Legend of the Street

When I was 14, my dad died. Each member of my family dealt with it by crumbling in his or her own special way. Mine was pot, and the dispassionate lifestyle it brings. Gravity brought me to orbit around other potheads, which is where I met Max. I was maybe 16 when I met him, having just obtained my driver's license and a clean little '89 Honda Accord that I proceeded to befoul. Max, as a 14 year old, should have been in a completely different social stratum from the burnouts I hung out with.

His equalizer was that he stole cars. He'd tap a window with a spark plug, hotwire the damn thing, and joyride. The group we were a part of was car-obsessed, and Max had not only the natural social allure of the thrillseeker but the driving skills of a god damned legend. He had this black '90 Prelude. Whenever someone spoke of their experiences in it they got a little catch in their voice and a sudden verve their eyes.

Some people cultivate tall tales, and some people slowly and quietly build a legend. Max didn't boast, at least not relative to the other teenage boys in his company. But I'm willing to do it for him. Here's the prototypical Max tale: after a long night of looting cars, he was offered a trade - his stack of purloined stereos for a mid-80's box Crown Vic with a Mustang engine. Max enthusiastically agreed, drifting around the city until the cops started chasing him. He lost them in a display of reckless skill, ditched the car, and called it a night. I wasn't there to see it, yet I believe it unquestioningly, because I myself witnessed a number of Max stories unfold. Like the time he took us drifting in an E-350 cargo van with no front brakes. In the rain. The he got his Ford Ranger, a fairly tame looking light passenger truck. He could burn the tires through any corner in that thing and make it look good. Then there was the incident with the Latin Kings ... I should stop.

All this adoration is a bit much. Whenever I tell the tales to someone, they ask if I had a crush on this kid, but that's not it. Max was an inspiring figure. As a child, I played far too many RPGs, and was crushed when I discovered my dreams of being a lone, unconquerable hero were hopelessly out of touch with reality. There were no legendary swords for me to claim, there was no final boss for me to conquer. Knowing someone like Max gave me a bit of hope that I could be at least a little special, and that there were exceptional people lurking everywhere.

To get to a point, Max is kind of a big part of the reason I write. I want to communicate to someone else how in awe of him I was and am. There is no more exciting place I can think of being than in the passenger seat next to him. I can't immortalize him in fiction, because I'd just turn him into a Mary Sue, so this little blog post will have to do. A monument to Max, the tallest 5'8" a man could ever be.

The Castle Sengir

There was a time, in the late 90s, when I played a lot of Starcraft. If that statement called to mind build orders and Zerg rushes, please revise your expectations. I played single-player nearly exclusively, and I played with cheats on. There was an official expansion, Brood Wars, which added new units and a new campaign. Beside it on Best Buy's shelves, there were numerous other Starcraft products, making grand boasts of "900 NEW MAPS!" in generic fonts. These map packs didn't have the novelty of new units for me to click on ad nauseum or new single-player missions to play for ten minutes and then skip with a code. They just couldn't satisfy me.

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is an expansion pack for Dragon Age, but perhaps that's giving it a bit too much credit. It behaves more like a map pack than a Brood Wars. There are more things to kill and more XP to get and more levels to gain, but there's not truly more meat to be had here.

For the record, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening is a confoundingly mouthy title. "Dragon Age: Origins" alone gets me with its presumptuousness - it suggests not merely a predestined trilogy, but a trilogy of trilogies. It's not so much a title as a marketing plan.

Dragon Age's setting was quite often described by Bioware as "low fantasy," which seemed to be an awfully nice way of saying "generic Ren Faire." Its plot wouldn't seem out of place in a relatively unambitious NES game. But that was redeemed when you talked to your party. See, when it comes to my party members in RPGs, I always roleplay as an opportunistic schmooze. It's kind of a min/max feedback loop: I tell them what they want to hear, and the game often rewards me for it. In Dragon Age, I found myself saying kind words to these people-simulacra because I liked them and wanted them to be happy. Well, all of them except Oghren, that horrible little thug.

Awakening does away with the bulk of your interactions with party members. They have their little quests and snippets of dialog here and there, but the presence of the characters is thin. Without getting down and dirty with some dialogue trees, I didn't feel any connection to my party members, removing the part of the game I most enjoyed. All it had left was the combat, which remains satisfactory. I felt over-leveled for most of the expansion, so most fights had all the suspense of Hot Knife Vs. Butter.

The game is more than a bit glitchy. I spent a sizable amount of cash on a backpack which failed to expand my inventory. The auras projected by your character's passive abilities can kill the frame rate (I should note that I played the game on the 360,) and often make the talking-head conversation scenes unwatchable. There was a city guard mysteriously appeared next to herself when I talked to her. Perhaps this mute doppelganger held secrets to the Darkspawn invasion? She was not forthcoming on the subject.


When I started Awakening, I was surprised to find that Leliana, the woman I had fallen in love with and pledged myself to during Dragon Age, had disappeared completely, with no explanation. Maybe it's better this way; I can remember her fondly, instead of through the prism of this hatchet job.

A Lonely Place of Dying

Ah, hell. I've got a ton of things to write about, even a couple of half-finished posts, but I'm not in the mood to complete anything. I hate filler posts, but it's worth it to use that title. Fuck Jason Todd.

Graceful Reprieve

The standardized unit of measurement for nakedness is the nude (abbreviated as ñ.) The scale is measured as follows:

0ñ:   a winter jacket, snow pants, and an unattractive scarf
0.25ñ:   taking your shoes off in someone else's house
2ñ:   taking a shirt off in public and your belly kinda flops out for a second
5ñ:   wearing a bathing suit
10ñ:   plumber's crack
30ñ:   wearing one of those paper smocks while sitting in a doctor's office
45ñ:   being pantsed in front of a boy/girl you previously thought you had a shot with
100ñ:   sharking
3000ñ:   naked open casket funeral

Hopefully this has given you a greater understanding how to measure your nudity and that of others.

That Terrible Strength

There used to be this website, Dammit.com. It was some guy's dream journal, mostly. Not just the usual chronicle of non sequitirs and places that are someplace but also someplace else, it gave an outline of the writer's life until that point. A cycle of regrets and fears and people who he'd never meet again but still existed as shades on the shores of his subconscious. Am I projecting?

6 jul... Long, sad dream about pam. Laying in bed together, talking. Catching up. "do you still smoke? Do you run? Oh you get cramps and have to poop? Hahahahaha. Do you still drink? Oh I stopped two months ago." Just knowing that I love her, and that nothing feels any different than it did years ago. She gets out of bed and goes in another room. My sister comes in and climbs into bed with me, and asks me if I am upset. "what do you think?"

Going back through his archived website, I found out this guy's name. Which is awful. It spoils the spell cast by his words. Once he has a name, he's just another person I'll never know. Some things need to remain ineffable.

4 Jun... A girl is reading a newspaper, seated with long legs crossed. The headline is something like, "2ND CHANCE STILL TO COME!" 

In 2000 or so, when I was reading this for the first time, I was rushing into the bigger part of teenagehood. It felt like my third eye was opening wider every day, like there was this world beneath the world that I was sinking into. I'd watch episodes of Saved by the Bell and cry because of the weird 80's-ness I'd missed out on. The cliché is that it's like you're experiencing all these new, strange feelings, right? They're still new and strange to me. I still don't understand them.

30 May... A long coversation with pam. She has left her boyfriend and says she regrets leaving me. She loves me, she says. I am tortured by her. As we kiss she asks me, "did you really think I was pretty?" and I tell her that in my eyes she was truly beautiful. I am happy to be in bed with her, but I am ambivalent as well. I don't want to be hurt by her again. And even as we are going at it, I remember that sex was never the biggest thing in our relationship. In fact, this whole thing is kind of grossing me out. I pull back from her embrace, and she gets up and begins compulsively cleaning. She is on some new anti-depressant and it is making her manic. 

I tried keeping a dream journal once, but it didn't take. The only thing I remember is: Bruce Willis and I are in bed, and I love him deeply. We're playing a biographical version of Street Fighter based on my life, and something in it hurts his feelings. I try to explain it away, but he turns into a priest. See? Dreams are terrible. I'd like to tie this all together by weaving some message about the universality of the unwaking realm, but that's just sweet-smelling shit. I like sad stories, and something about Dammit.com just makes me feel so sad.

A Speck in a Sphere

Some kind of illness is creeping up on me. A generic coldfluspiratoryinfection, probably; nothing heavy-duty enough to merit a doctor's visit, but just enough of a nuisance to slow a week down to a crawl. It's not a good time for a leukocytic showdown. I picked up another job doing short-term government work. It pays well, but it's grinding me down pretty awful. It coexists in my schedule along with my sadly extant retail job and a single college class. By the numbers, it's really not that much of a commitment, so I don't understand why it's kicking my ass so unequivocally.

Whenever I get a new job, there's always a period of panicked scrambling to get into some sort of equilibrium. I'm flailing wildly to catch my balance at the moment, and it's stressing me out mentally and physically. Thus, the illness. I wonder sometimes if I'm made of the proper stuff to do the 40-hours-a-week life, if I can hack the basic requirements of anything beyond a marginal existence. What confidence I had that self-reliance was within my abilities is eroding. Things would be easier if I had some overriding goal that propelled me or some gift that I could rely on, but if it's there, I haven't identified it. I don't write out of passion, but because I need to.

I suppose it troubles me that this blog has become a bit of a Livejournal, but I suppose it's a bit more acceptable considering that no one really reads it anyway. In high school, I'd check the Diaryland and Livejournal accounts of my classmates more often than necessary, searching for mentions of myself. Some proof that I was central to somebody else's life. I think maybe only one person ever mentioned me. (Thanks, Magda!) It's good, though, to have a secret public journal. I try to discuss what I'm feeling with my friends, but I never really feel like I'm getting through. There's a catharsis to this sort of confession, I think. It's a prayer addressed to the void; whether it gets answered is immaterial.

Mucho Dollar Care a Junk CIA

I want to write something, and I've got a couple topics lined up, but my heart's just not in it right now. Consider this an IOU.

An Eternity in an Eternal Place

I was playing cards at a friend's house when I got a call from work. They offered an extra shift tomorrow morning, and I said yes. Now, I've gotta finish baking a cake for another friend's birthday, take a shower, and get some mediocre sleep before I go to work and start the cycle anew. I get all pissy when I feel I haven't enough time to myself in a day, such as this one. I don't necessarily want to relax, I just don't want to be around other people.

In a day, I'm sure I'll be in a completely different place, but that's no reason to deny what I'm feeling right now. It's all sour in my mouth.

Alodia Gosiengfiao

I ride public transit here in Chicago. Often enough, I get in confrontations with people who have some sort of problem with me. One time, some random, crazy-eyed guy screamed "DONUTS!" and punched me in the face. I responded by telling him to get off the train until the security guy hustled him out. Still, for months afterward, I'd replay the scene in my head, my reaction growing more and more violent. At the apogee of my fantasies, bits of the guy's skull were in my hair. My brother is the sort of person who will take brutal umbrage at an insult, and when I told him the story, his first response was, "Why didn't you punch his ass out?" It was a difficult question to answer. The best I could come up with was a partial truth: I didn't feel it was worth getting kicked off the train, and possibly crossing paths with the police. And the truth is, getting punched in the face by an amateur doesn't hurt.

But there's more to it than that. I'm a big person, and rather strong for it. Should I truly need to, I'm well convinced that I could disassemble anyone below the 90th percentile of ass-kicking ability. If I uncorked my violence on someone, I'm not sure I'd stop before they were meat on the floor. Beyond that, I'm a calm person nearly full-time. Not quite a pacifist, but I try. It'd feel like I was betraying that aspect of myself if I allowed some fool to make me lose my cool.

I don't want to paint my dilemma as anything high-minded. It's the classic struggle of Id vs. Ego, with Superego throwing in a few words every so often. The primal reaction I feel precludes all of this reasoning (and, perhaps, rationalization.) Today on the bus, some teenagers were talking shit about my attire. Homo/transphobic stuff, enough to get me riled. My fists clenched, my heart raced, and I couldn't decide what to do. Looking back, I feel I should've cussed their asses out, but at the time I couldn't see that ending in anything but blood. Which wouldn't have proven anything . . . but maybe made me feel better.

I always feel diminished after getting into a confrontation with somebody. My father tried to instill in me a sort of manly martial pride, and chastised me when I didn't return measure for measure. It didn't really land for me, but sometimes the teachings we reject stay with us. He died when I was 14, far before the revelation of my ladyness. And now his voice is the one I hear chastising whenever I find myself lacking in some masculine virtue. Most of the time it doesn't bug me, but there's always a pressure. To, y'know, Be A Man.

Power is not evil, but it tempts one to use it. That temptation scares me as much as it elates me.

Horrid Tropical Paradise

Many weightlifting techniques sound like sex acts, specifically the sort of imagined deeds contrived by eleven-year-olds at the tail end of a slumber party. Bent-Knee Good Morning? One Arm Pushdown? The Seated Underhand Row? It goes the other way, too. Tell me true, can't you imagine a personal trainer recommending five sets of Donkey Punches to energize your core?