PROLOGUE: DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU? "...and that's not normal, mark. you don't even know me." and while i admit she might be right, it's still a bullshit thing to say. i've known i should have just given up on her since i let her ruin my birthday back in april, but let's be honest; i'm a sucker. you'd think i'd've learned my lesson, having wasted four years of my life doing this same dance with a different girl, but no. here i am at two in the morning, apologizing, somehow, for putting too much pressure on her by caring about her when she can't find time to care about me (i swear this is how she spins the conversation, so there's no way i could possibly win). i don't sleep much, despite knowing i have to fly out later in the day. i get up and drink one of those gross little 5 hour energy things and, while i regret it (tastes like fucking cold medicine), it does work as advertised.
on my way to the airport, as i'm dropping off my keys with sarah (who always volunteers to feed moustache when i leave town), the girl-i-don't-even-know rides by on her bike. timing. i call out, she waves, and keeps on riding to work, wearing my old courierware bag with the BAN THIS stencil on her back. and that moment right there about sums up our whole relationship.
ACT ONE: LOS ANGELES, or A HEAT WAVE IN THE DESERT SATURDAY at some point on my way i realize that i've left my camera at home. dammit. i hate flying with drama on my mind, because there's nothing else to think about while you're on a plane alone. i decide to blank my mind of it. i'm on vacation, motherfuckers. it was a good week for comics; i read the last volume of Y the last man (i got choked up when apersand dies, i admit it) and the surprisingly good umbrella academy (written by the singer of my chemical romance, but i swear it's a good book. i was skeptical, too).
tara picks me up at long beach airport, which is a bit of a zoo, but less disgusting than LAX. it's been in the 70s in seattle lately, and it's close to 100 when i touch down in LA. tara says, "we're going straight to chad's to sit in the air conditioning until it cools off", and i have no arguments. LA always seems bigger to me than it geographically is, because so much of my time there is looking at highways. we cruise tara's little suby over to silverlake and crash out at chad's place. i like chad, i decide. tara has chosen well, and it's nice when your friends are dating people that don't disappoint you (i hate that feeling). we bask in the AC for a bit and make some loose plans for what to do with my time in LA.
weighing the options, i decide i want mexican food. i phone nicole and she says she and mike will be at some hipster bar not too far away, so we head over there after dinner. it's great to see nicole, i think it'd been about four years since last time we hung out. she introduces me to mike, whom i've heard a great deal about, to say nothing of having seen his band a bunch of times, but never actually met. i remember when they first started dating, nicole said, "i think you'd like him. he's got a very dry sense of humor. he's probably the only person i know as funny as you and nick". to which i replied, "no one is as funny as me and nick", which is true. but i liked mike a lot. what's up with all my homegirls finding awesome boyfriends? crazy. a herd of squealing hipster girls on what appeared to be a bachelorette party bar crawl barges past us and nicole and i enjoy sizing them up and talking shit. mostly i was annoyed that they were hoarding the photobooth. oh, well. next time. we all roll back to chad's house (adding on chad's pal chuck and his lady joan) for cheaper beer and less squealing. you really can't put nicole and i in the same space without us reminiscing about the glory days of wigglesworth street. chad and chuck get me psyched up to go skateboarding, despite the thick coat of rust on my skills. we all agree to meet up at the beach the next day. i sprawl out on chad's couch in front of the arctic air conditioner, and my lack of sleep catches up with me.
SUNDAY turns out one of chad's quality boyfriend skills is making awesome breakfast; i gotta find me a woman like this, i tell you. we all enjoy his finely crafted toast, soft boiled eggs, and hash browns while the caffeine seeps in. tara had purchased a large television and had it delivered to chad's place, so we threw that in the back of chad's truck and rolled out to tara's newish place in venice. more of the gross LA highways, unloaded the tv, and tossed tara's two boogie boards into the back of the truck. beach mission is go.
we drove along the coast for a good long while, and while my LA geography is a little dodgy, i gathered we were going "out past malibu" to a beach called zuma (not to be confused with the popcap game about a frog shooting balls at spirals of other balls). parking was a motherfucker; they had five gates to get into this place, only two of which were attended. the city had issued a "hey, it's going to be wicked hot, you may lose power in your home, why don't you just go to the beach?" warning, so everyone and their fat sister was trying to get to into this parking lot. took us about an hour to get to a space, but it was fine, minimal road raging. nothing to make you body conscious like rubbing sunblock all over your (admittedly minor) love handles while surrounded by tanned, healthy people. i honestly can't remember when i last went to the beach, but it's like falling off a bike, comes right back to you. salt water makes you have to spit a lot, frolicking in waves is still as fun as it was when you were little, and while i'm not at all ready to try surfing again, boogie boards i can (mostly) handle. chuck and i kick around a mini soccer ball in the surf while chad and mike play frisbee. mike loves frisbee way too much. "when they're on tour, i get calls about the awesome frisbee catches he's made that day," nicole informs me. mike and i end up talking guitars for a bit, which is fun for me because i don't really have any guitar geek friends in seattle. i can nerd out on games and music there, but i am lacking comics and guitar fetishists to bond with in the emerald city. we pack up our beach stuff and head down the highway a little bit to some seafood shack that nicole and mike speak well of. i get fried clam stips and french fries; very cape cod, which is my only real beach association, i guess. we say goodbye to the gang and head back to chad's to decompress. we drive through some of the windy canyon backroads, and it's really kinda beautiful. i'm so used to the ugly urban bits of LA, i forget that it's kind of interesting, topographically. some nice postcard material here and there.
tara, chad, and i watch a fuel tv spotlight on daewon song and i start to feel skatey again. chad is still a devout skater, and the issues of transworld and thrasher in his bathroom make me feel old and guilty for not keeping up with my love of skating. then again, there was a point maybe five years ago when i was reading an interview in a skate mag and realized, "shit, all these kids are like 17 and totally spoiled little assholes obsessed with pot and finger-banging. i don't want to hear about their lives". now, much like porn, "i only read it for the pictures". we head out for dinner at a classy chinese place where chad's parents used to take him when he was growing up (he's half chinese, incidentally). i get a really good squid in black bean sauce, and a lame fortune in my cookie.
on the way home, we pass the disgusting hotel scott and i stayed at for E3 2006, and i feel guilty about that whole debacle all over again (sorry, scott). we will wind up passing this place many more times during my stay this week, as it is on the way to chad's house, and each time it makes me feel shitty. some memories are like that. fittingly, point break is on tv when we get back to chad's house. tara tells me about point break live and i am intrigued. i guess whenever chad has a shitty day out surfing with friends, he says, "somebody punch me in the face, cut my leash, and tell me to go back to the valley". mostly, i still want to fuck lori petty. what is it with me and butch chicks?
we head out so chad can get some sleep before working the next day. i get a call from karl, my building manager, that goes something like this: me: hey, karl. what's up? karl: hey, mark. where are you? me: i'm in california. karl: oh, we were looking for you and couldn't find you. i'll go turn off the lights and lock up. me: huh? karl: oh, there was a fire. -pause- karl: outside the building, the bushes by your unit caught fire. the apartment itself is fine, just a little smoky. we didn't know where you were, so i wanted to check in. me: ...okay. well, thanks for calling. karl: okay, take care.
it was the pause that gave me a heart attack. that's just not a sentence you leave hanging, y'know? i texted sarah to ask her to check in on the apartment and the cat the next day.
MONDAY i wake up on the air matress in the spare bedroom, next to the surfboards and the box of action figures. tara has to wait for the cable guy, so after i shower, she sends me over to the socialist (read: "hippie") coffee shop down the street, where i have so much trouble trying to figure out where all the elements of her iced coffee are within the space that i don't even ask for my own tea. does it really need to be so complicated? does that raise your socialism score? fucking hippies. the cable guy, of course, does not come. so we head out for our day of capitalism.
first we pull over in what i gather was tara's old hood, and walk a ways to the venice canals. if location is everything, then the million dollar price tags on these houses might seem fair. the disparity between the architecture from one home to the next is sort of amazing, all within these fairly small lots. nice to look at, but i don't think i'd want to live there. we head into downtown and look at a number of boutiquey stores, fancy clothes and such. the animal-themed-housewares shop tara wanted me to see is closed, sadly. we wind up meeting a girl from worcester at the british clothing store, where i buy a fred perry hoodie (on sale, for bonus jew points). 'membah, massholes ahh everywheahh, watch ya fahkin' back.
the giant robot store does not yield any treasures, which is a bit of disappointment. i usually find a good art book or a ryan mcginnis shirt there. across the street, at a shop called black market, we did a little better. i found a sweet shirt with two holstered pistols on it (which i have named "the kohler" in my head), and a nice brown shirt with subtle argyle (which is my new ladykiller shirt, having retired the plaid shirt i stole from vivona years ago because it is now transparent from wear). i am officially declaring the whole "sneaker freak" thing over; real men do not stand in line to buy shoes in limited edition "colorways'. get a real hobby, shithead. continuing on my clothes shopping plan, we ride around for a few blocks, failing to find the camper store. "oh, by the way, this is beverly hills," tara informs me. all i can think of is 90210 from middle school. "it's as bad as you might guess. no one we know hangs out around here," she says, "but there's good cupcakes nearby". i declare that our mission, to obtain cuppy-cakes in beverly hills. and we do, as well as a good sandwich shop for lunch.
after obtaining cuppy-cakes, we stumbled across the la brea tar pits. we both enthusiastically decide that today's tourism will be going to the tar pits. the pits themselves are pretty dull, just bubbling with methane and stinky. but the fossils in the museum are awesome; giant sloth, wooly mammoth, saber toothed tiger, and a wall of four hundred dire wolf skulls! sick! i want that wall to be my next band's album cover.
again, i have no sense of LA geography, so when i realized that i had left my skate helmet at tara's house venice (not having gotten my caffeine fix because of the hippie coffee shop, i missed her "bring everything you will need for the day" instruction) and still wanted to go to record shopping at amoeba in hollywood and then meeting with chad in silverlake to go skating, she got frustrated and i got confused. she showed it to me on the map and then i felt dumb, especially factoring 5pm traffic. ultimately, we decided to go back to venice and breathe out for a few, then see how the traffic looked. whether tara was being a good sport or it really wasn't so bad, we picked up the helmet and then took off for hollywood. obviously, any time i am in either SF or LA, i have to stop off at the mecca of used record stores. though i did not bring my quest item list, so i was just sort of winging it based on what i could remember, and consequently, did not score as well as i might have. such is life. tara gave me forty five minutes to hunt. because i always wind up listing my haul:
champion/betrayed split: betrayed is one of my jock-core guilty pleasures. finger pointing abounds. concentrick "music for tunnels": tim green from the fucking champs' side thing. this one (1996) sucked, the new one is amazing (and has jon theodore of the mars volta on drums). ed gein "it's a shame a family could be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs": new york grindcore on the inside edge of unlistenable. perfect for shitty moods. georgie james "places": john davis, formerly of q and not u, and some woman. crap. i hate you discography: it was filed with give up the ghost, but it sounds like a remedial hardcore course taught by teenagers. shook ones "sixteen" and "facetious folly feat": local seattle hardcore that for some reason i can't find at any local stores. sounds like kid dynamite, and unabashedly, at that.
so, yeah... mostly struck out on blind purchases. a few winners. we meet up with chad at his house and i checked the trucks on the board i gave tara last summer (which, in part, vivona had given to me. we keep this shit in the family). we hit up a nice little outdoor concrete park a few miles away, and i realize it's been a long, long time since i dropped in on anything steeper than a curb. i rolled down the easy transition and ate shit on the first wall, managing to scuff all the major joints and my palms. that got the adrenaline buzzing! feeling good and shaky, i pumped around a bit in the medium sized bowl until i felt a bit more confident. at some point, i cut off a young kid by accident, totally my foul. "i'm sorry, sir," he said, and i can't decide if i just look that old now or if he was taking the piss. either way, that made me feel ancient. despite being rusty as fuck, i had to admit, it felt really fucking good to be skating. i didn't realize how much i missed it / needed it. we rounded out the night at a great little italian place. i got fettuccine verde in a rich orange sauce that was to die from; i ate to bursting and slept like a brick.
TUESDAY cuppa tea at chad's and tara and i're off for more adventures. we get brunch at a place called dusty's and are served by a boy who looks like tobey maguire. there's an obnoxious couple next to us talking about cool music business people they know and i am reminded that i am, despite having so far been surrounded by cool friends, still in los angeles, land of soulless phonies. tara says that they sometimes run into jason lee at this place (chad is pals with chris pastras, and thus, cooler than me) as i enjoy the french toast. we stop into a sort of super archie mcphee store not too far away called wacko, where i get presents for sarah, joe, and the girl-i-don-even-know (and her mother. since, in spite of my not even knowing her, i know her mother likes anything with a fleur d'lys on it. weird, huh?). i like to bring gifts back from vacation for the good children.
zoo! it was way too hot for the zoo, both for us and for the animals, and i again cursed myself for stupidly leaving my camera up north. did you know that the end feathers on a flamingo's wings are black? i'd never noticed. we got a really good view of the orangutans, which was great. i love the locomotion of the adult male, so huge and lumbering. and then we saw an elephant masturbating against a huge tractor tire, and my day was made. we went back to chad's to chill for a bit (literally) and i watched some of alien3 while tara checked her mail and such. i booked a shuttle bus to the airport, confirmed dinner plans with nicole and mike, and drinks with pinball later on.
cooled down, we headed out to do some downtown-ish stuff. first stop was little tokyo, where i got a nice hello kitty prize for stef and we took sticker club photos (also hello kitty themed, of course. snowboard hello kitty, at that). the "anime store" was all crap bootlegs of shit i had seen ages ago, and seemed to mostly be a front for all the hentai in the back. skeevy. we delved further into downtown to go to a hotel rooftop bar called the standard. i don't know how this area could be so booming as a neighborhood, since it all feels like financial district back home to me, not hood-like at all. the standard is pretty chill in a weirdly douchey, guilty pleasure kind of way; i gather it's worse later at night and on weekends. it's very LA in it's weird mix of people and sort of hip but sort of business vibe. we get some drinks and finger food while enjoying the view. i spot an invader tile piece on the wall next to the pool and that cheers me up. some lame fucking dude with a series of butterflies tattooed down his back (dead serious) kept making eye contact with tara, whereas i was sizing up some brooklyn-looking birds wearing too much clothing for a heat wave. the bartender was just killing time until his motley cru cover band took off, i could tell.
i gather poor mike has to get up at like four a.m. for his job, and then practices with isis from two to four every day. so i was not insulted when he initially declined the dinner plan. but i think the promise of yamashiro sushi broke him, and he toughed it out. my friend kevin (henceforth referred to as "pinball") had taken scott and i to this place the first time i went to E3 (2005), and i was so enamored with it that i try to get back there every time i'm in LA. traffic was a motherfucker, corroborating tara's stories of how badly fucked hollywood gets when there's a show at the hollywood bowl, but we made it okay. nicole got a steak and i told her how proud of her i was (all my little vegans are growing up and eating dead things!), and i ate roughly my birth weight in sushi, as i usually do when i go out for the good stuff. we bid nicole and mike farewell, and then rolled back downtown to meet pinball at some whiskey bar a few blocks from where we'd been in the afternoon. while we're waiting for pinball to arrive, tara chews me out for being stupid and letting a girl treat me like shit again, and i think i needed to hear it from someone who actually knows my history to make it real. pinball shows up with a small gaggle of friends, and he and i catch up for a bit. he tells me that a ton of the ex-turbine gang are working on his team at blizzard now, which is kinda cool. nice to know the team is still together in some ways. it's a small fucking industry, man. pinball gets pulled away on girlfriend duty, and tara and i excuse ourselves for the evening.
back at casa chad, we discover he's decided to replace dinner with beer and is feeling a bit less cranky. he hands me a big old girl deck ("from the hands of eric koston") and some barely used wheels and says, "you got the bug again. you know you do. take this home and ride it". we then look up online where the closest skatepark to my house is, and i promise chad that i will take his gift and ride it there. i realize he just gets this shit flowed to him from pals, but it was still awfully generous. they go to bed and i discover that i am too caffeinated from drinking cokes all night to sleep. i end up watching some godawful freddie prinze jr movie because claire forlani (i have very few celebrity crushes, but ever since mallrats i've loved claire. we even named a song after her once) is in it. and even then i felt dirty.
WEDNESDAY woke up early-ish to see chad off to work, and thank him for the hospitality and gifts. tara does some exercises with her personal trainer in the backyard, which is endearingly yuppie (also, her trainer is a hot mormon, which is just wrong on all counts). we return to venice, and i set out to entertain myself while tara works. conveniently, her work is located only a few blocks from venice beach, so i take her skateboard over there and cruise the strip, people-watching. such a weird spot; you have muscle beach, which is sort of self-explanatory, all sorts of touristy strip stores and restaurants, creepy little tattoo parlors with short mexican guys covered in prison tats excited to help you get some of your own, and parking lots full of crusty old RVs beached like whales, full of homeless people who have tanned away their facial features in the sun. somewhere amongst all this glamor is the venice beach "skatepark", which may be the most liberal use of the words i have ever seen. a few ledges, a kinked flat rail, a foot high curve with coping on it, and another curved slab that i spent most of my time there trying to stick a boardslide on, to no avail. i watched this one twelve year old kid trying to kickflip a parking block for a bit, but he kept stopping to text message every few minutes. why does a kid that young need a fucking sidekick? i mean, shit. he's got his whole life in front of him for being fat and lazy and getting all of his social interaction by typing with people. i kept wanting to shake him violently by the shoulders and tell him to enjoy it while he can.
i met up with tara and the dudes from her editing suite for thai food lunch. none that memorable, nor was the food. tara dropped me off at her place and i thanked her for the lovely stay and touring me around. she went back to work and i showered, shaved, and packed up my shit. stuck for a bit in afternoon rush hour traffic, i had a nice conversation with the shuttle bus driver about gas prices, the economy on the whole, and the los angeles lakers. a girl with too much eyeliner and "juicy" sweatpants on kept making blatant eye contact with me at the gate, while sitting next to a boy who could have as easily been her husband as her brother. never can tell. i just read more of my book (we owe you nothing / punk planet: the collected interviews, edited by daniel sinker) and played some more new super mario bros on my DS. another quick flight and i was home to the comforting smell of cat shit. it's the little things you miss when you're away.
INTERMEZZO: EVER GET THE FEELING YOU'VE BEEN CHEATED? this was the first time i'd ever come home from LA without being jet-lagged (and only mildly sun-burned, to boot), which was nice. life settled back into normal gear, work was slow (we spent a week playtesting / bug hunting, which is what most people assume we do all the time when you say "i make videogames"). i fulfilled my promise to chad, and have been skating at the little indoor park over in freemont every weekend; it feels great puttering around on obstacles and ramps again, even if i can barely stick any tricks. the girl-i-don't-even-know and i swapped a few texts about hangouts, but then she just stopped talking to me altogether. no explanation, no nothing. and as much as it hurt to do it, i just stopped trying. i didn't call her. she quit on me, and i decided to accept it rather than start a fight. i could be meaner about this, but i'm going to be uncharacteristically mature. i get ugly when i get hurt, those of you unlucky enough to have seen it know this, but it's not something i want to get into. if being friends with me is not worth her time, explaining to all of you how she fucked me over is equally unworthy of mine.
the only strange part is that this is the first relationship i've ever failed out of where it wasn't at all my fault, it was entirely her baggage. after a lifetime of me fucking everything up, for once i am in the right. i wish this made me feel better about it, but instead i've just felt kinda hollow in my stomach whenever i think about her.
ACT TWO: BOSTON, or IT'S NOT THE HEAT, IT'S THE STUPIDITY a few weeks after LA, i was saddling up for boston. partly because i need to check in on my city periodically, and partly for family reasons. since last thanksgiving, my grandfather has taken a pronounced turn for the worse, both mentally and physically. in april he fell over, and my parents had to cancel their visit to seattle to take care of him. my brother and i had planned to both go home at the same time at the end of june, but then i had some work crunch to contend with (which was later rescheduled, much to my annoyance), so ultimately our trips were a few weeks apart. i decided to make it a short trip (two days in the city, two days in the burbs, then out) so i wouldn't wind up with dead time at the end just being bored in the suburbs.
SATURDAY while i understand the logic behind bringing a baby on a red-eye flight ("oh, she'll just sleep the whole way"), babies are not logical creatures. i got maybe two hours of sleep, despite drugs and earplugs. having spent a few years on the wrong coast now, i can say that the pacific smells nothing like the atlantic, and i know i am home by the smell of boston harbor. it's that unmistakable and omnipresent. it's about 4am in my brain, but despite inconvenient shuttle buses from either side of the longfellow bridge, i manage to take the T back to mel's house without too much trouble. i pass out on her couch, and she staggers in to say hello looking about as exhausted as i am, informing me that she had a late night out dancing and was going to return to bed. i think we both slept till about 11:30 EST, and we both felt good about it. i bullshitted with her roommate damien for a bit while mel groomed herself, and then we wandered over to davis square and got brunch a johnny d's. i got sweet spinach omelet which came with a perfectly-sized little cup of oatmeal. we had a sad moment remembering that the last time we ate here was with amanda, who has subsequently caught a nasty case of crazy from her boyfriend [!google alerts ALEX DORFMAN google alerts! omg paranoia ftw!1!! pnwd!!!], making fun of mel's then-newfound symmetry. again, it sucks losing friends for no logical reason. sort of a theme this year.
mel dragged me out to thrilling arlington on a mission to get cat food for her boys. the bus driver was hucking along, and not only blew past our stop, but screeched to a halt so fast that mel toppled over the seat in front of us. i guess mel volunteers at this particular cat clinic/shelter sometimes, so everyone knew her, and i got to go in the back and play with some of the cats awaiting adoption, which was nice. while mel was socializing with the vets and other staff, i listened to this lady talk to the dude working the front counter about her cats in the familiar way you would talk to a sibling about a shared relative. i guess an exclusively cat-oriented clinic would naturally attract crazy cat ladies, but i was impressed that there was one there on display during my brief visit. we had the same maniac bus driver on the way home, but managed to not fall over this time.
whether it was the dancing and exercising the day before or what, mel decided she was going to be lazy and not go to the party she was planning on bringing me along to that afternoon. which was fine with me, honestly, being more interested in hanging out with old friends than being charming with people i didn't know. so i left her at home to rest and headed into harvard square for my first round of record shopping at the newbury comics branch there, and a brief perusal of planet records. i obtained about twenty five cds in my two day visit to the homeland, and i will tally them up in tomorrow's entry. from newb's i walked down mass ave and phoned stef for directions to her new place.
her roommate, marissa, opened the door and let me in, as stef was elbow-deep in algae-rich water when i got there. she had recently moved in with marissa and cameron (again) and was still in the process of getting her fishtanks sorted out, pawing around with a little net and then running the flapping sea-life from a small tank in the living room to a larger one in her new bedroom. the last time i was home, stef and i went over to cameron's old place to hang out and it was like a pet store's aquarium section; wall to wall tanks brimming with fish, shrimp, crabs, algae eaters, snails, and turtles. the new apartment was equally overrun with their shared tanks, and while stef transferred her pets, cameron and marissa gave me a tour of the other exhibits. my favorite was the small tank of little eyeless fish who could hone in ..ment in the water. finished with her fish-shuttling, stef and i headed out for dinner.
we walked from cambridgeport across the bridge toward the city. they've refurbished the citgo sign, fixed up the busted lights. have you ever thought about the citgo sign? does anyone even remember/care what citgo oil is? and how did it become one of the iconic landmarks of our city? picture an image of fenway or the boston skyline without the citgo sign. exactly. it looks nice from the bridge, anyway. i miss the charles; i've written before about how sitting along the banks is my favorite cheap date, and while lake union has it's charms, this will always be the water running in my veins. we have a nice dinner at an indian place i'd walked by a million times but never actually eaten at. i'm starting to think i need to pick a new entree besides murg sagwala, but it never treats me wrong, no matter which indian restaurant. after dinner, we return to stef's place and i gave her the slightly-belated birthday presents i had brought her (i was pretty close, it was only a few days before). then we watched a number of episodes of arrested development with cameron and marissa, of which i had heard many good things, but never bothered downloading. turns out it's quite funny. we take some of the turtles out from the tank and let them run around on the bedspread. one of them is intrigued by television. i brought along a couple movies from home, from which stef picks the taste of tea, an odd-yet-sweet story about a family living in the mountains of japan that i recently picked up. i pull some cables setting up the vcr and dvd player in her bedroom, and stef taps buttons for about ten minutes trying to program her universal remote to talk with her television (i am momentarily reminded of einstein's definition of insanity). we made it about an hour into the movie before stef faded out. my confused sense of timezones didn't notice i'd kept the poor girl up til 3am eastern. i fell asleep watching her snore.
i'm going to pause the story briefly here, because i know what you're thinking (preemptive defensiveness being my specialty): did he really just fly across the country on a booty call? this may be why i don't really write about my love life anymore, because it winds up with me defending myself more than anything. when i was seventeen and putting out zines, i'd write about anything and everything going on in my life, even at the expense of looking like an asshole. chalk it up to immaturity, at least i didn't feel like i had to add disclaimers to explain myself. did i travel three thousand miles to wind up in this girl's bed? no. i traveled here to see my friends and to visit my senile grandfather while he could still remember my name. did it work out that one of my friends was once a love interest and that we were both recently on the bounce from shitty breakups? yes, that i'll give you. but the majority of you bored enough to have read this far are my real friends. you know i am not a shifty womanizer (actually, anyone who knows me would laugh at the idea of me dating more than one woman in a year...), and you know it's more complicated than that. which is why i generally don't write about it.
SUNDAY ten thirty-ish my brain turns back on and i start organizing all the things i want to do during the day, but i afford myself a few minutes to just watch stef sleep (cursing a lifetime of bad timing all the while). she halfway wakes up and we spend a bit of time just holding each other, and i start thinking which items i could cross of my agenda in favor of just staying here in bed. we motivate a bit, she starts in on her morning coffee and cigarette, and i try to get myself ready to walk around all day. we make plans to hang out again later, and i head off for allston.
my first stop for the day was trusty old new england comics, where i was hoping to hang out with my friend michelle. i think it's a good thing that i spent time in LA a few weeks earlier, as the blazing sun didn't phase me quite as badly as it might have. the humidity, conversely, was still filthy. michelle was not at the comic shop, but i picked up my weekly fix, anyway. i was sort of bummed, but it left me more time for record shopping before my lunch date with pete mac. i rode the B line for the novelty of it, and to no great surprise, learned that BU kids still haven't grasped the concept of "step in from the doors and move to the rear of the train" in my absence. i was hoping to go to the paraphernalia shop next to fenway and pick up a sox shirt (specifically, one for the new japanese guy on the team. i hate the sox, but the idea of a japanese man playing baseball at fenway makes me happy), but then, noting the townie families in full sox kits, i realized there was an actual game that day. i got off the train a stop before kenmore, just so i could relive the feeling of walking through a fenway crowd, scalpers howling in my ears. when you go back home, it's good to visit the things you hated as well as the things you loved. keeps it all in perspective.
i stopped off at nuggets and the newbury street branch of newbury comics to shop for records. as i mentioned, i bought a lot this trip. i'll list them now, including two that break the continuity of this narrative because nick will hand them to me a few hours into the future. but oh, well:
the austerity program "black madonna": sounds kind of like shellac meets the turing machine. mathy, lots of mid-range twang, though i wish people would stop trying to sing like steve albini. black cross "severance pays": ex by the grace of god, do i love louisville hardcore or what? the production on this record is so-so, but the songs are pretty solid. daggermouth "turf wars": continuing my strange, guilty pleasure, pop punky hardcore phase. i'll grow out of it, i'm sure, but lately my itunes looks like a flyer for the warped tour. daltonic "chattanooga": if you ain't from boston, you probably don't care. and even if you are, you probably don't care. dianogah "qhnnnl": chicago bass-bass-drums trio, a little more vocal and aggressive (almost) this time out. still mostly mellow instrumental. four years strong "rise or die trying": sounds like the first fall out boy record. god, what is wrong with me? why does everything have to be catchy these days? am i that depressed? give up the ghost "love american EP": that's more like it. real boston hardcore, american nightmare with a lamer name. the grails "black tar prophecies" and "redlight": soundtrack-esque, doomy metal-ish music. our score composer at work, nathan, actually turned me on to these guys. makes sense. guns up! "all this is" and "outlive": sometimes i need some finger pointing. okay, always i need finger pointing. have heart "songs to scream at the sun": a little let down, i remember them being fun live. hardcore by the book. hot water music "finding the rhythms": i'm just collecting my back catalogue of older HWM i have on vinyl. makes it easier to forget how bad their last few albums sucked. moving targets "fall": this was worse than i remembered it being. old, old boston punk/indie band. though funny to see the TAANG! logo again. no age "nouns": i've tried twice to like this band, and failed both times. sorry, nick. ratatat "LP3": i respect what they're trying to do, but i don't need more ambient music. i go to ratatat when i want bangin' beats, and this album is not doing that for me. shai hulud "misanthropy pure": if you stop and listen carefully, there's as many time changes in newer shai hulud songs as anything meshugga is doing, just the riffs are simpler. sing along tech hardcore done right. love it. sigur ros "með suð i eyrum við spilum endalaust": i can't pronounce it, nor do i care. it's sigur ros, you know it's beautiful and ethereal. sinaloa "oceans of islands": i was bros with these kids in high school, though i don't keep up. sounds like all sorts of early nineties emo, though more indian summer than cap'n jazz, y'know? of course you don't. the suicide file "some mistakes you never stop paying for" and "twilight": when in boston, buy up lots of boston hardcore to comfort you in foreign places. sounds like a slower version of the bronx with more black flag mixed in. unearth "the stings of conscience": mosh core with metal leanings. suitably angry.
i am trying to stuff all of today's purchases into my bag when pete calls to say he's arrived on newbury street. we walk a few blocks and stop at the tapas place (i wanna say it's called "tapeo"? who cares), where we are seated outside to people-watch all the newbury douchey tourists and eat small portions of food. kim and liam (his wife and son) are in new mexico visiting her family, so pete's been soaking up the bachelor life for a week or so. he orders some spicy shrimp things that are delicious, and i get scallops in a bright yellow sauce that's pretty good, along with some side dishes. we talk shop, he fills me in on the improvements for rock band 2 (which he was bumped up to lead artist for) and i brag about my gore effects for project origin. every time i see pete, he reminds me that whenever i feel like coming home, i could come work at harmonix. i just can't get excited about making pyrotechnics and smoke machines, though. dunno. pete confides that he is burning out on the games biz a bit; being thirty six, having a kid, adult concerns and all. i think everyone in our industry feels this, sometimes. that feeling of overextending your adolescence and "will i still want to be doing this in twenty years?". maybe all jobs are like that, but ours especially so. how long can you make entertainment for ungrateful, socially-retarded teenage boys before you can't take the feeling of uselessness anymore? and what do you do with your life afterwards?
i strike out at the camper store (much like indian food, i think shoes may be a field where i need to broaden my horizons away from the tried and true), and bid pete farewell with one arm while hopping onto a 1 bus with the other. i make it back to mel's house pretty soon thereafter, and we meet nick, celeste, and neko around the corner at the park. it's funny, six months ago i was home and witnessed neko's first steps. now she's running around, speaking in full sentences, and climbing up fences. i haven't made that much progress in six years of my life, but kids learn shit so fast. it's interesting to see her grow up in these half-year chunks, she makes such huge leaps between my visits. celeste and i catch up while nick spots neko on the jungle gym. mel plays photojournalist, as ever. i can only imagine how she will document her own child if/when she ever has one.
we rally john, mel's recently-ex-boyfriend, and our little posse heads over to the chinese place a block or so from mel's house. we'd eaten there before, and it's always pretty good, with a good spread of vegetarian choices for such a small place. neko's first try at chopsticks was pretty impressive, i've seen adults do way worse. i've said it before, but nick and celeste always make me want to find an amazing woman to brew a kid with. it's just fascinating to see how much of each of them there is in this tiny person. genetics are cool, what can i say? we walk over to davis, and get ice cream at the j.p. licks there. i think it's funny that they've all trained neko to refer to john as "dude": "neko, hold dude's hand while you cross the street". and a two year old saying, "dude, dude, look!" is pretty goddamn hilarious. maybe it's just me. team woodside heads back to suburbia and john takes off (i can see why they broke up, he's too nice for her. perky, even), leaving mel and i to chill out for a bit on her couch. she got up early to go ride horses in suburbia, apparently a new hobby for her. me, i'm just jetlagged. mel convinces me to take a shower before i head over to stef's house ("on behalf of women"), and i wind up smelling like her fruity girly soaps and shampoo. i thank her for the hospitality and we make loose plans for her to come visit in the fall.
i find stef, cameron, and marissa watching a history channel special on axes, which was pretty good. we then watched a pbs show debunking spontaneous human combustion, culminating with forensic scientists wrapping a dead pig in a blanket and setting it on fire to show how the fat perpetuates the fire until even bone burns away. i declared "fire scientist" as my new career path. stef and i retired to her room to finish watching the taste of tea.
love will always smell like second-hand smoke to me.
ACT THREE: ANDOVER, or SUBURBAN HOME MONDAY i know i came home to perform my duties of filial piety, and i know stef's gotta get up for work, but i really don't want to untangle our limbs just yet. or ever, given my druthers. we ignore the alarm clock as long as practically possible, but eventually we have to stop staring at each other. i space out watching her fishtank from the edge of her bed while she gets presentable for work. she looks so cute in her office clothes, but she looks cute all the time; it's almost redundant. we ride the T to copley, she has a cigarette, i tell her she should come visit seattle (enticing vegans to visit here is easy), and we hug our goodbyes. this part sucked two years ago, too.
all that extra T fare seems to have been put into making north station into a proper train station again, even if the service is still shit. the 9:20 train doesn't go all the way to andover, so mum and dad come to pick me up in reading. it's drizzling and overcast when i get off the commuter rail, and they accuse me of bringing the seattle weather with me. "we're going to head straight over to see gra-pete (a contraction of "grandpa pete" my brother coined when he was two and has subsequently become my grandfather's moniker within our family) so we can catch him before they serve lunch," they inform me. i regret not having had any caffeine this morning, but otherwise i am fine with this plan.
when my grandmother died a few years back, my parents moved my grandfather up from jersey to an old folks home in andover so they could keep an eye on him. despite the full care service package, my father visits the old man at least once a day. a year or so back, gra-pete slipped up when telling me a story about my father and said, "my father went to the bank to settle some things for me. or, rather, your father. well, he's like my father at this point!" he chuckled. and it's true, dad puts a great deal of himself into taking care of grandpa. some other time i will go off on my useless shitbag uncle, who visits my grandfather about as often as i do, while living a great deal closer than i do (maine), but not right now. we arrive at the old folks home, and i forget for a moment that one has to breathe through their mouth here. it is, after all, a building full of old people farting and slowly decomposing. "old farts" is not just slang.
as i mentioned, back in april grandpa wandered out from his room and took a spill, and spent a little time in the hospital. when he returned to the old folks home, they moved him up to the "memory patients wing" on the fourth floor, where there would be closer supervision of his activities. you have to have an employee unlock the door to the elevator with a key to access this area. we went up to his room, and he said hi to my father and mother, and then looked straight at me and said, "oh, and who's this?".
but he wasn't being coy. he honestly didn't recognize me.
that hit me kind of hard. again, i am struck how much can change in six months. when i was home at christmas, gra-pete was noticeably doing worse than before: he was breathing oddly, forgetting stuff more, and would periodically seem to shut down and stare off into space like he was dead. but when i walked in the door, he gave me a hearty "marko! how are you! marvelous, marvelous!", like he always has. six months later, and there's simply no recognition. nothing. we politely shake hands and mum tries to introduce me, to remind him, but it's just not there. you can see in his eyes it's not there. mum hands me an album of old photos, suggesting that it might spark his memory if we look at some old pictures of us together. i dutifully flip through the pages, amused with my own sense of nostalgia looking at them, but i don't think grandpa registered much. he nodded politely and said, "oh, yes, yes" where appropriate, but it was more the programmed response of schoolchildren than sincere interest or comprehension. if anything, he looked sad, like he knew he should know, but couldn't. i can't imagine how awful that would feel. dad says he sometimes has trouble just finding words and stringing them together, and often gets frustrated by it. i'm not hurt that he couldn't remember me, rather i feel bad that he had to try. i can't even remember shit from ten years ago, by the time i'm eighty eight... well, i'll be dead by then. but you get the idea.
we handed grandpa off to one of the staff ladies for lunchtime and had her unlock the elevator for us. the old people home always makes me depressed, which i think it's supposed to do, by design. we drove back through town to admire the new sculpture of polar bears out in front of the town library (where my mother works). because, you know... nothing says "andover" like polar bears. as we pulled into my parents' driveway, a deer bounded across in front of us. no bullshit. like wild america or some shit. i keep telling you, i grew up in a swampy forest, that's why i choose to live in cities now. we have some lunch and then hung out around the house for a few hours. mum reminds me that we're going to go work at the soup kitchen in lawrence where they volunteer. there's no poor people in andover, so they have to go to the next town over to sooth their middle class guilt.
my parents cannot seem to grasp the notion that i am thirty years old. the idea of me doing my own dishes, or even worse, doing dishes for others, is completely inconceivable. there was much disclaiming before we got to the soup kitchen, like "well, we couldn't cancel, because we were already on the schedule for this week when you told us your vacation plans. but you don't have to work if you don't want to". because, you know, i'm the sort of person who would sit drinking a cosmo and reading fashion magazines while my parents served food to disadvantaged people. after the usual round of introducing me to the other volunteers like i am a bowling trophy they've won, we set to preparing food for the "underemployed and unemployable", as one of the volunteers put it. it was pretty much an assembly line; baked beans, two pieces of ham (i owned this with a pair of tongs), a piece of bread, and cup of potato salad, handing the plate along from left to right. even my small brain could figure it out. i know it makes me almost as bad a bostonian as my hating the red sox, but i hate baked beans, too. i end up chatting with the nice englishman doing the dishes, and we have that classic conversation i have with all non-computer-savvy folk when i explain what i do, "so, how do you get the art into the computer?". it wasn't too bad for an evening's work, and mum and dad were unduly impressed with my helping them out with their do-gooder-ing. to celebrate their good deedery and my newfound skill with tongs, we went out for ice cream in (formerly-racist and don't think we've forgotten) north andover. dad and i watched tekkon kinkreet (which i had brought with me), and then i read a bit and passed out on the couch in the basement. through some mystery of suburban dust molecules, my allergies always flip out when i sleep in my parents' basement. just kills me.
TUESDAY there is something comforting about eating breakfast at my parents' house that i can't quite pin down. my mother's yenta jewish mother routine of offering me food even though i am perfectly capable of finding it for myself, my father making pancakes or eggs or something along those lines, NPR coming out of the radio, and the lack of any sort of black teas or coca cola to sate my early morning caffeine addiction. all of this leaves me groggy and disoriented, much like every morning of my life during high school.
we went to the old folks home again to see grandpa before lunch. again, no recognition. it's just weird, looking right at someone who's watched your whole life, and they can't remember your first name. when i got home to seattle, i called my brother to talk about this feeling, and he made a good point: we didn't go home for gra-pete, we went home because it matters to dad that we're there and that we care about the old man. this is the same conclusion we came to about why we went to my grandmother's funeral (five of the worst days of my life), even though we both hated her, and dad only sorta liked her (she was a terrible person, how my grandfather put up with her so long is beyond me). it's awkward these days, because i hear stories about my grandfather from both of my parents, and sometimes they conflict. my mother is the realist, my father the optimist, and both of them are so heavily invested in taking care of grandpa that it's incredibly stressful for them from both perspectives. i try to picture myself taking care of my parents twenty years out in the same way, and it makes me uneasy. to think of watching the person that raised you crumbling before your eyes... i dunno. i don't like to think about it, and it makes me sad for my father. i hope i can one day be as good a son to him and mum. i spent some more time talking with gra-pete, and while i don't feel any of it penetrated beyond polite smiles and acknowledgment sounds, i like to think it made him feel better that i was there talking with him. i gave him a hug as we left, and he held my hand for a moment. i can't really describe his expression, but it was somewhere between sad and exhausted. it reminded me of my dog's eyes the day she died, and it still kinda haunts me.
dad went to work at the art center in lawrence (he taught high school art for thirty one years so he could retire and... teach art), and mum and i drove around andover a bit, "sightseeing". the high school looks nothing like it did in my day, and even the skatepark is starting to show it's age, ten years later. we drove home, and i did my usual tech support gig on my mother's computer for an hour or so. despite my best laid plans, i still wound up with a few bored hours in suburbia. i read about E3 online, trying to keep up with the hype machine. when i got back to work thursday, i had 300 emails, 80% of which were "did you see this cool video of something at E3?" and "oh, yeah. i saw that. it looked cool. i like to hear myself talk!". i guess i can really only stand to be at my parents' house for about twenty four hours.
mum and i picked dad up at the arts center, and looked over the current exhibition in their gallery, which was better than the average showing for that space. usually i have to bite my tongue and supress my education. i am introduced again like a trophy to women i have met maybe a dozen times but can never seem to remember the names of. we go out for dinner at this little mexican place nearby that my parents love. so much so that we eat there every time i am home, and yet they still ask me if they've taken me there. yes, you have. watch as i order the same chimichanga as always. we all watch the taste of tea when we get home (it was hard packing movies i thought both stef and my parents would like), and while it's still a great movie, it is two hours long and i'd just watched it the other night(s). also, neither of my parents are a gorgeous little woman i want to spoon while watching this movie (and it would be creepy if they were), so it lacks some of the magic of my last viewing thereof.
WEDNESDAY another night on the basement couch, and i'm up at 5am for dad to drive me in to logan. the upside of traveling and jetlag is that it feels shitty no matter how early you get up, so four hours of sleep is plenty. i talk about work as we drive, i think it makes dad happy to here about my job, like i am successful or something. the only dunkin donuts i get on this trip is, ironically, during my layover at JFK. bacon, egg, and cheese on a plain bagel, medium english breakfast tea with milk and two sugars. some things are just necessary to feel at home.
EPILOGUE: EVER ONWARD. so that's my vaction story. it starts with a girl telling me i don't even know her as a way of saying she doesn't want to date me anymore, and it ends with an old man who has known me since the day i was born telling me that he doesn't even know me.
the lesson is this: i forget sometimes that i am a good person. i sometimes let my ego get chewed up by people who haven't earned the right to mess with it. and because i am a sucker, i wind up depressed about events and people that are, ultimately, inconsequential. it happens to everyone, i know. it's a simple lack of perspective. my advice is to step out of frame and look at your life now and then. sometimes you have to get out of town to do so, and this pair of trips helped me remember that my life is pretty great. think about it: i have amazing friends. people who will take time out of their lives to run around their cities with me, take me out for good food and ice cream, take me to the beach, take me skating, put me up on their couch, talk for hours, listen for hours, remind me that i am a good friend and that i have done the same for them when they needed me. these are the friends who inspire and motivate. i have a loving family. for all my teasing them, i love and respect the hell out of my parents. this alone makes me a freak in our society, i know. but i wouldn't trade it for anything. if all i have to do to make them happy is fly across the country and spend some time in suburbia, it's hardly an imposition on my life.
life is good. don't forget.
it's not all sunshine and puppies, obviously. i still lost the girl (or girls, i suppose), and in a way, my grandfather. in grandpa's case, it is what it is. the old man is just that, he's eighty eight years old. the body and the brain are not meant to function that long (on average), and that he lived to be eighty seven and still have his shit petty much together is a small miracle in itself. it's different. it feels like he's not there when i talk to him, but who knows what's going on inside his head? he seems so far gone, but it's not like he's dead. he's just less and less there every time i see him. at least i know mum and dad are taking care of him, and that comforts me.
i still can't be with stef, which leaves us about where we were when i left boston. she's got her education to sort out, and i'm not ready to give up on my seattle life/job just yet. as much as it's a nice dream, taking pete up on the harmonix gig and coming home to be with her, i don't know that she'd even want that. at the very least, i know her well enough to know she's say, "don't come home just for me". for now, we are just great friends, as ever. and that's better than i deserve.
the gift i bought in LA for the girl-i-don't-even-know sits on top of the bookshelf in my living room, reminding me daily that (a) i am a sucker and (b) i have no idea what to do with it (i gave the one i got for her mother to a friend at work, at least). none of my other friends really fit this gift, as it was very specifically intended for her. because i know her well enough to get her the right gifts. i know her better than she'd like to admit. not as much as i might have liked, but more than she'll let on. could we be friends again? i dunno. i doubt it. i think there's too much resentment built up between us at this point. she needs to get her shit together. and i hate that. i hate that i miss her, i hate being conflicted about it, i hate that it's still on my mind. even now, i feel shitty writing this out. hardly as cathartic as you'd think. there is no closure here, just a vacuum.
life is not perfect. don't forget.
thank you to tara, chad, nicole, mike, pinball, mel, cameron, marissa, clan woodside, pete, mum, da, gra-pete, krysten, and stef, for everything. oh, and to sarah and joe for feeding the cat. and you, for reading all this nonsense.
the first time i ever met my friend ella was in elements of design, a freshman year foundation course that everyone at mass/art had to take (this is in 1996, to clarify). we had this terrible bitch of a professor, as i recall, who made learning basic design concepts excruciating (made all the worse by her one day showing us some of her own work, and the whole class seeing that she was actually a really poor artist). anyway, the first time ella and i talked (we probably singled each other out by our clothes and patches. when you're 18, "hey, you like hardcore. we must be friends" is really enough of a basis to be friends with people), she was picking through my sketchbook and said, "your stuff looks like the comic Scud. have you read it?". i had not, but on her recommendation, i picked up the first trade. and it was true, my stuff at the time did look a little like rob schrab's. on top of that, it was a really good book; snappy dialogue, ridiculous character designs, dynamic poses and action sequences, and a healthy sprinkling of pop culture gags. i picked up all of the rest of them as they came out, until one day in 1998, for no clear reason, they simply stopped. book 20 had a great cliffhanger ending, set up for a whole dramatic arc of craziness, and then... yeah, 21 never came. these things happen a lot with comics, which, much like good bands, often break up before their time. but i was disappointed, nonetheless.
this past year has had some great reunions; new records and tours from both lifetime and 108, joss whedon is writing a new series of "season eight" comics that continue buffy the vampire slayer (which, yes, i only just recently got on board with, much to the amazement of many of my nerd peers. but, still, is awesome), and the latest good news... rob schrab is finally doing Scud 21. and 22, and 23, and 24 to give closure to the series he left hanging a decade ago. i've waited a long time for this, and i am really excited. i know a lot of other nerds are, too. when i heard about this a few weeks ago, i dug through my longboxes to find the original series, and re-read them... and i still love it (though i can't find the second trade, programmed for damage... and fucked if i can remember who i lent it to).
so today i picked up the much-anticipated book 21. and i am satisfied, and still excited. and as much as it's enough that he's even doing this book, schrab includes a heartfelt introduction on the first page that i really liked and wanted to share a few paragraphs of:
Learn from the pain of an old nerd. And take this bit of wisdom: If there's something that you are procrastinating on, writing a book, making a movie or asking a girl out. Do it. Today. Be scared, be stupid but there is one thing you are not allowed to do: Give up.
Empty your head. Empty it of all the ideas, stories, jokes, philosophies and inventions. Put it all down on paper and share it. We are on this planet for such a short time; don't hog the magic by dying with it all in your head. Make your life extraordinary.
anyway, cheers, rob. thanks for not leaving us hanging forever.
additional references: www.robschrab.com www.scud.com en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scud_the_Disposable_Assassin www.youtube.com/user/RobSchrab (i really recommend the scud vlogs. cool process stuff, plus schrab's a funny fucker. also a cameo by doug tennapel, creator of earthworm jim! act like you know.)
so my blog here has been getting around 150-200 hits a week, yet i hadn't written anything in a month or so up until the holiday update, and only maybe 10 of my friends are "subscribing" to it. so who are you other lurkers and what do you want from me? are you honestly learning anything useful from my rantings? there's six billion other blogs on the web right now, many of them far more informative and/or amusing than mine. at least say hello if you're going to read my diary, jesus tits.
You've got a new Myspace message from FakeySlutt69!
the only thing i can think of is that my blog is getting looked at by the creepy internet winners who kep sending me random messages from fake acounts with names like "kewtietart19" and "hottieholla4U". actually, let's talk about this for a minute, because i find this phenomenon sort of intriguing: i go through phases on myspace (i'm going through one right now, hence it's on my mind) where i will get tons of emails (sometimes up to six in an hour) from these fake accounts with the pre-packaged messages containing some variation on "hi cutie" blah blah blah, "my email is soslutty@turdburglary.net, we should chat, ur cute" blah blah"click here to check out my webcam" blah blah "xoxox mwah, love ya, paris". i'm not even kidding. nick tells me that married guys don't get these messages as much, and i haven't heard from any of my ladies about them getting them at all. so i have to think these winners are specifically targeting single, male profiles.
which leads me to wonder what these fake accounts are trying to spam you with, really. one theory is that they're trying to "phish" your myspace password so they can post bulletins for macy's gift cards and then further "phish" your friends' passwords to totally dominate the myspace bulletin board scene. i guess the idea there is that your myspace password is also your email password, online banking password, paypal password, etc, so they can further steal your money from you. but that's just stupid. who would use the same password for all of those sites? ("so the combination is one, two, three, four, five? that's the stupidest combination i've ever heard in my life. that's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage!") internet terror has a long way to go.
another theory is that since these fake profiles are always fake slutty girls, the people sending them out are trying to rope single boys into clicking on their porn sites. how this makes them money, i don't know, but i would like to clarify for you winners that just because a dude is listed as "single" that does not mean "slovenly lonely nerd walking around with a perpetual hard-on for porno-looking chicks". yes, i'm not getting any. no, i am not going through puberty and wanting to hump women who look like pamela anderson. moreover, lonely nerds don't need help finding porno on the internet, i assure you.
the thing that blows my mind is that this is probably someone's "job": go to an online networking site, make up a hundred fake profiles with pictures of slutty chicks, then bulk mail as many single guys as you can in an effort to steal their passwords. better still, they're writing macros and bots to do this for them. i picture the men doing this (internet creeps are always men. always) as the classic clinically obese, mother's-basement-dwelling, socially retarded, failed comp sci major archtype with one hand in a bag of cheetos and the other rubbing his crotch (or "target demographic" as we referred to them when i was in the MMORPG business). their lives are already worthless, may as well spend their time annoying the rest of us. or maybe this is the work they give kids who reply to those "summer jobs for the environment" flyers you see in any college town. regardless of the hows and whys, whoever you winners are, i hope you all die horrible deaths for wasting my time. i'm seriously tired of marking all of bellasexxie21's messages as spam every couple hours.
seattle: pop culture space/time anomaly
the other night i went out to see isis and ran into greg moss playing bass for opening act 27. i asked him how long he'd been playing with them (since i see greg maybe twice a year nowadays), and he said about a month, and that he was kinda nervous about botching the songs. "don't worry, this is seattle. they still think grunge is happening here", i assured him, "you could play anything and they'll love you". "really?" greg asked incredulously. "yeah, they still have raves here. they have no fucking idea about music, relax".
true story: i was on the bus coming home from work and some dumbass little kirkland girl says to me "hey, man, can you spare a dollar? i'm going to this rave tonight and i want to do copious amounts of E...". i turn my head to regard a teenager with pigtails, plastic jewelry, a pacifier (yes, seriously), and giant complicated pants (not so much jnco's ravers wore in the heyday as those straps n' eyelets deals that the nu-metal slipknot fans always seem to to be tripping over in any given mall), looking at me like she needs this dollar to pay for her mother's cancer surgery. "wow, that's fucking awesome" i reply, and she goes away.
now let's just hold up the story right there, because this is the bit that kills me. she was going to a RAVE. remember ravers? we put an end to that nonsense in boston around 1999-2000; rounded up all the kids in giant pants and polo shirts like snakes on whacking day, and made them repent for their sins. they all moved to brooklyn and started dressing like they're karen o or in the strokes, denying their paul oakenfold albums whenever challenged about it (or maybe that's just jess hecker... i kid, i kid). a few overdosed on E to erase their shame.
but not so in seattle! at some point around 1992, a rift opened in space/time surrounding this city, and all music scenes continued to survive well after their lifespans in the outside world. the prime example is grunge, of course. people play pearl jam and stone temple pilots on the jukebox with no sense of irony or party foul. it's okay here, whereas grunge died fifteen years ago everywhere else in the country. i remember seeing what looked to be two heshes front row center at a pelican show here, only to be awestruck when they turned around and had flannels wrapped around their waists and one sporting a soundgarden shirt. i saw a dude on the bus the other day who looked like he was on his way to an audition for singles II: mother love bone's revenge; shitty goatee, long hair with do rag, flannel, leather jacket, ripped jeans... it was like a time warp.
it's a weird town, as i tell a lot of people. things i had hoped i'd never have to deal with again are still alive and well here. i saw a kid in full the crow makeup (like the james o'barr comic or brandon lee movie, you pick) get on the bus one day, and that day was decidedly not halloween. while back home we're still celebrating the demolition of man-ray and the notable dispersal of boston's goth scene, i'm upset to inform you that sad kids in black clothing are still thriving in seattle. hot topic "it's my first day being punk, do you like my ramones shirt?" kids and harvard square-esque crusties compete for sidewalk space, along with these mutant hybrid crusty-raver-pants-nu-metal-but-dirty things i can't really pin down other than to say they look like homeless kids who decided to leave home right after an insane clown posse show. and, as i mentioned above, there's still ravers here. like real ravers, having real raves, with E and pacifiers and shitty techno music and dances involving keeping an imaginary ball moving in the space between your glowsticks. it's mind blowing, honestly. they still have boston/brooklyn/SF-style hipsters here (i do live on capitol hill, after all), albeit with a bit of a hippie twist, like most things in the pacific northwest. but all these other dead scenes walking around like the resurrected zombie jesus keep weirding me out. mostly i'm upset that my own dead scene, mid-nineties emo / screamo, is nowhere to be found in this land of misfit music cultures. i haven't had occasion to wear my sweatervest yet in seattle...
i mean, honestly... ravers. what the fuck?
best description of a total stranger i have ever heard
vivona and his ladyfriend came up from portland one weekend to visit. he said, "we have to meet up with this girl i halfway know here. she stayed at our house one time, and said if i was ever in seattle i should come to the bar she works at and she'll hook us up with drinks". fairly standard, but the bit that killed me (and hurt even worse when it turned out to be true) was: "this girl is gonna crack you up, she's just so ridiculously 'rock-n-roller'. she looks like steven tyler's mic stand".
robocop is still as amazing as i remembered it being.
rent it. buy it. whichever, just watch it again and tell me i'm wrong.
scott pilgrim 4: scott pilgrim gets it together
if you haven't picked up any of the scott pilgrim books, do so now (thank you to michelle for the initial pick). this is one of the most fun comics out there. scott is kind of an idiot, has a sweet band, and lives in canada. he meets an awesome american ninja delivery girl and discovers that he must defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends to continue going out with her. it's got rock and roll, street fighter references and various japanese rpg nerdy in-jokes, a complicated love story with a hot betty that would make john hughes proud, and an endearing canadian flavor. essentially, it's the perfect comic if you're markwood, minus the six gauge steel ring in your urethra and the terrible luck with women. book four is probably the weakest, but that's sort of like saying end hits is the worst fugazi album: while it's true, it's still better than most other music by a huge margin. pick up scott pilgrim, stop being an asshole.
assassin's creed deserves better than an 83 metascore.
my mother says there are two kinds of people in this life: beattles fans and stones fans. me, i say it's ninja fans and pirate fans. i am a ninja guy, myself. as such, i love videogames about ninjas, or just games with stealth kills. hence, i recently played through assassin's creed and i loved it, no matter what you've read. it's got so many of the things i love about ninja games (the prime example being the first tenchu on the ps1), and a unique setting. broken down into one sentence, it's a ninja in jerusalem killing the knights templar. maybe it's my personal desire to kill all fanatical christians, but it's deeper than that, with sneaking, blending into a crowd and lots of climbing up buildings. i love climbing up buildings in games; i don't know what it is, but my theory is that it's some subconscious thing we have in our "reptile brains" about wanting to climb to the top of things. my late iguana, moochie, she loved climbing things. let her out of her tank and she would immediately climb to the highest point she could get to, be it the top of my head or up the drapes. the masterful shadow of the colossus (ps2) did a great job of making the player enjoy climbing, as did a personal favorite that a lot of people overlooked, spider-man 2 (ps2). to be fair, terrible campaign mode and shit combat mechanics, but the feeling of climbing, jumping off, and swinging along among the skyscrapers of manhattan fulfilled all of my boyhood spider-man fantasies (and not just the ones about fucking 60's era gwen stacy). to this end, assassin's creed is a great climbing game, too. adding elements of the french extreme walking sport, le parkour. you scamper up walls, run along rooftops, stealthily backstab archers and guards, then sneakily descend on your target for the invisible kill. what's not to love? is it a bit repetitive? yes, i'll give you that, but that's how ninja games go: kill the guards, kill the target, rinse, repeat. am i disappointed that the collector's edition did not ship with an inflatable jade raymond doll? perhaps. the woman is a mystery: i've worked in games for five plus years, and while all lovable in their own ways, none of my producers have ever been what you'd call "hot". anyway, i think this game was reviewed poorly and if you love ninjas in the way i do, or if you just like to picture yourself clambering up walls, you will probably enjoy it.
dear jason lee, what the fuck is wrong with you, kid?
i guess i'm just disappointed. think about it. he went from having the absolute best style of any skater anywhere in 1991: </p>
to being a key component in one of my all time favorite movies: ..
to getting back into skating and putting stereo back together with dune:
to... uhm...:
yeah, i don't know what to make of that. i think holmes needs an intervention; i might set up a charity organization to pay jason lee to stop making bad movies and focus on skating. can i borrow a few bucks?
spare a fucking smile? i'll kill you.
bear in mind that i've been crunching for well over a month now. i got up early today to go buy a new bus pass, so i could ride in to work on a saturday. leaving bartell's with my shiny new pass, a younger hippie-ish homeless kid on the sidewalk said to me, "hey, boss. could you spare just a smile?". it's 8am, i've slept about six hours, i've been working 12 hour days 6 days a week for over a month, and i'm having a little trouble with mustering a smile for a fucking beggar. forgive me. don't think me an asshole more than you already do, but i have no sympathy for beggar kids who are younger and healthier than i am and have no physical or mental ailments that prevent them from earning their own money. there are plenty of legitimate homeless people who are on the street and cannot help themselves, but these are not them. these are slacker fucks. you can go and be an anarchist all you want, but don't come asking me for my money when i've been a good little capitalist (at the expense of sleep and social life lately) to earn it. and for fuck's sake, don't try to be charming with this "spare a smile" shit. i'll fucking kill you. "no, actually, i really can't," i inform him. "whatever, man. have a nice day. vote republican," he sneers at me. and i laugh at that. like not being a useless shitbag means i can't be a democrat?
general update-ish stuff that may or may not be pertinent to you:
CRUNCHY we're in the last stretch of getting C2 out the door, so i'm in full crunch till mid-december. if i seem punchy or irritable, it's most likely sleep dep, don't take it personal (or you can if you'd like, but i'm too busy to give a shit about your feelings). on the upside, the game's shaping up nicely, we will ship on time, and it's good to feel like there's an end to be found somewhere. now i just have to finish the giant stack of bugs and tasks in my outlook...
THE PRODIGAL SON i'm coming home from december 20th to 27th. spending most of that in boston proper crashed at mel's, with a few days in andover bracketing santa claus day. who's gonna be around? book quality time via email or just call me, we'll get this shit together. goddamn, i am already salivating thinking about getting to eat real pizza again. east coast!
MIXTAPES so there were no holiday mixtapes last year, for those of you to whom i have not directly apologized. i could make any number of excuses, but i find i apologize too much these days and it's damaging to my image as a hardass motherfucker. i wasn't happy with the way the tapes were turning out, things were busy, whatever; it didn't get finished and you didn't get your usual holiday mixtapes. show of hands for who reading this has made me a mixtape in return for my sending them one every year? exactly. so shut it. think of it as building up even more anticipation for the best gift you're going to get this year.
now, regarding this year's holiday mixtapes, i've been kicking around a few ideas. first, i plan on getting them done no later than february 2008. second, i am still offering them free of charge to whoever amongst you wants one, as usual. this is what makes them a "holiday gift", the me giving them to you bit. simply send me your mailing address, and pray that i'm feeling more productive than last year. and lastly, the part that differs from the usual formula, i need some feedback on how these tapes are being listened to. more specifically, are you listening to them playing the physical disc in a cd player, or are you ripping them to mp3 to play off of your computer or portable mp3 player? i am considering a format change, going from audio cds to mp3 cds (again overlooking the semantic debate of calling either of these formats "mixtapes". i'm old, and mixtape is the vernacular of my youth. deal with it), which would allow me to get more bang for buck on blank cds and would, in turn, save you the time of ripping the cds yourself. i know for myself, i tend to immediately rip new cds to my ipod so i can walk around with them and bring them to work with me. i rarely listen to cds as cds anymore. i'm high tech, after all. but i wanted to get some user feedback before i just assumed that everyone has abandoned their discmans (discmen?) for the bright, digital future of tomorrow-morrow land. please advise which would be better for you. and mailing addresses, dangit!
h'okay, more later, gotta brave the black friday mobs to get my comics fix.
now, most of the time, when someone is completely insane and also loves jesus a little too much, they paint themselves up a sandwich-man board and some clearly legible signs, and then stand in busy city intersections informing anyone within earshot how they are going to burn in eternal hellfire for ever and ever unless they accept jesus christ as their lord and savior right then and there. surprisingly, despite this very direct presentation of the cold hard facts of hell and sin (a compelling argument in favor of embracing their faith), their conversion numbers are rather low. this is purely speculative, but my guess is that it probably has something to do with the shouting and the wild look in their eyes.
effective or not, this is generally how it's done for the clinically insane christians of the world. this is not to say all christians are clinically insane, of course; i know many fairly sane christians, and while they may personally believe all that hogwash about the hellfire, they generally keep it to themselves. they do not feel compelled to wear a sandwich-man board or hand out creepy little parable leaflets. this is what defines them as sane.
so let's say that one of the crazy-type christians, instead of spending all of their time making toast in the hope of the virgin mary appearing to them on a slice of wonder bread, rather chose to learn some rudimentary videogame programming. for the sake of this hypothesis, let's also say that this particular crazy christian is especially fixated on the biblical tale of noah's ark.
without further ado, i give you THE ZOO RACE GAME:
now, bear with me, let's examine just a few moments of this clip to see if we all understand the game: your in-game avatar is a cougar wearing a pirate hat, who runs much faster than the other animals. you deftly dodge past green geysers, then past pillars of flame in hell (i think this is the christian bit, here), then swim in a river past various dinosaurs and a colonial williamsburg house, then you exit the river and a saint fires you out of a catapult, you crash through a window and then you're driving a steam locomotive over a bridge (note how sharp your cougar looks in his pirate hat), but then your train crashes (with a spectacular display of particle fx, putting my work to shame) into a billboard with a quote from john 3:16 of the new testament on it, but don't worry, you don't die in the crash, you're simply teleported to an awesome animal disco hosted by noah.
okay, breathe out. breathe in. this really just happened. no one has spiked your drink, no matter how much your head hurts right now... there must be a rational explanation for this. maybe looking at the game's story will help us a bit:
delving deeper into this mysterious masterpiece (for the good of science and game development, obviously), there's even more backstory available on the official zoo race game webpage. once i got over the initial fit of hysterical laughter brought on by looking at the screenshots (specifically, one of a bear being shot out of a cannon), i managed to read a few of the "creature stories", such as the story of "gad the goat's prayer and the food":
"After that, then the Lord God spoke to Gad the Goat saying:
GAD!YOU LIKE THIS FOOD DO YOU?
Yes Lord, Gad said softly.It can help me Lord to be strong.
Then the Lord God again spoke to Gad the Goat saying:
YOU CAN LIKE THIS FOOD, BUT THE SPIRITUAL FOOD THAT I GIVE TO ALL CREATION THAT WOULD REALLY HELP THEM., FOR THIS ETERNAL FOOD IS ENERGY TO LOVE AND SERVE OTHERS AND IT IS THE FOOD THAT SHALL GIVE ETERNAL LIFE.EAT THAT FOOD GAD. EAT IT."
there's also some gameplay strategies in the "how to play" section, including such key tips as: "If playing as the pig or sheep, then hit the water and swim quickly, because those creatures have expert swimming abilities." which i thought would be obvious to most players, but i guess they are trying to reach a fairly broad audience of completely insane christian people, many of whom are not avid gamers like myself. i did not look at the "secrets and shortcuts" section, as i felt that would be cheating.
as an added multimedia element, you can purchase the soundtrack cd separately! the marketing blurb underneath it is very convincing: "Surprise your friends with some new music songs that they have not heard before." not to ruin the surprise of what some of you are getting for xmas this year, but... well, c'mon... these are music songs you have not heard before. you love shit like that.
anyway... i could milk this all day. it's that magical. holy crap, i could live a million fucking years and never make up something this absolutely crazy-go-nuts loopy. thank you, crazy christian programmer man. thank you for not simply taking the well-trod path of wearing a sandwich-man board and yelling at people on the street, but instead putting your hard time and effort into coding up this epic conniption fit of a game for the world to enjoy. you have set the bar that much higher for the next generation of batshit crazy jesus freaks the world over.
thank you matt rice, for keeping tabs on the indie game dev community enough to find this gem.
and thank you, noah, for bringing all these wonderful creatures together to race for us. keepin' it real in the old testament!
[for the especially masochistic amongst you, here is a video of the developer's previous masterpiece, noah's adventures. seeing a theme, are you?]
Currently
listening
:
No Salvation
By
Coliseum
Release date: 21 August, 2007
What I Did On My Summer Vacation by mark lazar wood
PROLOGUE so seth got into crazy free engineering school in norway, which you can ask him about if you want the details. mostly i'm just happy it came together for him because he had all of his eggs in that basket and i worry when people over-commit to a longshot only to have it fall through (having done it myself once or twice). fortunately, this one came up jackpot. anyway, he says, "i'm moving away at the end of july", and i figure i should go home and see him off while he's still in the continental u.s. (because it's cheaper than flying to scandinavia). a plan for a boston trip starts to form, with a few calls and IMs to confirm couches and hangouts and timeframes. i also talk with dudek about finally getting off my ass to go see her and paul in buffalo. i dunno. how do vacation plans really form with me, anyway? it just sorta happens; you talk to a few people, make a loose plan, and buy some airline tickets. everything else is just dumb luck, for better or worse. besides, with no E3 this year, what else am i gonna do in the summer?
friday 22 june it'd been a long ass week. we had a milestone build to get done by wednesday, so monday and tuesday were manic hustle days to get a few things ready for sega to look at. foolishly figuring the rest of the week would be easier, i came in with my guard down wednesday only to get jumped by my producer early in the morning; turns out he'd negotiated a loan with the producer of one of the other projects for a week or two of my time to help with their E3 build. i said, "well, sure, that's fine with me. but i should mention i'm going on vacation all next week". so it went from "can you get this done in two weeks?" to "can you get this done in three days?", which was a little daunting. but then they realized they only needed about a third of what they originally asked me to do. not to say it wasn't a bit of a last minute crunch, but that's what we call job security, making oneself indispensable to the company by being flexible. at the end of the day friday i was catching up with my producer and he said, "and now you're really looking forward to that vacation, huh?". too true, dave. too true.
i hate the red-eye. no matter how exhausted i am, i can almost never sleep on them. as a refresher course in boston life, i got seated next to two hometown clichés: a middle aged businessman with the obligatory ted kennedy haircut and powder blue shirt, and a 21 year old meatball who begged the flight attendant to bring him a beer because "he was afraid of flying". note: budweiser is not considered beer unless you are 21 or my idiot uncle. they both settled into watching ESPN while i read until i passed out. i must have gotten a few hours of sleep, because i distinctly woke up when the captain came over the intercom to announce our descent into boston. i do love how the runway into logan comes right up to the water, so it always looks like your plane is going to splash-land.
saturday 23 june i hate the new T ticketing system. it's like they took the basic idea from the BART tickets, but wound up using it to fuck you more. somehow it now costs me two bucks a ride on the same shitty trains i left behind a year ago; is the MBTA the new big dig? discuss.
my much anticipated first cup of over-sweet dunkin donuts tea and a bagel turns out to be a regular coffee and a stale bagel. complicated terms like "english breakfast tea" get lost under more simple ones like "medium with milk and sugar" when english is your third language, i can't blame her. but i wasn't gonna drink it either. park street station is still 20 degrees hotter than the outside world.
stagger to mel's door around 8am, where she's left the keys in the mailbox for me. shuffle into the house and pass out on the couch. modi says hello, and i pass out til about eleven.
mel and i get rolling after a round of hellos and high fives. get some tea, pick up her bike from the shop down the street, and meet up with her friend elizabeth. they're going to look at an apartment in teele square. we show up before the landlady, and go check out the yard sale next door, which is mostly books. i pick up some cool 1934-35 vintage shortwave radio magazines with cool old advertisements and diagrams. i love anything with vacuum tubes, what can i say?
the landlady shows up, an endearingly flakey middle aged german lady. she keeps talking about how nice the men who live in the place currently are, how they have "poetic souls" or some such. which is clear to us by looking at the recycling bin full of budweiser bottles (i feel a theme coming on) and their cross country running photos on all the walls. the most poetic thing i saw in the place was a little whiteboard that said, "Rules of the House: (1) Clean Your Dishes. (2) Don't Shit Your Pants". mel was trying to convince the landlady that they should be allowed to paint the walls, and the landlady said that would be fine. she could see it as a nice burnt orange. in fact, she mentioned burnt orange at least three times, so i think that will probably be the best choice for the next tenants. as we leave, she tells me how much she respects bill gates (having discussed my living in seattle and working with computers) and how profound his address to the harvard kids was. bill gates = wicked fahkin' poetic.
we all get some crepes next to the somerville theater, and then part ways with elizabeth. mel and i go back to her place and call up nick and celeste. they've been o
