch the very same six to twelve illnesses. It’s impossible to be in close contact with a little one and not catch the bug of the month. I hadn’t had a cold in two years prior to our son’s birth. Since then, I’ve had three. And somehow, Mono–a disease I thought you only caught from making out with girls in study hall.

So today, I cannot breathe through my nose or taste anything. The same old cold we all have throughout our lives. This is what my body tells me today. Tomorrow I will feel a little better and by the end of the weekend I will be back to normal. I will forget what it’s like to have a cold, much like I’ve forgotten how it was to survive on four hours of sleep in the early days. Next month, I will get this cold again.

I think of our little boy. Indeed, he’s less of a baby and more of a boy now. Small and perfect, he learns something about his body nearly every day. How to clap, how to wave, how to stand. We watch him grow, amazed at his journey. Every day we get a little glimpse of the little person he’s growing into. And we can’t wait for more. But in another way, I think of his little body and want him to stay this way forever. Perfect and fresh, unmarked and unhurt by the big world out there.

Your life is going to change, they said. This kind of thing must have been what they meant.

I love me some nutty weather. Often the cost is tragic, but bad weather reminds us that we are an arrogant civilization. I think we all need a slap in the face every once in awhile to keep us in our place. A slap from the cold hand of Mother Nature.

As a kid, I was always disappointed after a summer thunderstorm. I remember going outside with my dad after a particularly bad storm. I was seven or eight years old. The power was still out in the neighborhood and the intersections were flooded as the storm sewers struggled to process the deluge. The clouds parted and the sun popped back in full glory, filling the afternoon once again with wet ohio summer heat. There was a rainbow.

How lame.

I don’t much care for rainbows. It means the storm has passed. I prefer the tension before the storm, the chaotic wind of a passing weather front. A rainbow means the excitement is over. You don’t have to be afraid of the clouds. Go back to watching TV.

So we got some snow last weekend. Quite a bit of snow, actually. They call it a “blizzard”. This is something. Although local weather reporters jump all over any kind of inclement conditions, I note that they hold this word in reserve. Like if misusing the word causes the jet stream to cancel one scheduled tornado warning for your viewing area later that spring.

It’s March and we the sky just dumped more snow on us than we’ve had all year. This was unfortunate, especially for my step brother who had scheduled his out of town wedding for this weekend. Instead of celebrating with family and friends, we were stuck inside, watching the local news team dispatched to all corners of the city for an in-depth look at White Death 2008.

To children, snow means snow days and snow men and snow ball fights. As adults, we are conditioned to dislike snow days like this. Adults tend to think more in terms of longer commutes and shoveling-related coronaries. But there is a part of me that finds it all very exciting.

Here’s the thing: We have a media industry geared around self-help and control. Lose weight, find a mate, control your finances, curb your addiction. I myself spend a lot of time thinking about very geeky first world organizational problems. There’s a talk show guest and self-help section for every area. But it’s all a myth. There is no control. You can make lists and plan all you want. You may improve yourself a bit and become a little more efficient, but there is nothing in the universe that will prevent twenty inches of snow from falling on your wedding reception.

I don’t take pleasure from any of this, but I think it’s good to get a little perspective. The universe is a grand and chaotic beast. We are silly to think there’s anything we can do about it.

For the record, I spent my snow days re-reading Alas, Babylon. Maybe it’s time to make some supply lists for the next storm….

Just a few days following my anxious post pondering the futility and utility of keeping a journal, I started catching up on some Tivo’d episodes of Torchwood (warning: gratuitous flash). Lo and behold, the first episode I watch is one where the agency is infiltrated by an Alien who can alter memories. The guy sneaks in and makes everyone remember he was always there.

Pretty clever. I’d like to try that at my next job interview.

The interloper is ultimately caught because one of the team checks his diary and can find no mention of the new guy. So, perhaps I should view a journal not as remedy for instant amnesia or an egotistical artifact for my progeny, but as a defense against alien infiltration.

Scary to think my daily musings about cubicle life and poor drivers could one day save humanity.

Some habits are hard to break. Especially for people with addictive personalities and proclivities toward organizational paranoia. People like myself.

For me, keeping a journal has been tough to get over. Sure, some of my friends scoff at journal keeping as a ridiculous pursuit. But, until recently, I’d been doing it for some time. It was part of me. When I started writing on this site a few months ago, I noted how I had stopped with the journal business. An activity that started out to help me grow had started to hinder me. So I quit. I was quite content with the decision at the time, but now it’s starting to nag at me, creeping in around the edges of my brain like the third day of nicotine withdrawal.

Sometimes I write to figure things out. This is one of those times.

I first started keeping a journal in fifth grade. This was an assignment from my English teacher, Mrs. Clark. At the beginning of class each day, we had to sit in the little nook of books and write for ten or fifteen minutes. Five lines were required. I believe she read these. I think I remember notes from her about what we wrote. I can’t even remember what I wrote and would give a large sum of money to find one of these spiral bound notebooks today.

It was a good idea. A new approach to get kids to write a bit more, think a bit more. The flaw was in her reading. Sure, a teacher couldn’t really judge an assigned task without checking up, but the whole idea of a journal is something private. For such a diary to be up for judgement really kills the whole idea. You can’t let your mind go when you know Mrs. Clark will be reading it over her lunch break.

Still, the idea stuck and a habit was born. Throughout the rest of school, I kept a personal journal. I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t write regularly or about anything important. Mostly rants about girls or parents, as I recall. Looking back, I regret I wasn’t more intense in my examination of life. But hey, who is at fourteen? Complaining about homework is really all the stress a kid needs. My journals at the time would be a testament to a fortunate childhood.

In college, I got a little more serious. Everyone thinks they got a little more serious in college, right? The girls were older now and no parents were around. Things were bound to get serious. But I wasn’t any more dedicated to a daily ritual like record keeping.

Around twenty-three, I got serious. I started writing every day. This was kind of a low point for me, but the journal helped. I used words to figure things out, to dream, to motivate. Oddly, my outlook seemed to improve in step with the physical quality of my journals. I started with cheap spiral bound notebooks, then on to composition books, then to leather books, and finally to hipster Moleskines. I filled eight volumes in nine years. Then I quit.

As I said before, the journal keeping had become something of a drag. It was a chore. The book was only serving to hold me back. The journal had become a surrogate for actual writing. So I quit, challenging myself to write other things, in other ways. And this has worked.

But.

I still carry a little notebook around with me. I have a lot of nutty ideas I want to capture throughout the day. I found myself writing little notes about what was going on in life. We’ve got a little boy who does something different and amazing almost every day. He clapped his hands for the first time and I thought, I should really write this down.

And this moment really captured the root of why I am compelled to keep a journal. This journal keeping is in lock step with my organizational preoccupations, working to prepare me for the day when I wake up and cannot remember anything. The mind is weak. Even if I can avoid spontaneous and inexplicable amnesia, moments of time will slowly leach away in the catacombs of my brain. Today, I just forgot two more people from my high school class. Gone forever. And I don’t even know who they were.

So all this work is really an effort to avoid my mortality.

Another thought behind these journals is the idea that someone in the future will pick them up. Maybe my son. Maybe Mrs. Clark’s great-granddaughter. But this goes back to the problem of having an audience. When you write in a journal as if you have an audience, then you leave out all the interesting bits that people wold want to read anyway, so no one wins.

Someday my present self, past self, and future self are going to meet behind the woodshed and have it out once and for all.

I see I’m at the bottom of this page and haven’t figured anything out, yet again. It seems important that I capture the important points of life somehow. It also seems important I have some place to let my mind doodle around. Maybe that place is a journal again. But maybe that’s just what an addiction feels like.

Over the winter, I played in a Warmachine miniatures league. This was all part of my return to the fantasy gaming of my adolescence that began with a trip to GenCon last summer. It was fun and challenging. And humbling.

Aside from my crushing defeats, I was most surprised with the changes technology has brought to the gaming table. Part of this league involved writing battle reports for the online forum. I’ve never been much of a forum guy, but I enjoyed this. It was fun to write up my stunning and humiliating losses each week. And once I was on the forum, I found myself drawn into lively discussions. (It’s always good to know a guy is not alone in having his ass handed to him.) So, even though this game has been largely a solitary endeavor for me, I still find myself part of a social community.

Fantasy gaming is a fringe activity in any incarnation. Maybe it’s a skirmish miniatures game. Maybe it’s old school twenty-sided Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe it’s a furry-theme live action role playing game. No matter your fancy, there’s probably a game written precisely for you. This is what I truly love about this world. There’s a freedom in these games, a sense of exploration. But the drawback is that an already small community is subdivided into much smaller groups. Aside from GenCon, it may be difficult to find a group of six people in your town who wants to join your weekly Vampires and Werewolves simulation.

In my fifteen year absence from fantasy, it seems the Internet helped smooth out some of the time and space issues facing gaming. You can find an active message board and cluster of blogs spinning around any game, giving game devotees a sense of community. And this sense of community is a large part of fantasy gaming.

But technology also threatens to kill off the industry entirely. Namely, I think you’ll find a lot more people playing video games than D&D on any given weekend. Think about it. It’s much easier to log on for multiplayer online action than to meet in someone’s basement every week. But you lose a lot of the novelty,too. Maybe I’m stuck in 1985, but even with a game like World of Warcraft, where the guild system yields a high level of social interaction, the experience is not the same as running an adventure face to face. Playing a role to solve problems requires a lot more thought than equipping the right sword for a hack and slash. This isn’t even to mention the effort involved to create an adventure from scratch.

Wizards of the Coast, the producers of D&D, are working to bridge this gap a bit. And not without controversy. Wizards is going to release the 4th edition of D&D this year. This edition promises not only sweeping rule changes, but also a focus on online content. Namely, the company has shuttered the long running Dungeon and Dragon magazines, moving the content online. The company is also working on a virtual gaming table that will allow people around the world to run and play in campaigns. For a fee, of course.

There is a lot of controversy over this, especially from die-hard D&D players. Complaints range from dilution of rules to requiring monthly fees for a game that has been free for thirty years. While not every player likes these changes, I think it’s interesting to think about this move by Wizards of the Coast in light of the entire industry.

I’m interested to see how technology will change this. Will the 4th edition make D&D more competitive against video games? I hope so. And I hope other game makers follow suit to shift the paradigm of fantasy gaming. We have enough kids sitting plugging into a video game console for a little passive entertainment. I think they deserve something a little better, something that will teach them a little more about the world.

At a minimum, maybe writing up battle reports will improve their writing skills a bit.

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