The Other Human Living With Me

It's been over three months since my girlfriend moved in with me. I consider myself a solitary hermit, a true lone wolf, unshakable in the face of relationships.

Being a total pariah and outcast, I grew painfully accustomed to living alone.

Before my girlfriend moved in, if you opened my refrigerator, you'd confront a box of Chinese food, plastic water bottles and a nondescript brown lumpy thing with a sheen of green fuzz that used to be a casserole. Or maybe a piece of fruit.

The laundry hamper smelled like a stinky tropical rainforest. It reeked so bad, and flies who landed on it immediately started gagging from the stench.

All of those miserable trappings of a single male dissipated rapidly when She moved in.

I'm in a comfortable, healthy place now. She makes sure of it. 

Fight On, Oldsters!

City, we need to talk. Stop antagonizing each other and try behaving like halfway decent people without grudges. I get it. Most of you are incredibly old and frightened at the way this country is progressing toward anarchy. Things are happening at an alarmingly fast rate and you feel helpless. 

Your ability to affect change is severely muted by infirmity, muddled reason or stubbornness.

And the music the kids are listening to these days!

If it’s not a blood-drinking Goth vampire, it’s a half-naked slut belching incomprehensible lyrics to a house beat sounding like a whooping crane farting “The Star Spangled Banner”.

You can’t relate to anyone younger than you. You think the Democrats are socialist hippies who want to turn America into a clothing optional commune where Jane Fonda reads excerpts from “The Communist Manifesto” while Che Guevara look-alikes with goatees rape your daughters with rolled up issues of Mother Jones magazine.

Those loud-mouth liberal teachers are indoctrinating our children by teaching evolution, science and critical thinking skills. God forbid they should force children to write the entire Bible out longhand while flagellating themselves with a cat o’ nine tails.

You know: just like when you were kids.

City, you’re just a throwback to a dark, ugly chapter in this country’s history when ignorance was bliss and oppression of minorities was business as usual.

You eke out your remaining days in Florida condos, clutching your pain medication and howling at television, grousing about arthritis, angina and senility.

City, you’re broken.

But it’s not your fault. It’s your defense mechanism because you’re growing old.

It’s scary what’s happening to you. You wish to rage against the dying of the light, to turn back the clock to a time when America was the clean-shaven good guy with a firm handshake and can-do smile. When America was decent, and just and moral. When the fiction crammed into your head by Golden Age Hollywood filled you with promise and passion.

Where are the Humphrey Bogarts, Carey Grants and Jimmy Stewarts now?

Moldering in tombs and winking at us from their preserved black and white cells where they eternally remind us of the days when we fought Nazis, fed the poor and rolled up our sleeves because we could.

Because it was the right thing to do.

Back when we didn’t view differences, but found similarities.

A time of generous millionaires and glorified public service.

When the government wasn’t looked upon as a plague of locusts.

When industry moved America and our skyscrapers touched the heavens as our ideas touched the minds and hearts of many around the world.

Back when you fell in love.

But now, as the years fell away, you’re left old and broken, flustered at society’s lightspeed pace, at the edges fraying and coming apart, of entropy and vice breaking everything apart.

Everything you built is unraveling and you’re angry.

So you direct your rage toward those you view as agents of America’s destruction:

Liberals.

Journalists.

Teachers.

Democrats.

Scientists.

Secularists.

Minorities.

You hate them with a nuclear explosion-sized rage ball of hot white fire. If only they would go away, you’d know America would be taken back. Control seized from the boogeymen destroying this land.

Know what?

I don’t blame you, city.

You’re too old to remember what it meant to stumble, to fail. You view failure as weakness, but it’s an integral part of the human condition, for without the occasional screw up, we wouldn’t learn.

Learning brings wisdom, and that leads to making the correct decisions.

Nothing wimpy about that, city.

So if you continue to bleat and prattle on about phantom threats to your liberty, of perceived secularists vying to remove God from your life and country, I don’t mind.

You’re a cantankerous fogey who lost the ability for compassion and social niceties, a gaggle of bitter old mahjong-playing biddies, a flock of geriatric grumblers who despise what you can’t comprehend.

You’re set in your ways, and that’s cool. Nostalgia is your panacea, your miracle elixir.

So rave on, liver spots dappling your pasty flesh, bony fists shaking at an indifferent God. Froth and jibber at the dirty thugs running the government, the media, the entertainment industry. Blather like Clint Eastwood in a furniture store filled with empty chairs. 

You're a bunch of Custers and this is your last stand. Fight your good fight despite change being an inevitable juggernaut. Push those boulders, Sysiphus. Push those boulders.

Of course I’ll get off your lawn, city.

Don’t want any footprints marring your Astroturf. 

Birthday

Today is my birthday.

I'm 43.

Jesus, that's old.

When I was a kid, I couldn't imagine me at 43. Back then, 43 was ancient. I lacked a concept of middle age. Hell, I couldn't envision life beyond 30.

But here I am. All 43 years of me.

Fuck, this is depressing.

Getting old is a penance, a price we pay for hanging around, for breathing another year, of existing on this dirt ball hurtling around the sun.

I think about the absolutely shitty year I've had, 365 days of vapid, wretched sloth and humdrum routine, and then I realize how privileged I am to make it this far.

Life is a game, and if you stay in it long enough, you might just see flying cars.

That's my hope anyway. Some day there will be cars flying through the atmosphere, taking us to a bright future where mankind stands as a shining bulwark of progress and Todd Akin works as a rape crisis counselor.

Because the future is tinged with irony.

Today my girlfriend bought me my birthday present: two suggestive T-shirts from Spencer's. Now my taste in T-shirts is eclectic and bizarre, dabbling in everything to pop culture, gaming and other weirdness I wish to wear emblazoned across my chest. I'm very picky about my T-shirts, any buy them for myself, rarely seeking any out as a gift.

So my girlfriend bought me two shirts, both of which I cannot wear in public for obvious reasons.

Though I curse like a Brooklyn sailor let loose in a Shanghai brothel, I don't enjoy profanity on my clothing. It's not edgy or cute, just profane and vulgar. However, as hanging-around-the-house-shirts and sleeping shirts, these two tees are perfect.

"I Killed the Honey Badger 'cause I Don't Give a Shit" is from a viral video about the honey badger, who acts all badass because, like the narrator proclaims, "he doesn't give a shit."

"Fuck you thunder! You can suck my dick!" is from the hilarious comedy Ted, a story about a talking bear who sings the "Thunder Song" with his adult owner, or "Thunder Buddy" as a way of calming them both during thunder storms.

While these two shirts aren't the peak of fashion and will probably get me arrested in public, they're a nice addition to my personal wardrobe.

One added bonus today: We had a day off from work. Labor Day is on Monday, instead of taking off then like the rest of the normal population, we have off on Friday. So not only is it my birthday, it is the beginning of a three-day weekend.

Tonight my girlfriend and I are headed to Atlantic City to celebrate, and tomorrow we're going to see one of my favorite comedians, Louie C.K.

Maybe there will be cake, ice cream or alcohol. Who knows? At age 43, I'm too old to care, just like the honey badger.  Like that hardy and ravenous critter, I just don't give a shit.

GenCon 2012 Report

This post is a little late, as I've arrived home from GenCon in Indianapolis a week ago, but I had to catch up on a few things in the hectic circus that is my life. Anyway, this is the fourth year in a row I've attended GenCon, and attendance seems to grow each year. A few things changed during this year's sojourn, however, some good and some not so good.

Like last year, I brought my girlfriend along. What I find uncanny is how she actually enjoys gaming and all of the juvenile geek crap I do. Finding a woman who'll tolerate your cartoon collection, library of RPG games, Xbox and other hobby paraphernalia indicating a state of perpetual arrested development is a sure sign things are meant to be. Geek girls are hot.

We stayed at a different hotel this year, one a little farther from the convention center, and had to take a shuttle. Other than the distant hotel, the thunder storm on the first night, my girlfriend tripping and hurting her hand and me not being able to connect with a few people I saw in previous years, GenCon was a blast. Agents of Oblivion, a spy/horror setting from Reality Blurs, was nominated for an ENnie, but didn't win, however attending the awards ceremony in a restored Victorian train station was awesome, not to mention seeing and chatting with friends from the gaming industry. Just being nominated was an honor, and I congratulate all of the winners and nominees.

We ate like hungry pigs. Indianapolis has a collection of superb restaurants, and our appetites were not disappointed. This year we dined at The Ram, the Old Spaghetti Factory, Harry & Izzy's and Buca di Beppo. Part of going to the convention is snagging good food and relaxing. I deftly accomplished both objectives.

Did I mention GenCon is the largest gaming convention ever?

The highlight was meeting Wil Wheaton and Nichelle Nichols. My celebrity encounters are rare, and I've wanted to meet Wheaton since his GenCon appearance in 2010, and this year I can confidently say I made that dream come true. Wheaton is the only man in the world who could wear a kilt and an octopus T-shirt and still garner undying accolades and respect from his legion of fans. He saw I wore my Reality Blurs polo shirt and immediately began complimenting the company's game lines, especially Agents of Oblivion and Realms of Cthulhu. I informed him about Ravaged Earth's second revised addition dropping later this year and he said he'd check it out. That brief conversation made the half hour wait in line totally worth it.

(It's also great to have a girlfriend with an iPad to record this momentous occasion for posterity.)

Saturday I attended the Pinnacle Entertainment Group's panel, where Savage Worlds licensees (like Reality Blurs) had the opportunity to discuss what products are in the pipeline. I plugged Ravaged Earth, and even showed some sample artwork and plot-point outline to a few people after the event. During Savage Saturday Night I ran my Ravaged Earth adventure, "Dutchman's Fortune" for six lucky gamers. The pulpy adventure had a treasure map to gangster Dutch Schultz's loot, which contained a Martian artifact. Our intrepid heroes had to battle Lucky Luciano's gangsters, break an inmate out of Sing-Sing Prison, collect two halves of the map, fight rocket marauders and a Martian spy before searching the woods in upstate New York. The grand finale really had them fighting for their lives against a supernatural menace.

I snagged some dazzling plunder this year which shall satiate boredom during those frigid winter nights. Deadlands: The Last Sons, Hell on Earth, Redneck Life, Star Trek Catan, Wench! and some really nifty metal dice.

The older I get, the more I lament my fleeting youth. Stuck in the doldrums of a perpetual grinding wheel existence, I find moments of levity among the things I enjoyed when I was younger. Now that I'm a middle-aged relic, I have the freedom to indulge myself in gaming, comic books, movies and other fanciful diversions. What used to be a blemish of shame is worn as a shining badge of honor. I'm happy in this geek life. As a game designer and creator, I'm fascinated with people's experiences playing RPGs, the characters they create, the hard-fought battles, the banter around the gaming table and the way a bunch of polyhedral dice sound when rolled. It's a world I entered late, but one where I'm most at ease. Thanks for making me feel comfortable, friends. To me, GenCon is family. One big, silly geeky family.

The Rednecking of America

"I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe and the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors."
- Edward Abbey "In Defense of the Redneck"


The twisted cultural depiction of so-called rednecks from the Southern United States is sapping our collective consciousness as a civilization. Like a virulent plague, the over saturation of selfish and destructive behavior on TV is having a negative effect on our internal psyche, as if the American zeitgeist is forced to listen to Travis Tritt while banging its cousin.

Early depictions of rednecks in popular culture were ones of good-natured fun. Popular entertainment showed them as backwoods and inept, and blissfully ignorant of anything other than hog sloppin', moonshine-swillin' and makin' babies.

In short, they were stereotypes.

Negative stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless. As far as the effete Manhattanites were concerned, rednecks remained clutching their Bibles and guns and stayed confined to their trailer parks.

Remember the Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, the Dukes of Hazzard and the Grand Ole Opry? They proved to be popular, yet there was a cultural divide. Rednecks were still looked down upon in those early days.

Popular culture's influences remained centered on Hollywood and New York and if you were a college-educated snob, you prospered on TV. The archetype of articulate, suburban or urban educated people dominated the airwaves.

All that changed with the rise of blue collar comics like Foxworthy who showed pride in his southern upbringing and did a brilliant bit "You Might be a Redneck If..." in 1993.

Suddenly, the representation of uneducated poor people from rural areas became widely circulated in popular media. The rise of country music in the mid-1990s to mainstream audiences, and the image of rednecks as "poor but happy" folks who were always surrounded by family became more widespread. Their comic milieu explored themes of laughing at life's absurdities, and recorded the universal struggles of the everyman, both were accessible to everyone, hence their growing popularity.

When George W. Bush became president in 2000 America had a Commander in Chief from Texas with a southern drawl, and redneck mania heightened. NASCAR became popular as a sport. The derogatory stereotype of the poor farmer became highly visible thanks to reality TV.

Comedians such as Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy and Ron White brought the trials and tribulations of redneck-hood to mainstream audiences.

Then, something happened.

We went overboard, and the rednecks shown in popular culture went from being friendly and kind to being total assholes.

There was an influx of redneck culture in mainstream American society. Stupid shit such as the show Jackass hit the airwaves, followed by a steady stream of shows featuring rednecks. All of a sudden, television became a smorgasbord of cussin', ignorant people whose behavior reflected badly on the rural South.

Southerners are proud of their heritage and culture. They're friendly and helpful to strangers, are God-fearing people with a strong sense of community and tradition.

This tradition is cheapened by American Hoggers, My Big Redneck Wedding and Redneck Riviera.

Yes, these are all real shows.

But the worst offender is a show called Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. The show - and it's more like a nightmare vision of what America would be like if Fred Thompson were president - follows an obese family of rednecks from McIntyre, Ga. This dysfunctional family consists of daddy "Sugar Bear", ogress mother June who resembles Brian Baumgartner from The Office, and their fucked up kids, the star of course is Honey Boo Boo, who reminds one of a possessed demon doll.

Yee Har.

Honey Boo Boo, whose real name is Alana, is a beauty pageant contestant who appeared on Toddlers & Tiaras, a show which is akin to abusing your child by tying them to the basement with bungee cords and broadcasting every painful second. Honey Boo Boo talks like Jodie Foster from the movie Nell. Most of the time, you can't understand what this kid is saying. She rocks her head back and forth, gurgles some unintelligible garbage and acts like she either has ADD or some mental disability.

This is on The Learning Channel. Learning. As in 'education'. The only thing anyone can learn from this show is that our standards have shrunk. 

Remember when the extraordinary and talented would receive much-deserved acclaim and kudos from a public? Now TV has become a freak show, a circus of deformed, uncouth and uncivilized misanthropes who degrade themselves just to gain a piece of the spotlight. They're not entertaining. Their exhibitionist scum performing for the jaded voyeuristic public. We're a nation of moronic hedonists getting off to Hillbilly Handfishin' and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. 

We're wallowing in the shallow end of the pool.

And that's what the rednecking of America is about. We're so blithely ignorant, so rotten to each other, so uncivilized. I know several people from the South and all of them are mannerly and treat people with dignity and kindness. But rednecked America? That's just a mean place, where if you're different, if you think and speak with clarity and conviction and have something intelligent to say, you're openly mocked as being a snob.

Our current political climate is scary, where guns are brought to political rallies and discourse has degenerated to guttural grunts. Is it any wonder why political ads have gotten so vicious on both sides? Is it because it's easier to manipulate people when they've become conditioned not to think critically or question anything?

The only thing you need to remember is America is a Christian nation and anyone not like you is an enemy. It's a time when words incite violence, when shouting someone down is better than listening to them and rebutting and when Honey Boo Boo is a plump little TV diva.

All hail our crass, unshod bumpkin overlords!

National Lament

I see people, wild-eyed and frothing at the mouth, seduced by the Machiavellian machinations of a political system slaking itself on corporate money, jingoism and ignorance.

I hear what passes for debate today, high-pitched banshee wails, schoolyard insults and idiotic prattle spoken from the mouths of talking heads and partisan puppets, mean-spirited drivel crafted towards inciting hatred and division.

I speak for moderation, kindness and tolerance, but am branded some radical subversive, a socialist, a communist, a freethinker, a liberal, even though I'm not. My words add to the deafening cacophony shouted through every talk show host’s microphone, drowned out by the recalcitrant and inflexible dullards plodding towards their work stations, padding their bank accounts with blood money.

American beauty is withering and dying, shriveling and blackening like a rose petal left in the sun. Its majestic hues turning grey and grotesque, its sweet fruits turning bitter.

We’ve traded hope for harshness, generosity for greed. Once we blossomed, now we decay.

I see people abandoning reason for dogma, tripping over their feet on the way to the altar, stumbling towards rallies with their signs aloft, scribbled in a hideous language barely resembling English.

I see the ghosts of Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan filing into a McDonalds, evaporating at the screeching banality of reality television and the latest tabloid sleaze belching forth from whiskered editors blaring headlines ridiculing the American Dream.

I smell a bonfire of burning flags and Qurans, a funeral pyre for a lost generation scared out of its wits, beaten to submission, tattooed, frightened, miserable. They scream profanities at the full moon, and like some frenzied cultists in a midnight pagan rite, dance beneath Washington’s stone columns and marble edifices.  

Their tongues knotted with lies and half-truths, their warchests brimming with ill-gotten riches, our leaders rush with flaming torches toward Moloch’s open maw, feeding the beast the frayed parchment of the U.S. Constitution.

The multitudes swarm into mass confusion, stampeding each other for the latest iPad, crushing their ribcages for an iPhone or shiny toy, some petty triviality, mind candy for the starving. This unstoppable juggernaut rolls over itself, flesh tearing and blood flowing like sangria into the gutter.

And the owl, watching from its lofty branch, emits a chuckle, as the destitute sportingly descend.

Whosoever holds the golden skeleton key to unlocking our utopia, remains dead and buried, felled by an assassin’s bullet long ago, silenced for all time, leaving his children to wander clueless and blind, and at their own pitiful folly.

Heavy chains around his neck, drowned fathoms down, he is one for the ages, a murky example of greatness felled by hubris.

I see America wrestling with doubt, teetering over a deep precipice, on the verge of extinction. Its poets, artists and writers all gagged, their mouths muzzled for the greater good. Its intellectuals lobotomized and drooling on white tiled floors. Its businesses locked in metal vaults, suffocating and gasping for breath. Its scientists muted by a lack of funding, beakers and test tubes gathering cobwebs.

I see its potential raped and strangled and stuffed into the trunk of a Chevy Impala and driven into the icy waters of the Potomac. No escape for the last generation.

Our final act plays out amid bunting, balloons and a chorus of the “Star Spangled Banner. Confetti bathes the crowd like red, white and blue rain. We move, stupefied, and fall before the crumbling walls of Jericho.

Plagues plummet from the sky, and over the airwaves, and in our quiet, manicured tree-lined suburban streets. Shysters delivering us liberty and freedom packaged in Styrofoam and chocked full of high fructose corn syrup.

We are the scions of our own destruction, the humble few who cower in coffee shops, under tables and in basements. We see the eagle crying as its wings are clipped. We shout out to the mountains not to recede, for the oceans to remain placid.

Yet our dream, like our frail bones, must turn to dust.

American Massacre

71.

That’s the number of victims in a shooting in Aurora, Colorado, when Jason Holmes, 24, entered a movie theater armed to the teeth and unleashed a spasm of violence.

12 people were killed and 59 injured.

It’s the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.

As a writer, I feel like I should record something about this tragedy, but I have no words.

The stunning thing about this is how little this senseless massacre has on me. I’m not shocked or surprised.

I’m numbed by the frequency of violence in American society, to the point where such insanity is almost commonplace.

That, my friends, terrifies me.

We are inundated with daily acts of barbarism and rudeness, or anti-intellectualism and hatred for our fellow man to the point where the normal operating procedure has been severely compromise and perverted.

America is a civilization in decline.

Our morals, our sense of reason and our treatment toward one another are teetering over that dark abyss.

The news media has a massive, dinosaur-sized erection every time gunmen like Jason Holmes strikes. Suddenly, the story isn’t about the violent act. It morphs into a heated national dialog about gun control, a psychoanalysis of the gunman’s motives and a dozen or so pseudo-issues which ratchet up the fear and paranoia of an already schizophrenic country.

We’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into a 24-hour news cycle where killers are transformed into cult icons, Robin Hoods with Uzis, deluded antiheroes raising the body counts all in the name of ratings.

One article I read postulated whether the comic book hero Batman inspired the murderer, since the film showing at the time of the incident was “The Dark Knight Rises”.

This nightmarish landscape of the lone wolf prompts politicians and bloviators in the media to create a hue and cry over how such a tragedy could happen. We don’t need these empty rhetorical questions, rather, we should be trying to such slaughter from ever happening again.

Jason Holmes is just one ghoul in a rogues gallery of killers, who transform tranquility into chaos and life into death.

On January 8, 2011, six people were killed including a nine-year-old girl and an Arizona District Court Chief Judge when Jared Lee Loughner targeted people at a political event in Tucson. U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head but miraculously recovered.

On Nov. 5, 2009, 13 people were killed and 29 wounded when Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan targeted his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas.

On March 10, 2009, 10 people were killed when Michael Kenneth McLendon targeted members of his family and others in Geneva and Samson counties in Alabama.

On April 16, 2007, 32 people were killed and 17 were wounded when student Seung-Hui Cho rampaged through Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

On March 25, 2006, Kyle Huff entered a party in the Capital Hill Arts Center in Seattle and killed six people and wounded two. Five of the six killed were under 30.

On April 20, 1999, two friends, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people and injured 21 as they stormed through Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Harris and Klebold, both students at the school, killed themselves following the massacre. The school’s name became synonymous with school shootings.

On Oct. 16, 1991, 23 people were killed and 20 wounded in Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, after George Hennard drove his truck into the restaurant and began shooting.

On June 18, 1990, James Edward Pough killed nine people and wounded four in a car loan office in Jacksonville, Fla. The day before the massacre, Pough killed two people and wounded two more.

Mass murder isn’t solely an American phenomenon; it exists around the world. There are brash egomaniacs with guns and rifles pounding out their own murderous manifestoes to justify their bloody deeds.

Polite society scratches its collective head and muses grimly, “Guess the guy must’ve been off his rocker. Yep. He probably just snapped, his grey matter scrambled to goo. Guy’s not playing with a full deck.”

Then we bury the dead and shuffle back to watching “American Idol” or “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and don’t contemplate the frail skein of mortality until another ogre snaps and butchers a classroom full of children or a family on vacation or a crowded movie theater.

Then the experts crawl from the woodwork and begin talking about gun control and what a horridly violent society America is and why can’t there be adequate treatment for the mentally ill.

It makes me wonder if anyone really gives a shit about humanity, or are we conditioned to be automatons craving the next season of “Mad Men” or “America’s Got Talent”.

What I see is a massive disconnect between Americans. We’re paranoid, cynical and bigoted towards each other. Neighbors don’t look out for each other anymore. Children don’t play unsupervised. This is because it’s human nature to guard and protect what we love.

That sacred trust we put in our fellow man has withered with each massacre, each sexual predator and each lunatic who believes God speaks directly to them through a pet.

We’re fractured and broken, and as a result, we don’t spend time face-to-face. Communication devolved to a few texts, Tweets and Facebook status updates.

We approach every tragedy with a healthy dose of gallows humor and wry skepticism, knowing that sometime in the future, another gunman wielding another grudge will create an even larger stack of bodies. 

Thus it goes on, a cycle of random violence, casual murders and spree killings.

And we’re so jaded by the whole thing.

Until we see others as fellow human beings and not superficial labels or vague stereotypes, this species will continue to devour itself.