I’ve rewritten this opening paragraph half a dozen times so far and I’m forced to confront one of the worst things a reviewer can face: There is nothing even remotely close to Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers for me to draw on for comparison or to reference as I describe the strengths and my favorite parts of this book. I’ve cycled through everything from my favorite stories to my favorite bits of metaphor and poetry from various sources to books that fall under the same “disease and rampant evil assholes bring about the end of civilization as we know it” umbrella but none of them works. I get about three sentences in and am forced to admit that, right now, in my experience as a reader, there’s nothing that can compare. Which isn’t to say that it is the best book ever written and this novel transcends literature to be the Perfect Story–that’s far too subjective of a claim for me to make. I’m just saying that any reference I make is going to wind up being such a pale shadow that all I can do is say they had a similar function or action. Like comparing a sunrise to an idea that slowly came to your attention. One is the actual dawn, to which nothing can truly compare, and the other is something that dawned on you simply because describing an idea as something that slowly rose before you is the easiest way to say that you thought something through in a way that gave rise to a new idea. This book was powerful on so many levels that I’m not sure I could really draw good comparisons without breaking it apart so much that there’s hardly anything left.
Between the Cracks
Eustace looked at the young man sitting across from him who was staring at the floor between his shoes. “I can’t spend a day in a warm office or house during the winter without getting bloodier knuckles than I’ve ever gotten from a fight.”
Eustace clenched his fist and watched the blood run from the split skin of his knuckles. “They say Humans are very adaptable, but really we’re just good at ignoring discomfort.”
Monday Musing
I’m back.
Grief
It happens slowly at first.
Days drag on for weeks
And months pass with the glacial pace
Of time spent in waiting rooms
With hands folded in thoughtless prayer
For something even your heart couldn’t put to words.
A Late Post
My grandfather was prescribed Hospice Care today. That bit of news, accompanied by the tidbit that his tests all came back saying he wasn’t a match to the genetic profile they needed for a last-ditch treatment effort, has thrown off not just my plans for today but my plans for the next few weeks. When I found out he had only a few weeks left unless he was a genetic match for this special treatment, I planned on heading back to Chicago at a moment’s notice in case something happened and that I’d spent at least one day every weekend in Chicago, visiting family with a particular emphasis on my grandpa. Now I’m planning the same thing, along with preparing a long-term bag that I’ll keep in the trunk of my car and getting my computer area reconfigured so I can dismantle it quickly for travel so I can work remotely if I wind up staying in Chicago for any length of time. We don’t know for sure how long he has left, but it’s probably more accurate to measure in weeks than anything else.
It’s difficult to focus on writing anything, right now. I’ve been trying all day to get my mind into gear for this and it’s basically just grinding the gears rather than actually slipping into gear. Trying to make myself write anything is doing more harm than good and I wasn’t able to create the stockpile of blog posts I wanted to have finished by now, so I’m going on hiatus for a bit.
I hate the thought of stopping, honestly. This decision has been tearing at me all day, despite the fact that it’s been lurking in the back of my mind every time I’ve gotten to my daily writing time and felt the black wave of grief and exhaustion (which are all I have left at this point) wash over me. I want to write more, but trying to make it happen is just making things worse on myself. As is the thought of stopping something I’ve done for four hundred thirteen consecutive days. I’m immensely proud of that streak of daily posts and the daily writing they represent, but I’ve pretty much run myself to the point of a breakdown and I can’t afford to have one of those right now. My stress levels are higher than they’ve ever been, I’m dealing with difficult emotions, I constantly feel run down and exhausted no matter how much rest I get, I’m pretty sure I’m currently sick and only not laid up in bed because I can’t afford to be, and all I want in the world is to keep writing and updating this blog because at least then I can point at it and say “look what I’ve done.”
This past year has been pretty awful for me and it has taken every scrap of willpower I have to make it this far right now. Choosing to take a break feels like giving up and writing this post, making this decision, feels like I’m rolling my soul in a pile of broken glass because daily writing and daily blog posts was all I fucking wanted out of this year. That’s it. My one goal for 2018 was to update this blog every day, write every day, and do whatever it takes to keep those things going. Just thinking about it and everything I’ve worked through up to this point makes me want to delete this entire post and re-write it as a “I’m not going to let this stop me” post. I’m not going to do that, though. I’m going to take a break. I’m going to stop making myself do this every day. I’m going to go back to journaling extensively every day. I’m going to reflect, try to deal with my emotions, deal with my anticipatory grieving, deal with my regular grieving, and then try to come back to this in the new year once I’m no longer traveling every weekend or constantly fighting back exhaustion that makes me want to just dissolve into a puddle of tears on my bed when I get home from work.
I am tempted to leave myself wiggle room for musing posts over the next few weeks, like I did seven or eight months ago when I was stressed and trying to figure out what was going on with my emotions. That might allow me to continue updating every day without the stress of creating new fiction, poetry, and reviewing things, but I think I really need a break from the internet in addition to every thing else as well. I don’t know if that’s going to mean deactivating Facebook and removing Twitter from my phone, or if that’s just going to mean I spend more time away from the computer, but I think I need that right now. Beyond the grief and pain I’m dealing with right now, I haven’t taken a break in over a year. Even the planned breaks wound up not being breaks because I was always working on something during that time. I had a project to do or some writing goal to accomplish. Whatever it was, it pretty much negated the whole point of the break, even if I tried to convince myself otherwise.
So I get I’m concurrently going on vacation and taking a hiatus. The vacation will end on the second of January, so that’s the earliest I’ll be back to writing. The hiatus will end once I’ve dealt with my grief enough to not feel like I’m shaving years off my life and pulling off splinters of my soul to sit down and make something specific. I’ll probably keep writing, but that’ll be expressive stuff rather than following the planned posts ideas I picked out a few weeks ago. I’ll be exploring my emotions and trying to cope with what’s going on rather than writing about pre-established fictional characters or creating parodies of famous poems.
See? I can’t even take a break without planning something for me to be doing while taking said break. Whatever. The point is I’m taking away the obligation and drive parts. I’m just going to create if I feel like and catch up on my giant collection of unread books if not. I’m going to try to figure out better routines for myself, ones that incorporate better physical self-care, and see if I can finally do something about the burn-out I’ve been fighting for almost an entire year.
Or maybe two weeks will pass and I’ll still be tired. Who knows. All I know is that writing feels incredibly painful today and I need it to stop feeling painful. Even if I want to write, even if I’m willing to put up with the pain (which I clearly am, given this blog post), I don’t think it’s going to be healthy to pull more than this out of my for the next couple weeks, at least. Catch you all later. You know how to reach me.
Tabletop Highlight: On the Importance of Dice
I am a firm believer in the importance of dice in tabletop RPGs. To be entirely fair, that’s not exactly an uncommon opinion, even if more people are moving toward digital dice rollers instead of actual rice. Sure, telling a computer to roll twenty six-sided dice makes it a lot cleaner and it does the math for you which makes it take less time, but there’s no feeling compared to being a twentieth level sorcerer casting disintegrate just so you can roll forty six-sided dice all at once. At one point, I literally had bought enough d6’s so I could roll damage all at once for my caster. It was an amazing feeling, making it rain dice like that. It was also incredibly difficult since I could barely hold that many at once and rolling them involved a lot of me saying “did anyone see where the beige one went?” and my friends replying “no, but I did find the purple one from last week under this radiator.” Good times.
All that aside, what I’m really talking about is the importance of specific dice, which is also a bit misleading since I’m not thinking of one specific die in all of creation. What I’m talking about is the importance of having specific dice for you to use. By our very nature, as creatures reliant on ephemeral chance to dictate the course of our gaming session, we tabletop gamers are a rather superstitious bunch. For instance, I not only have a favorite set of dice, but I pick the dice I use on any given night by how aesthetically pleasing I find them as I get ready for the game. I firmly believe that prettier dice roll better and no amount of bad luck on my more gorgeous dice can shake that belief. The inverse is also true. When my players are having a string of bad rolls, I swap to using my ugliest, most generic and awful dice so the enemies the party is facing roll worse. My absolute favorite set, the set that has rolled more triple-twenties than all of my other twenty-sided dice put together, is a beautiful set of clear plastic dice with bits of black paint or plastic swirled inside them. Unlike every other set of partially clear dice I’ve ever seen, the color is only on the inside of the dice. It doesn’t touch the outside layers at all, so you can spin the dice as you hold it up to the light and watch the smoky black color swirl at your fingertips. I don’t even let other people touch those dice. I keep them in a plastic container inside my dice bag so I’ve always got them ready to go in case I need to roll well on something important.
If you take a survey of all tabletop players, you’ll find a range of traditions and superstitions. There are players who believe in punishing their dice when they roll poorly and even destroying the dice if they keep rolling poorly after being punished. This punishment can range from something as mild as leaving the offending die on its own for a while to the incredibly gross tradition of putting one of your misbehaving dice inside your mouth for a while. I’ve even seen someone go so far as to file through a die they were punishing so it could never roll again, which just seems completely over the top to me. There are also people who believe that you need to roll all of your dice at once, regardless of how many that might be. I’ve got a friend who uses a specific die for every type of action his character might be taking in any game he’s playing, so he has to buy new dice every time he plays a game with an additional action type. I prefer to buy new dice for characters who are about to make their debut, so the character and the dice start off fresh. I generally only get new dice for characters who are supposed to be a part of a campaign for a long time and I do it to avoid any kind of mental influence on how I see the dice.
Despite the range of beliefs and the things people do with their dice, most people remain a bit more rational and logic-oriented than their superstitions suggest. I bet if you followed up your first survey with a second survey asking people if they though there really was something to their little traditions, almost everyone who answered the first one would say “no.” And yet we’d still turn around and immediately go back to our superstitions as soon as the situation called for it. The way I’ve always viewed it is that there’s no harm in being cautious or believing in something that’s probably not there. If it isn’t there, then you’ve just spent a bit of time marking a tradition. If it turns out that there was actually something to it, then you’ve got your bases covered already. It’s why I don’t really believe in ghosts, but I won’t denigrate anyone who believes in them. Additionally, and probably more importantly, it helps the players feel like they’re in control of what is pretty much just random luck. If you believe punishing your dice will make them roll higher next them, then you’re in control of your own outcomes because you can “encourage” your dice to get with the program. You more order you can impose on what seems like chaos around you, the better you feel.
The same is true of having specific dice for specific things. I probably haven’t rolled more triple twenties with my favorite set of dice than with any of my other sets, but the belief that I do roll more twenties makes me remember when I do. It’s simple confirmation bias. The same is probably true of punishing dice or whatever inane thing we all do that makes us feel more comfortable with the fact that the world isn’t as cut-and-dried as we’d like to think it is. Random things happen outside our control or comprehension and we get a glimpse of that when we play games with dice because the difference between success and failure is pure chance. For the vast majority of us, there’s no skill involved, no talent, just dumb luck. Even the most skilled of us, who should be able to succeed no matter what is thrown at us, can sometime fail because of chance. So roll the dice and hope you get more passes than failure.
Still an Accomplishment
Luke placed the trophy on the shelf and took a moment to straighten it so the plaque faced outward. After a quick scan of shapes and words he’d long ago memorized, he sighed and turned to his wife. “One day.”
She nodded. “One day.”
Luke looked around the room at all of his trophies and led Mariah out of the trophy room, leaving the lights to her. Instead of checking on the kids, he moved into the living room and sat down on the couch.
A moment later, Mariah sat down next to him. “You’ll get one eventually. I know it.”
“I guess.” Luke raised and lowered a shoulder. “I’ve been playing sports for almost thirty years and I’ve never won. I’m getting a little tired of second and third place trophies.”
“Yeah, but you have more trophies than anyone I’ve met. That counts for something.”
“Tons of second and third place trophies aren’t an accomplishment.”
“Luke, you play a dozen sports a year. You’re an amazing coach to the kids and none of your teams would have come close to placing without you.”
Luke looked away from Mariah.“It doesn’t feel like anything worth celebrating.” Mariah pushed herself up to kiss him on the cheek and was settling back again when there was a crash from the den. Luke was in the room before she could get up.
When she arrived, she found him standing next to a fallen trophy case, broken trophies scattered on the floor.
Luke looked up to her. “Well, shit.”
Mariah smirked. “You had enough trophies to pull your trophy case off the wall. You don’t think that’s an accomplishment?”
Luke look at her for a moment before busting out laughing. “I guess I’ve come in first when it comes to having too many trophies.”
Saturday Morning Musing
My absolute least-favorite part of the winter is driving anywhere further than around my town. Normally, driving places and making plans that give me extra time to meander from my starting point to my destination is my favorite thing to do that involves moving. In the winter, though, my favorite activity turns into a morass of idiotic drivers who forget how to drive every year couple with terrible weather conditions that make you curse every moron who thinks they can just drive over ice like it’s pavement. No matter how cautious you are, you always find that one incredibly slick spot of ice and wind up sliding toward the absolute worst part of the road, since it’s the only spot with a ditch while literally every other spot for miles is perfect level ground you could just drive away from. You’ve got a chance to make the right call and avoid it, but sometimes there’s an asshole right behind you who zips past the icy patch, no problem, and is passing you while you slide so you don’t really have a chance to avoid the ditch since you’ve got no space on the road anymore. As you sit in the ditch, watching for a tow, you try to appreciate the fact that at least he didn’t slide into the back of your car since he was way to close to you to stop in time.
Don’t even get me started on trying to drive somewhere for the holidays. Unless you’re actually driving on Christmas day, and only specifically between cities during non-peak driving hours, you’re not getting anywhere quickly. Forget trying to even do any local driving as the holidays approach because all the routes take you past shopping centers (because that’s just how traffic management works: it allows you to go near every important, high-traffic areas in what should be a rapid pace outside of rush-hour) since they’re going to be backed up despite the fact that online shopping is way better than trying to find what you want in a mall. While there are things you can’t always do online, such as supporting your local businesses, those are never the places that get crowded. It is always the shopping centers and malls because apparently everyone, their mother, their grandmother, and every single one of their cousins all have to go to the mall every day to see if the mall kiosks have finally turned into something interesting instead of another cell phone or knickknack/plastic jewelry stand.
Even if you do manage to avoid all the traffic and the peak-driving hours, there’s a good chance your carefully made plans will be completely ruined by the weather since it frequently decides to, out of nowhere, dump a metric ton of snow on your area when you took your eyes off the forecast for one day. Then you’re forced to try to escape before it falls or to wait until it’s over and be forced to drive at the same time as everyone else who decided it was a good idea to wait. No matter which choice you make, it winds up being the wrong one. It’s as true as the fact that buttered toast always falls butter-side down and that cats always land on their feet. An incontrovertible fact of nature. If you leave early, then it sneaks its way in front of you and falls right as you’re hitting the difficult part of your drive. If you leave late, then so does everyone else as your local population decided to be sensible for once and not all try to drive through the snow. Even if you try to outsmart the dichotomy by choosing to stay home instead of drive at all, you choice is still wrong because it suddenly decides that this one storm is the only time it won’t wind up snowing double the predicted amount. It’ll snow a light dusting of stuff that’s quickly swept away by wind or that melts under he suddenly clear sky as the temperatures never quite make it as long as they were predicted to.
One day, when quick, efficient, long-distance public transport is available, most of these problems will be solved. I can guarantee that I’d ride a bullet train if one existed between here and Chicago. I’d hop on that, ship all my gifts to my parent’s house instead of my place, ride down a day early, do my wrapping, and then head home whenever I wanted because there’d be trains every day but Christmas Day. It’d make things so much easier on me and everyone else who was moving between states or who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of driving through bad weather/roads full of morons being morons. Which are always worse than bad weather since they’re also available in “it’s snowing so I’m going to drive so close to you that you won’t be able to see my headlines” and “I’m going to continue to drive at ninety miles per hours despite the fact that I can’t see further than thirty feet ahead of myself at any given time” editions. Truly, they are the worst roadway companions. Especially because they seem to always have those horrible, bright LED or Halogen headlights that are focused up at the cars in front of them instead of down at the road for whatever dumb reason. Pretty much every awful thing other drives can do while traveling the same direction you are will be one of the moronic drivers who forgets how to drive in the winter. It’s so incredibly awful that I forgot how bad it is every year until I experience it again and am reminded of just how much I hate driving long distances during the winter.
There is no world in which the amount of stress you get from driving during winter is worth putting up with if you have literally any other options available to you aside from taking a bus. Which, let me tell you, is another can of worms entirely. A worse can of worms. Thought crowded roads were bad? Try riding a crowded bus down a crowded road while rubbing shoulders with someone who decided deodorant or basic hygiene was something other people did while dealing with people who feel like they have a right to comment on what book you’re reading or how you’re trying to survive the twelves hours of hell it takes to ride two hundred miles. You didn’t think you’d be able to get a direct bus, did you? All of those filled up last Christmas. Of course there’s still a seat available for you somewhere, but it always happens to be on the bus that their breaks down on the highway or that has to stop at two dozen cities or gas stations along the way to your destination, turning a three-hour drive into eleven and a half hours of sitting on seats that were worn out the day they were put in the bus. I used to ride buses from where I went to college back to Chicago for every holiday and, while I like riding the bus and appreciate the need for affordable travel from one place to another that doesn’t involve owning a car, I still hated every single bus ride while I was on it. Maybe if there were trains like any sensible society would have, the buses wouldn’t be so friggin’ awful all the time.
This year, instead of going to visit relatives for the holidays, spend your time and money on buying a new video game or seeing how many single dollar bills you need to burn in order to keep your apartment at a comfortable temperature. You’ll probably enjoy the latter more since at least you’ll be able to sleep in your own bed.
Actually, better yet, buy a house and then make your entire family come visit you for the holidays. Then you can enjoy being around your family but not have to deal with driving during the holidays. Or invent teleportation devices. Really, the only problem is driving. If you can find another good method for spending the holidays with your family, I’d recommend going with that option.
I’m No Hypocrite
“I turned off that part of my brain”
I say, trying to not sound proud
“I just write words and put them up.
I say, planning my next post.
“Good job. Mission accomplished.”
I say, checking the stats page again.
“I haven’t missed a day in over a year.”
I say, searching for affirmation.
“I’m no hypocrite.”
I say, facing the mirror
As I look for reassurance
In a face that doesn’t believe
The words on my lips.
I Want to Be the Very Best
Today marks the very first day of my new life’s work. I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of many great trainers before me and abandon any attempt at being a productive member of society. Instead, I am going to wander through the wild parts of the world, capture creatures with funny names and huge powers, and then train them to battle other, similar creatures owned by people like me. All of my money will be earned by robbing the people I defeat, I’ll sleep in the woods, and I’ll rely on free healthcare to keep my captured monsters in peak fighting condition at all time. I may make friends along the way, I may encounter a friendly or combative person frequently enough to designate them my rival, and I may rise from obscurity to sit at the peak of the monster fighting league so that everyone in the world knows my name. Unfortunately, none of those things are guaranteed, but I know I’ll definitely have a great time along the way, bonding with my new pets and crying when I’m forced to say goodbye to them.
If you haven’t guessed what’s going on, I’m talking about my plan to finally go on the Pokemon Journey reality has always denied me now that Pokemon Go finally introduced trainer-versus-trainer battling. I imagine battling will change significantly as time goes on since it’s clearly in favor of people willing to spend money or who have done nothing but play Pokemon Go and the whole “use a shield to block a charged attack” thing is just plain weird, but I’m glad they finally got something out there. So far, I’ve declared one of my roommates is my rival, battled him a few times (we’re tied for wins and losses right now), and done absolutely nothing else with it because society is demanding I do my day job so I can pay my bills and afford to live in my nice house with my actual pets. Someday, perhaps once the holidays are over, I’ll go on a short Pokemon Journey to test the waters. After I’ve figured out how the battling scene is going, that’ll be it for me. I’ll quit my job, pack up everything I own into a backpack that breaks physics, and head off into the great unknown in order to find new Pokemon, battle new trainers, and become the legend I’ve always dreamed I could be.
I imagine it’ll be difficult to live off the land and spend all my time traveling between major cities, but I think I can manage it. I’m single, have no societal obligations that I’d miss, and am a rather hardy individual. I can walk for long periods of time, assuming my pack isn’t as heavy as a typical Pokemon Trainer’s backpack must be, given that it holds hundreds of pokeballs, healing items, berries, cases, bicycles, and so forth. If it’s a bit more realistic and not able to hold a limitless supply of whatever I want (if it removes the weight of the things I put in it, that would also be pretty cool. I could work with that), then I imagine the first couple weeks would be rough while my feet adjusted to the constant walking. After that, I’d be unstoppable.
Unfortunately for me, I seem destined to become a gimmick trainer. Likely a Hiker with a heavy focus on rock-type Pokemon. I could get behind such a gimmick, of course, but only after becoming the best there ever was. Then I’d go find some mountain path to live on and challenge every trainer who passes through before making my team of Geodudes all use “Self-Destruct.” The trick would be that I have a sixth Pokemon, maybe a Mew or something super cool and rare. It would also use “Self-Destruct.” That would be my gimmick and then I would become a different type of legend. I’d become even more famous than when I toured the world as an unbeatable Pokemon Master and trainers would come from far and wide to see if they could beat my team. Unfortunately for them, all my Geodudes would be immune to one hit knock-outs and the final Pokemon would change on occasion so they’d never be able to defeat me. Every match will end in a draw and I will establish myself as an unbeatable Pokemon Trainer. It will be glorious!
I will have to wait, though. Pokemon Go is still in its infancy and we’ve yet to see if it will truly last the tests of time. There’s also no move in Pokemon Go that functions like “Self-Destruct,” though I remain hopeful that they will either eventually add more game-like features to Pokemon Go or replace it entirely by creating Virtual Reality Pokemon. I would be all about that. Nothing quite like immersive games in virtual reality to make you feel like you’re not stumbling around your home while waving your arms dangerously close to every precious and fragile object you own. Heck, maybe they’ll figure out how to make Pokemon robots and then we can go on Pokemon adventures in theme parks. That’d be super cool.
Since none of that is happening right now, I’m just going to focus on battling my rival, enjoying the new combat feature of Pokemon Go, and trying to remember who half the people are on my Pokemon Go friends list so I can remote battle people without feeling weird about initiating an interaction with someone who is effectively a stranger. The feature was difficult to find and it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense about the way it works, but it’s fun to play. I think the Stardust and Pokemon Candy requires for learning additional moves are egregious, since it’s almost impossible for most players to afford something like that. Only people who play constantly have access to that kind of stardust and enough candies for powerful Pokemon or legendaries. I mean, I spent most of my candies and stardust just powering up Pokemon fairly recently, so I can’t afford to give anyone an extra attack, which means I’ll be vulnerable to anyone who has one since they’re great for countering Pokemon that typically counter whatever Pokemon has the second attack. The fact that you can add extra moves is a huge break from their established methodology, so I’m interested to see where they continue to take.
Whatever they do, though, it’ll be fun. I can’t wait to get out there and start playing again!