Nine Variations on Leigh Holmes

I'd never felt it before, the pull to touch her and the glow she lit inside me. It was so strange, and recognizing the word that went with the feeling filled me with anxiety. 'Love' is such an easy word to misuse, abuse, and slander. The single English verb with the greatest power to endear and make you look like a fool, often simultaneously. She said it first, but I didn't really hear it because it came in the middle of a conversation; rolling onto the floor, void of pith.

-

The loveseat in front of my TV is all black leather and nowhere near big enough for me to lie down on comfortably. There was a time when we would sit there tensed, respecting the layer of distance friends need between each other, arms uncomfortably at our sides. We've found a way to make it work somehow, us two big people, her voluptuous legs wrapped around me like ivy, my hands sprawling redwoods growing up through the crook of her arm.

-

We broke the bed. That's an accomplishment I have never matched in terms of ego-swelling athletic sexual pride. When I was on top of her, I'd have to grab the steel rail of the headboard and push it forward to keep us from collapsing in on ourselves. It was awkward, but the sense of control, of knowing that I'm an integral part of what keeps this assembled and secure . . . well, it's the perfect metaphor.

-

It's the cutest burp you've ever heard. She turns her head and makes a noise like "pf-huh". Maybe if I wasn't in love with her it'd just be a twee affection, the sign of a woman trying to hard to be a girl. But it triggers something in me when I hear it. Something cliché and vulnerable and forcefully inchoate.

-

It's not a 'relationship.' That's what she told me. Still living with the man who at some point was her boyfriend, she can't take the mental leap to calling this what it is. Or what it isn't, perhaps. We talk about it, and we reach most of a resolution each time, but some conversations are ever-living. In August she moves out, and she said she'd be fine calling me her boyfriend about a week after she's left his house. I winced and told her it felt like I'd been punched in the gut.

-

She wanted me to choke her. Inexperienced, it was my first time taking control of someone in that primal way. I kept wondering if I was going to asphyxiate her, but my grip stayed tight. After I did it, she told me I was a natural dom, which conflicted me. There's nothing truer to my current philosophy than the act of taking control. But I wonder how far I've come from who I used to be.

-

I keep saying sappy things. I love how thick she is, and I never tire of expressing it. Every time I tell her how special she is to me, she bites her lip and looks away. The gesture makes me feel anxious, like I've fucked up, but I keep doing it.

-

She texts me all the time. Little things: good morning, I miss you, how's work, this creep is staring at me on the bus, fuck Cubs fans. We've been friends long enough that we already have a secret language, but the added intimacy has created bizarre new slang and in-jokes. Despite all the sex and cuddling and professions of love, having someone I always want to talk to is the thing that stays with me throughout the day.

-

Ending things is hard, whether it's a blog post or a relationship. I wonder when our denouement will come, and then sometimes I wonder if it will come. I can't stop knowing that our shared daydream will probably come to an end at some point, and it kind of tortures me. I want to watch plays and movies and have boring nights with her. I want to deal with the worst parts of her and watch her ugly cry. I want to get to the point where we keep getting annoyed with each other so that we can get to the point of sublime acceptance. I want to do the whole dance. Pondering the possibility isn't the same as envisioning a destiny, but any chance is worth it.

Interruption of Service

I turned 25 today. Or yesterday. It's hard to tell. I was born on 6/26/86, which I always interpreted as a subtle nod to the number of the beast. So, in celebration, I post here. My mother, she spent most of my birthday trying to convince me of the gravity of 25, how it heralds the end of people giving me slack for my youth. A good point, but one I couldn't take to heart. I know I need to be so much more than I am.

This birthday was not the best. A great project was undertaken to construct chicken and waffles ex nihilo, but the waffles suffered structural breaches in phase 2 of development and the entire work was scrapped. We still ate the fried chicken, and discovered that it's quite delicious with maple syrup. I met up with another friend, but there were insults, innuendos, and misunderstandings. That one left me in a bad mood. But the dinner with family was alright, the company was lively, and I was ultimately reminded whom I could rely on.

So, a decent birthday, not going in the record books. But I realized something: I used to enjoy having everyone make a big fuss about my birthday, but now I kind of want to go unnoticed. It's better as a day of quiet reflection and joking around with bosom friends than a big-tent bombshell event. And, really, it doesn't deserve the pomp and circumstance I usually demand. So maybe the bright side of turning 25 is me giving myself less leeway for needless things.

Pig King God

Insanity. That’s what I worry about. No family history except for a brother who took Art Bell too seriously. No outward indicators ever diagnosed. But internally, I understand just how thin the wires that hold everything together are. How, if plucked at the wrong time, one could produce a discordant note that would make the mechanism rip itself apart. Drugs made the line go slack, but eventually provided a tension of their own. So I keep an uncomfortable vigil on the individual parts of the machine, waiting for the moment when the wires cross and I fall out of sync with reality.

But see, what I feared was insanity. What I deep-down kinda hoped for was full-blown theatrical madness. If the insane brain is crackling static, the mind of a madman is a symphony being performed by twelve cellists performing in thirteen different time signatures. The insane go to a home and eat jello, while the mad speak prophetic nonsense and command a strength born of crazy. In the point-buy system of life, madness is the preferred idiosyncrasy of the min/maxer, because it elevates while at the same time providing a nobly tragic flaw.

Why not skip the middleman and become a madman? Well, like all other literary diseases, lunacy requires an inciting incident. To truly go mad, I'd need to lose my kingdom, or accidentally kill a loved one. I could discover the incomprehensible truth behind reality's veil and be sucked into a world disconnected from moral and natural law. But that requires the intervention of Fate or a heavy-handed narrator. You can't just go out and take the entrance exam for Stark Raving University; you need to be headhunted. But Chemical Imbalance Community College accepts admissions year-round, and has very affordable in-state tuition.

So, I fear insanity. Because if I keep writing shit like this, it can't be too far off.

I Wish This Was The Last Time I Had To Do This

The first part is the longest. Incubation. Put it out of your mind. Do anything else. Go for a walk, do some shopping, read a book; anything that you can convince myself is vaguely constructive. Ignore it. It'll still be there when you get around to it. You can get started after dinner.

Hand-wringing: step two. Sit in front of the computer. Commit to getting started. You still have tons of time left. In fact, you have enough time to check your e-mail. And, ooh, don't you want a sandwich while you're doing that? I heard about this great place over on Sheridan that makes this salmon banh mi...

Step three. Okay, this is the point where you just get disgusted with yourself. Because, really? You can't do better than this? Isn't this the hundredth-plus time you've been stuck staring at an empty computer screen? You need to change your approach. Your whole last-minute ethos is clearly not working. Best case, you stumble in tomorrow morning sick from your two hours and fifteen minutes of sleep, toting some sub-literate agglomeration of unrelated thoughts. Next time, you start a week in advance. This time next Sunday you'll be kicking back and enjoying yourself, laughing about how trivially easy it is to get the work done when you spread it evenly throughout the week.

Step four: panic, panic, panic, panic, panic! I mean, what the hell, right? Fuck! Fuck. Okay. Okay. So it took you an hour to get a tenth of the way through it. It's cool. Relax. No, you are not sleepy. Do not do this to me, god damn it. Make some coffee! But real quick-like. Okay, just, um, just try to think real hard. Just try to fill the page with as many words as you can and edit down from there. ...well, okay, good hustle, but it's better if the words are related to the subject at hand. Coffee's ready, go! Go! Yeah! That's good, isn't it? This'll help you think. It's gonna be fine. Just bang it out and it'll be fine. Wonder what's new on Twitter?

Step five: unplug your modem.

What? Oh yeah, step six. Um, okay, this is the part where you just

Step seven: Pray to the God of the Israelites for the strength to finish this without passing out. Trust me, New Testament YHWH doesn't have enough juice to fix this mess. Look, you will never pull this shit again, got it? The walls are buzzing and you're mouth's dry from all the coffee. Maybe you should just call it a day. If you just take a two-hour nap now, you'll wake up all refreshed and full of ideas. Well, if don't just sleep straight through 'til 9am tomorrow. Hm. Maybe nix that nap.

Step Eight. Enlightenment. Clouds open, muse sings, fingers never leave keyboard.

Yes! Yes. Home stretch. You did it, slugger! Okay, think of a punchy way to end it. Waitwaitwait! I got it! How about, "Step nine: get some sleep already."

A Culture of Shitheads

Each mermaid represents a
different venereal disease.

The proliferation of tattoos as casual style is disappointing. In ubiquity, they lose their ability to signify anything other than insufferableness.There was a time (which I am very probably making up) where tattoos were badges earned by sailors upon their first circumnavigation of a whorehouse. If not that, they were shows of yakuza loyalty, ways of counting all the men you'd killed, methods of celebrating romances doomed to end in violence, or mementos of that lazy summer spent in a death camp. The tattoo was a brand, a way of irreversibly committing outlier activities to your flesh. There was a taboo, and it was well-earned.

Nowadays, tattoos are like bumper stickers: a channel for dysfunctional people to express their deeply-held obnoxious beliefs publicly. Hipsters, juggalos, nerds, and Lil Wayne are the main ideological blocs I'm referring to here. If you have twelve tattoos acquired over a period of six months, can any of them be considered special? "This tattoo celebrates that time I bought a churro with NO FILLING. What a wild ride." I'm on board with the body-as-a-canvas metaphor, but owning a paint-able surface doesn't obligate you to scribble dicks all over it.

Tuxedo Mask can't save you from a lifetime of poor decisions.

Once, in a kickboxing class, I saw that the woman in front of me had Pac-Man tattoos all over her arms and legs. I'm pro-Pac-Man, but the moment of recognition was followed by a cringe. Before I'd even talked to her, she had metaphorically screamed out "I LIKE PAC-MAN!" No one likes Pac-Man that much. Not even Toru Iwatani.

Like all modern problems, this can be traced back to Mike Tyson. By popularizing the tribal face tattoo as the new acme of socially unacceptable body modification, he made a great array of slightly less extreme body mods look not quite as insane. Rapist, recluse, trendsetter; truly, Iron Mike was a triple threat.

Read me clearly: I'm not assaulting the right to sculpt your physicality into an avatar of the ever-living Cosmic Jackass. A person's right to tattoos should be as unrestricted as their right to create Herbie the Love Bug flatulence fetish fics or put triple bookshelf spoilers on their Priuses. Monstrous violations of taste are coded into America's red-white-and-blue bedazzled DNA. But Christ, manifest enough self-respect, aesthetic sense, or just plain laziness to refrain from superfluously embellishing your body.

Upon the Burning of our House

Recently, I read a very interesting article on the Woot.com blog. The inciting incident: because there is some nominal cultural cachet associated with the 'geek' identity, more and more people who wouldn't have claimed it before are doing so now. The message from the author: Cut it out. The sentiment resonates with me in low and sturdy places, and I'm uncomfortable with how much I want to chastise anyone who disagrees.

To begin with, I reject the fundamental idea that geek is cool. It's no more fashionable now than ten years ago to be, say, a person who debates dubs vs. subs in the middle of a Paranoia game on Usenet, all while cosplaying unpopular Star Trek characters in a barely lit basement apartment. It's acceptable to play Call of Duty, watch Battlestar Galactica, or have played D&D in high school. But these are all more things that intersect with nerd culture, if such a thing exists.

Here's the thing: before the modern era of about five years ago, there was not a "nerd culture". Nerds from different spheres often don't get along with each other, or consider others too below them. Consider the classical text, courtesy of the Brunching Shuttlecocks:

Uncomfortable, but true. The Venn diagram of geek is a near-infinite number of spheres, barely intersecting. This loose confederation is united by the accumulated derision of a lifetime of unpopular choices. Some are hardened by it, some are damaged, some take it as a call to rise above, and some barely notice it, but it changes their perceptions. In a world where their pursuits had mainstream acceptance, there wouldn't be a common ground between a Warhammer 40K player and a furry MUD user. Geek culture without rejection isn't a culture.

But is that a bad thing? This is where my argument falls into hesitant hand wringing, because I'm not even a little sure. I can't try to extrapolate who I'd be if geek had been cool when I was small, and the me that would be produced by that experiment would probably have a different outlook anyway. Geek culture would be more like a series of tribes than the current loose alliance bound by a T-shirt-based hanky code. What is the opportunity cost of unpopularity, measured in wedgies?

I know I lack the objectivity necessary to confidently answer to that question. The thought that my culture is being infiltrated by carpetbaggers leaves me queasy. Some actor claims in an interview to be a "huge nerd" because they play Modern Warfare with their friends, and it feels to me like they're wearing some kind of blackface. Our culture, as it is, exists as a shelter against these people, and now they're co-opting it.

The phenomenon fills me with odium, but I don't know if it's a fair response. A lot of hipsters are at the front of this wave, but a decent proportion of them have authentic claims to citizenship in Geek Israel. Maybe it's like gay people coming out of the closet in the 80's and 90's: now that the water's a bit warmer, everyone's willing to take a dip. See, this paragraph is pure rhetoric: I put a positive counterpoint at the end of a series of negative sentiments, trying to make myself appear hopeful. But I'm not. I dislike people taking advantage of the only culture I've ever been able to call my own, and I want them to get the fuck away.

Seriously?

I don't know whether to feel contempt or pity for the bastard who had to write this copy. Mother's Day is a Hallmark holiday devoted to awkwardly celebrating Mom with brunch and a card. There's an Oedipal brazenness to celebrating by jerking it to the older-than-30 women who make up Silicone Valley's refuse. The artiste who had to jam these sentiments together deserves both a slow clap and a hard slap.

The Unfocused Lawlessness

I've learned how to make a damn good burger and fries. I got this cast-iron grill pan, which I heat up on high for a few minutes, then I throw the beef on there. Flip it, press it, and after around eight minutes throw burger and pan into the oven at 500 degrees, going about another five minutes. In the middle of all this, I drop the fries into a pan of canola oil at low heat, wait 'til they reach a "pale blonde" (internet's words, not mine), then take them out and re-fry them under high heat. Boom! Hamburger heaven. Reader, this is an instruction manual for how to find your bliss.


Also, playing the new Mortal Kombat game, which is frustratingly dubbed . . . "Mortal Kombat". By all rights, it should be "The Mortal Kombat" or maybe "Mortal Kombat: Origins", just to save me from having to distinguish it from the original specimen or the series as a whole. Great game, play it, etc. But! Shao Kahn is some bullshit. He's a legacy arcade boss, an archetype made from wasted quarters and crushed dreams. Every hit you land on him does half damage, every move he has is about fifty percent over the normal damage curve. Half his specials are unblockable. You can't grab him. His super move takes away over half your life bar. All things I expect from a fighting game boss, and traits I can forgive, to a certain extent. But in addition to giving his moves crazy priority over yours, he will often flash yellow and ignore your attacks.

Fight-wise, this makes things near-impossible on your end unless you resort to spam techniques. Personally, it is an insult. See, there was always that kid. Whenever I played tag or cops and robbers or whatever gotcha-based game, this kid would devise a novel strategy: he would simply ignore it when he got tagged or shot or slimed, claiming it never happened. I hated that kid. You probably hated that kid. If you were that kid, I bet you hate yourself. Adding that layer of uncertainty to the outcome of a game destabilizes it. If the rules stop applying at random points, eventually it stops being a game, and everyone goes home. Shao Kahn is that little "nuh-uuuuh" shithead, and he makes me want to stop playing his damn game.

Part of me just wants to shake Ed Boon and say "THIS IS WHY MIDWAY DIED". The Mortal Kombat is a game that trades heavily on arcade nostalgia, but its greatest asset is the long, involved single-player story mode, an approach unheard of when MK cabinets still roamed the earth hungry for quarters. The unreasonable final boss helped arcade operators make quotas, but it serves no function in a post-Diversions world.

Any Blade Will Do

As a much younger person, I used to read tons of fantasy/sci-fi novels. They were all thick tomes, the sort of paperback doorstoppers that are read mostly for the accomplishment of getting through 890 pages in a weekend. I cherished them. Where some had Game Boys, I foolishly chose the Game Gear, becoming another of the walking wounded in the First Console War. The damn thing could optimistically make it four hours on six batteries, and had an even more generously estimated six decent games to show for it. My Star Wars novels and Melanie Rawn softcovers were my only escape during a bus ride or lonely recess period.

During my later teenage years, I gave up reading for pleasure. Twofold explanation: 1.) I got a car and my idle time shrank. 2.) It's really hard to focus on a book when you're high. My excommunication ended a couple years ago, and I took the book back up, along with the bell and candle. Only now, there's a wrinkle: I can't read sci-fi or fantasy anymore. I worry that it's because I buck at the unashamed nerdiness necessary to read the genre. Not that I'd be afraid to read them in public, but in private.

The other truth is that I've learned a whole lot more about the craft of writing in the intervening period, and most of the dragon and robot reveries I read as a kid were not so good. Plots that were barely zapped in the microwave long enough to shake off their staleness. Characters with narrative arcs that could be predicted just by reading their names. Plots constituted of implausibilities stitched together by extremely convenient applications of magic/science. While the hackwork is enjoyable in the moment, I can't say that a single damn one of those books has really stayed with me.

So maybe that's the real answer: time. When I was young, I had the time and boredom to kill maybe a book a week. Now it takes me closer to a month to get through a book I really enjoy. As a result, I choose my targets much more carefully. Steak over popcorn. Don't take that statement as a condemnation of nerd lit to the dreaded Trashcan of the Low Arts; but I have a hard enough time finding books that truly excite me without limiting myself to a limited genre.

Concentrated Milk

This is the sort of thing best never said in the light of day, but, well, I'm sick of having friends. The necessity of interpersonal relations isn't lost on me; it's a grave task to maintain balance or sanity without peers. I've spent months holed up in my house in the past, and I can give detailed testament to how much it sucks and how much it sucks out of me. But all the motions necessary to keep friendships in the green honestly feel like they provide poor return on investment.

See, when presented with the choice of either having fun alone or having the same amount of fun with others, I'd choose the solitary option a solid ninety percent of the time. You have to manage people, make sure you're not going past their boundaries, and think about their happiness. I have enough trouble doing that for myself. I just got back from a night playing cards with a friend, and afterward I had no desire to ever see his ass again. This isn't an uncommon occurrence with any friend of mine, and it really has me questioning my approach. I usually try to soften the blow by calling myself antisocial, but really, I'm a misanthrope, and the mind of a misanthrope isn't hungry for company.

This is too high-school-notebook for what I want this blog to be, but a record of my self needs to include some nerd clichés if it's going to be honest. I want to expand on this idea, make it into a train of thought rather than a bus of sentence fragments, but it may be too unformed for me to grasp fully yet.

Renfield’s Syndrome

The morgue is pretty boring, except for the little sand dunes of dust on the floor. I'm out of breath. While I stop to fish for excuses about why I got here after all the action, a stake falls out of my duster, rolling into one of the ash piles. Now it's official: I am the worst vampire hunter.

Not like the Van Helsings. They're assholes, and what makes them even bigger assholes is that they're really nice about being assholes. The new one, Wilhelmus - every time we, y'know, team up, and I stake a vampire just to the left of the heart, he gets this weird half-smile and gives me the speech. "Paul, go under the sternum and jab upwards. So you don't have to force your way through the ribcage." I can't stand it.

I stick my finger in the ashes, then smell them. They don't smell like anything but ashes, but I figure it's kind of a cool signature move. You never know who's watching, huh? In this business, you get a lot of mysterious strangers spying on you from the shadows. Which is a terrible thing to find out about at 3am while you're pissing in a storm drain.

It was a stakeout, right? Apparently something was going on in Koreatown by the cannery. I mean, I guess it was. I'd been watching the loading dock for the past 5 hours, but all I'd seen were some teenagers huffing toner or something. So I get out of the car to pee, because, shag carpet in the van, ya know? You aim wrong and you never get that smell out. I go down the big concrete embankment, get things going, and, when the tank's half-full, boom, guy behind me.

"Enjoying the evening air?" He croaks it in like a Tom Waits voice, like piss over dry gravel. I kind of jump, but I don't wanna turn around with my pecker in my hands, so I play it off like I don't need to see his face 'cuz I'm cool too. My damn duster's all wet down the side now. His breath hits my neck, but it's cold. Vampire.

Now, I was on the verge of a panic attack, and my zipper was stuck. That's really the only way to explain why I'd say, to a complete stranger: "Not since you bastards killed my uncle." Look, I know. I know! Doesn't make sense in hindsight.

Okay, so I played the dead relative card too early. There are really only two ways you become a vampire hunter: you train from when you're, like, ten, just like those jackass Van Helsings. Or - someone you know dies, and you kinda fall into the whole cycle of justice and revenge thing. It's so cliché and dumb, but when you're at a funeral and an old lady shuffles up to you, hugs you real close, then whispers in your ear, "I want you to find the bastards that did this and kill them." ... I don't know, how can you refuse? You look like a total shithead if you do.


Thing is, I'm braced to get punched, kicked, or the ol' neckbite, so I do like this quick turn around move without even zipping up. I'm giving the guy my best kung-fu-I-can-kick-your-ass stance, which is really bullshit 'cuz I got kicked out of my dojo after two weeks when my check bounced. This vampire, he's a white guy dressed kinda business-y. Khaki pants, white shirt, cropped hair, and snaggletoothed fangs. The way he's eyeing me, it's hungry, and then he looks down at my junk. "My, aren't you a big boy." he says. I give him the once over, preparing to cock back my best haymaker and all of a sudden I realize he's packing. Plain as day, his dick's hanging out of his pants, too.


My brain starts cranking, and it finally chunks it out. That message board that tipped me off was right: there is some action going on here, but it's fucking gay cruising. I'm so embarrassed that I spout a line of bullshit about how now that I've got his attention, I want to save his soul with the power of Christ and lead him away from the path of sin and anonymous storm drain blowjobs. He gives me this super confused look, and after a beat I turn and just start running away as hard as I can, pecker flopping in the wind.


Swear to god, I'm gonna quit this whole game. Wilhelmus says he can get me a janitor job at his family's bakery, but I'm kinda iffy on it. I have my pride, you know?

World of Ruin

It only gets colder. I'll reassure myself that there can't be a colder day in this winter, that there's only a gradual rebirth into the golden land of Spring awaiting me after this little rough patch of absolute zero. But I can't even fool myself. The weather has me indoors, and it's doing more than just fever my cabin. It's leeching out the discipline I've been building in myself for the past year - I still work out, but my mind's fuzzy and I find it hard to stare at any problem without blinking and looking away. It's like my brain's wearing a parka made of fiberglass insulation. It took me thirty minutes to think of that simile, and it's not even good.

The dead of winter is the appointed time of my existential crisis. When all the holiday glow has subsided, when my hours at work get cut back, when all I can hear are the silences of my apartment, I turn inward. I've been working out for the past year now, and I've lost 25 lbs., become physically stronger than I've ever been in my life, and have developed a bit of steel deep within myself. But it's both not enough and too much.

I'm worried that I'm taking it too far. The testosterone fucks with my head and feels awful unnatural. It awakens some atavistic urge to callousness deep within me. If I go far enough, the physical changes will make it even harder to pass. But I need more power.

I need more power.

I don't know what sentence to put after that, so by necessity it stands alone. Written in a story, something so declarative would be pithed out after a definitive trauma. My village is razed by mercenaries while I'm out hunting. A drug deal gone bad leaves my girlfriend in a wheelchair. A bully pushes me down into the sand and I make a tearful, determined resolution. Best as I can see it, I'm reacting to feelings of powerlessness by finding a way in which to becoming powerful.

Super Sonic Speech Impediment

Holy fuck, I used to write some painfully long blog posts.

Sonnet 130, Translated

My bitch is ugly as shit! It's cool, though.