Mar
29
Discard an Axiom
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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.
Mar
19
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.
Mar
14
Listen in Darkness
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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.
Mar
13
Ask Your Body
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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.
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