Live from the Lonely Moments Apartment Complex

I'm going to quit my kickboxing class. It's expensive, which is bad, but the bigger problem is that it's been leaving me feeling worn out. It's hard to do strength training and an intensive cardio activity at the same time, and I feel like it's been compromising my strength gains. Analysis aside, I'm conflicted about the decision. There's a sense of community unique to the gym, the knowledge that this person might punch you and you wouldn't even mind. That's tempered by the moments of awkward inadequacy, missing a kick over and over until somebody gives you the Check Out This Motherfucker look.  I have a relationship with my gym, and now I'm queasy about going for the breakup.

Indeed! This party DOES suck!

Every time I observe someone slightly younger than me who has all the talent I lack, it's like the pain of flossing for the first time in a month. The ache comes in waves, starting and stopping with a tempo that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything. Gore Vidal said, "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." It would reveal me as petty to agree wholeheartedly, but I think it's a bit late for that.

I'm gonna go ride my bike in commemoration of Halloween. Today's the 31st, so all of the good pre-moving junk is going to be out in the alleys. And, uh, even though I'd rather not admit it, I look forward to potential random encounters in the midnight hour. Not sloppy hookups behind an abandoned elementary school with sirs or madams dressed as Sexy Radiology Technicians (although I wouldn't be mad at that) - but the inexplicable stew that boils out of the pot when a city of costumed fools are let loose, sanctioned by the closest thing American culture has to Carnival. God help me, I'm itching to punch somebody.

The Promise of Roycemore

I think I have a fever.


Literature is beautiful to me because it exposes all of the paths that you could have taken but didn't, all of the people that you never had a chance to be. Or maybe that's pornography, I'm really not sure.

...

See, when your brain begins to overheat, you feel like it's making all of these brilliant new connections when, really, it's just flailing at buttons, trying to get anything to make sense.

Wall Ring

I'm writing a paper right now, or at least I should be. It's going poorly. The last few months have seen my life accumulate more responsibilities, and my ass is dragging from the weight. Every time I attempt to complain about my workload, I feel like such a shithead, probably because I am such a shithead. Nine credit hours at community college, around thirty hours a week at my fecal retail job, then another seven or eight at my martial arts class and working out. This is not a lot! And many other people have to endure much more than I do for the bare minimum of survival. I worry every day that I simply lack whatever hardiness is necessary to survive in the wild, and the constant hand-wringing is itself a kind of confirmation. Still, I can't admonish away my discomfort.

The one delight really getting me through right now is my body. After eight months of weightlifting and stretching and punching, I've finally started to become a little bit fearsome. I'm still fat, and I've only lost about ten to twenty pounds, but what lies beneath is as if hewed from stone. Probably the actual product doesn't stand up to the praise I give it, but it's my achievement. I enjoy using my new form, seeing the little ways strength and coordination ease my way through the world. Then there's the vindictive joy of slowly edging onto the cusp of conventional attractiveness. Despite the pain and inconvenience, I delight in the act of lifting the weight. It's such a private thing for me; until last month, I hadn't exercised my routine around anyone else in years. There are moments created when I lift of such austere, perfect, monastic solitude.

I read an essay by Henry Rollins where he kept lovingly referring to weights as "the Iron." He sounded like a serial killer. So I don't want to go too far out on that ledge, lest I fall into a musclebound disdain for all of the puny Micronians. But I guess I kind of understand why he gets downright religious about the topic. Unlike gender or religion or class, strength hasn't served to make me identify with others who share its marks. There's no knowing glance with the brick shithouse on the train. (Honestly, I'm always sizing them up, wondering if I could take them.) It's a private thing, a closed circuit communion with the self. Contextualize it however you want, because it's only your own experience that matters.

Punning Linguist

Crackdown 2 is on my mind, and because I crave orbs, I've been playing a lot of the mighty progenitor, Crackdown. Going through it with a more critical eye, I've realized that the combat is merely an accessory to the platforming. In the body of Crackdown's gameplay, it is the appendix. There's no end to the appeal of jumping forty feet, landing on a skyscraper, shimmying along a drainpipe, and then falling ten stories into a river. In a way, Crackdown's jumping and scaling  resembles parkour. While your avatar's movements lack grace or fluidity, there a shared idea of reducing each obstacle down to its component parts.

See, I'm never going to own a jetpack, hoverboard, or flight ring. It sounds defeatist and anti-futurist, I suppose, but this is the harsh lesson life has taught me. There is a level of human mobility that can only really be expressed through video games. Fuck, even in Ninja Gaiden, Ryu Hayabusa can make an off-the-cuff 15ft jump and, at its apogee, change his momentum 180º. As a player, I take it for granted, but it's amazing. Crackdown lets you climb a building's exterior barehanded. Samus Aran has super speed. Mario can straight up fly. I love platformers above all other genres because they encourage new methods of breaking the rules of physics.

Variations on My Summer Vacation

Summer's long. I've spent this whole time working out, lifting weights, trying to learn a little bit of martial arts. My body has become more pliant, and as its capacities expand I can work it harder and harder. Exercise has replaced videogames as my summer leisure activity, and I feel a little smug about it. But I need to remain focused on performance-related goals rather than trying to improve my appearance. That way lies a certain flavor of madness, plus a host of body-image issues I don't think I'm ready to tackle on my own. I've made it as far as I have by staring at my feet and concentrating on the ground in front me. I worry that looking to the horizon will just make me trip and fall.

---

Summer's long. The few games that interested at its outset have withered in this fucking heat. Crackdown 2 was an exquisite disappointment, true royalty among phoned-in cash-ins. It sucked. Played a little of Prince of Persia: Fuck The Reboot. It was okay, but the sort of okay where you think about playing it once every two weeks, then become bored halfway through that thought and take a nap. Tried the newly translated Tales game for the DS, but my shoulder buttons are busted, so that's out. I've been playing a whole lot of Ancient Domains of Mystery, my favorite roguelike and my ultimate fallback game. Right now, I'm playing a dark elven archer. Yeah!

The internet is a catalyst for subcultures, lowering the amount of energy needed to give something an audience. I know it's better for me to ignore it, but straight up: I'm sick of anything that calls itself 8-bit, unless it's RushJet1. I think of 8-bit anything like I think of steampunk: visually interesting in small doses, but a little goes a long-ass way. Seems more like a catch-all cash-in for late 80s nostalgia brewing in the mid-20s demographic than an actual interesting movement. Also, it gets my goat when a sprite that's clearly in an SNES/Genesis/TG16 resolution is dubbed "8-bit." Come on, do the math! 16 bits, not 8! Genesis does what Nintendon't.

Perhaps the deeper truth is that I don't like the sophisticate branch of game culture. Y'know, art platformers with a statement, zines about how Nintendo taught you what real disappointment was, and endless ruminations on the sin of reviewing a game when you could critique it. It is a fecal Ourobouros, endlessly chasing its tail down the drain.

---

Summer's long. The hours stretch on even longer when the oven's at 500º. There's nowhere in my apartment I can escape that hateful heat, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for delicious pizzas. I've been endlessly refining my technique, iterating on my sauce, and trying for the love of God to get the pizza onto the stone without fucking it up royal. My kitchen is the forge, my pizza stone is the anvil, and I am aiming to create a culinary Masamune. I'm not there yet, and I don't want to talk up my product more than it can handle, but I'm proud that I've created something tasty on my own.

---

Summer's looooooooong. I've been on a quest to get in a pool since June. I've been so sweaty, and every time I sweat I think about being underwater. Next Thursday ... WATER PARK. I'm fucking psyched.

*I was gonna format this as a numbered list, but I was worried it would be pretentious. Then I read a post on someone else's blog that did the same thing, and I hated it. I guess I'll just have to display my pretension in other ways!

Cherry Trees Blossoming in Profusion

Last week, I took a slice out of my paycheck for my new job and bought myself a Fleshlight. My god, it is the unparalleled opus of onanism! Makes me feel a bit crass to discuss it in any space, even one as discrete as this. Kevin Smith praised a high holy hymn to the fleshy implement's virtues on his podcast. While I may like to consider myself above the persuasive power of advertising, it stuck. I'd always worried that it would end up another useless implement at the back of the sex toy drawer, next to the too-pointy buttplug and the inexplicable 14" dildo. Really, all I needed was a vote of confidence that it wasn't a waste of ~$70.

And it isn't; it's the best sex I've ever had. Which isn't as much of a statement as it sounds, as I've only had two sex partners, neither of whom I successfully topped. Part of me feels creepy for enjoying it to the extent that I do. I guess I kind of worry that it's a step or two removed from knitting scarves for my RealDoll. Hell, as a transwoman I feel guilty for taking so much pleasure from sticking my dick in something. But these are reservations that enter my mind long after the deed has done, and they tend to not linger long.

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.