One of the many songs I have floating around in my head half-formed and never really written is entitled "Long Cold Summer." The chorus goes like this:
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
As cold as I've ever known
I could not feel any number
Chills me to the bone
These things I've not outgrown
History has shown
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone
A lot of the songs that come to me never get farther than the composition of a refrain or an initial melody, which I suppose is why I'm not much of a songwriter these days. And maybe that's for the best if I'm going to be producing such forced rhymes in my songs as "summer" and "number" or invoking the grand cause of history to describe something that would be strictly personal.
At any rate, these coming months promise to be a long, cold summer like the one years back that inspired me to come up with the fragment of song. I've known a lot of long, cold summers in my time. That's not to say that the cold is external. Growing up in the desert (even if we try to paint it green with borrowed water), I've known weeks of waking up in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, of having a sheen of sweat burst forth from my forehead the moment I take a step outside with no consideration for the fact that I have miles yet to walk, of having the blood run so hot beneath the skin that it feels like fever even when it isn't, of breathing air that burns the lungs and scorches the throat and seems evacuated of oxygen. And, physically, I expect this summer to be like those other summers.
Internally, though--internally, it will be cold. So cold that I'll be able to sit and sweat and think for hours on loneliness, for want of anything better to do or anywhere else to go.
I've been on a school schedule for most of the years of my life now, and that brings with it a boom-and-bust cycle of socialization. I meet people during the school year, and that's good. I even form something like friendships with those people after many weeks of forced proximity and sometimes forced cooperation on obnoxious group projects and the unforced but still automatic bitching about instructors and their methods after class. But then summer (or the change of a semester) comes around, and before I've managed to build those friendships into ones that would warrant socialization outside of the class (or, alternately, the office), those nascent friendships are lost to me. There's a big difference between being tossed together by chance and unified in the amicable dissing of a common enemy (be he boss or professor) and achieving that point where I could comfortably ask a person "Hey, you want to come over to my place some time and hang out?" By which I also mean to say "We could watch a movie or maybe play a board or card game, if you didn't think that was too socially deviant, but I don't know you well enough as yet to know whether you'd consider that deviant or not. Or maybe we could just talk, because you know, there are times when I need to hear another human voice. I'm trying to minimize the amount of pressure I'm exerting on you here, knowing full well that you'll probably say no, or maybe say yes just to be polite and even feign enthusiasm but that doesn't imply any kind of follow-through. Please? I could really use a friend right now."
I've got a girlfriend now to act as a buffer against these boom-and-bust cycles. Call her social insurance, if you will, though I know that sounds callous and overly-mechanical. She keeps me away from the worst of the loneliness. But when I am otherwise lonely outside of my relationship with her, it shows, and then she gets impatient with my feelings of alienation. Not that I blame her, really. But if I am otherwise lonely, then my relationship with her becomes lonely, too. And anyway, she's going to be gone in Europe for much of this summer. So going to her for some small amount of human contact won't really be an option.
And I have other friends. I have friendships that I have cultivated for years, which is the normal course of things for me. It takes me probably one or two years to feel fully comfortable around another person, and to reach that aforementioned level where it's okay to ask for some kind of intimacy beyond the casual interactions that occur when disparate persons are placed essentially haphazardly into close physical proximity (maybe the sorting is guided with respect to intellect and social class, whether at work or in an academic setting, but the factors of emotional compatibility and personality are still essentially random). I form friendships but slowly and carefully, and I can only maintain a few at a time. And when those carefully-laid friendships begin to crumble, as they are for me now, I have no immediate other recourse.
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
Previous summers such as these have given me ample opportunity--no, more like need--to write, and to read. In the silence that comes from a dearth of human voices and the stillness that comes from a dearth of human interaction, I am clacking away at my keyboard, trying to populate my barren universe with fictional characters. Or I am glutting myself on books or films or video games, trying to invite those characters into my desolate life, allowing their stories to take over my own, which is sad and boring. But it doesn't really work. The characters I create are all fragments of me, and I know it, and they can't provide me with real company any more than I can pretend that the person in the mirror is a friend rather than my own reflection. And while other peoples' works can be a balm for a time (see the entry on WoW), I can't allow hide my mind behind other peoples' fictions indefinitely, any more than I could ask another person to dream for me. None of it, really, is a replacement for real human contact. The history of literature has shown that lonely men like me have tried, throughout the ages, to replace the volatility of relationships with the constancy and predictability of books, and it's never really worked. We've got exponentially more media now to distract us from that loneliness than Dante did when he wrote verse for dead Beatrice or Catullus did when he said love is like being crucified. But media can only mask loneliness, it can't really take it away. It's a change in appearance, not in essence.
So maybe I should be grateful for a summer that will demand that I write even if only to keep emptiness from crashing in on me, but it's hard to feel grateful for that.
Another fragment gestated into a full song:
I'm going nowhere
And no-one's waiting there for me
Oh, I will have time this summer. I will have time in abundance. And when I am socially-integrated, I am always regretting the loss of that time I have when I am going nowhere and no-one's waiting there for me. Time to think, and reinforce the same dark tracks of my thinking until they are so deep that I do not know how to extricate myself from them.
The therapist tells me that a painting shut away in a dark cellar where no-one can see it still has value. He tells me that a flower blooming on a distant and desolate mountainside where no-one will ever find it and where it has no chance of producing seed still has value. That these things are not to be disparaged for their lack of connectivity and value to others, but still cherished in and of themselves. He tells me that even if a man should alienate his friends and his love, he still has value. Maybe he's right, but what he says seems damn alien to me a lot of the time.
I know I hate feeling like I can go anywhere or do anything, because nobody really cares what I do, and nobody is waiting for me or wanting me to come back.
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
On The Eating of Vermin, etc.
This past weekend was Easter Weekend, and for the past three years that has meant that I go on up to Julian in the eastern part of San Diego county for the O.C. Friends' Easter Retreat. I could go on about the kindly company of my fellow Quakers or the merits of Camp Stevens, but I will limit myself to one of the highlights of this years' excursion; namely, the eating of worms and scorpions.
There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.
One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.
I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.
I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).
When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.
John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.
The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.
I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.
I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.
Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.
Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.
Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.
So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.
Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.
The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.
I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.
And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."
There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.
The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.
Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.
Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.
My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.
The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.
The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.
I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.
Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.
I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf
And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226
There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.
One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.
I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.
I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).
When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.
John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.
The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.
I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.
I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.
Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.
Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.
Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.
So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.
Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.
The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.
I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.
And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."
There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.
The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.
Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.
Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.
My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.
The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.
The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.
I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.
Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.
I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf
And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Path in the Jungle
Imagine you are cutting a path through a jungle. Your tool is a machete, and with it you begin to hack your way through the vines and bushes and branches of trees.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And yet you press on.
You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.
But it is something, isn't it?
After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.
The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.
And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.
Or maybe you do.
Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.
Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.
And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.
You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?
And yet you press on.
You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.
Is that sufficient?
There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.
Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.
And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.
And yet you press on.
Or maybe you don't.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And yet you press on.
You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.
But it is something, isn't it?
After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.
The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.
And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.
Or maybe you do.
Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.
Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.
And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.
Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.
And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.
You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?
And yet you press on.
You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.
Is that sufficient?
There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.
Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.
And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.
And yet you press on.
Or maybe you don't.
Once An Addict, Always An Addict
Facing the imminent possibility of the break-up of my D&D group, or the necessity of my leaving it on account of my having made everybody feel too bad about things too often, I've been feeling intensely the desire to return to World of Warcraft--or World of Warcrack, as my boss is given to calling it.
I hate WoW. But I love WoW.
WoW (and EQ before it) is wonderful in providing me with a sense of purpose. "Here's a quest, go do it!" says WoW. And, unlike in other MMORPGs, many of the quests are actually doable. And there are a lot of them. Many hundreds of hours' worth of quests. And in addition to the quests that I could ever actually do, there are a great many more that were contingent upon the assistance of other players, and these always hung just out of reach, like a fruit on Tantalus' tree, and they kept me interested even if I was barely ever able to satisfy them.
The so-called "real world" is very bad about providing me with a sense of purpose. Most times, when I complete a task, the reward is vague or long-term. If I motivate myself sufficiently to do my push-ups and sit-ups in the morning, do I get fanfare and a monetary reward and a sense that the world is right again and an observable increase in my capabilities? No, no, no, and no. If I write a piece, what is the reward? A brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by agonizing doubt, followed by nothing at all, as the piece lingers and dies on my hard drive. Or else goes to a workshop where my fellows pick it apart and show it to be the ugly and ungainly thing it is. That feels like more of a punishment than a reward.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of purpose. Even if I achieve maximum level--a feat which takes about a hundred hours of gametime, if not more, which equates to several weeks of real-world life spent doing nothing other than experience grinding--the finish line recedes away from me. "Oh, you're level 70," says WoW, "That's cute and all, but do you have a thousand gold for an epic flying mount? And you don't have any Tiered gear from the dungeons. So you need to start at the bottom of the level 70 instances and run each one between five to ten times (each run taking several hours to complete, and more hours to initiate and arrange, if it ever gets off the ground at all; most of them don't), and then work your way up until you have the gear you need to go see the biggest and baddest and most exciting dungeons." And all of this participation in the "uber" end-game is contingent upon other people to go into these dungeons with you. So that means that groups fall apart, or that if I am not up to an elite hardcore standard set by people who *only* play WoW in terms of gear or damage per second or knowledge of the intricacies of every little aspect of the dungeon, I am open to extreme and mean-spirited criticism at any time.
WoW is wonderful in providing me with a sense of discovery. Every new quest and new zone is an opportunity to see something new. And I like exploring. Not physically, so much, but intellectually, absolutely. There was so much to see in WoW--I don't know how many virtual miles of terrain actually exist in the game, but it's a lot. There are caves, and marsh channels, and purple-leafed forests, and cities built atop colossal mushrooms, and floating islands, and all kinds of interesting things to check out. And all of it filled with ore deposits and rare herbs and treasure chests and other exciting things to find, as well as strange beasts. And there are a number of classes to try, each with its own different playstyle.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of discovery. With all those pressures to get more gold and get better gear, now now now now now, many times it's difficult to actually appreciate exploring the virtual world. And with all of the pressure on being uber, the pressure is always on to copy somebody else's approach to playing one's class, or to be open to such comments as "You suck" or "You fail at life" or "Learn to play" if one does not. That, and it becomes abundantly clear after a while that the game rewards certain classes and builds (i.e., the ones that do a lot of damage) and punishes others that might have utility but that utility is too limited in solo play. But I know there are some people who always have groups and for whom this is not an issue; I've just never been one of them. You want to be a healer, or a warrior who uses a sword and shield? Tough shit, unless you're already level 80 with tier 8 gear (or whatever it is these days).
That, and over the course of leveling up many characters in both the Horde and the Alliance, I've been there and seen that. The world doesn't change--or if it does, the change is slow in coming. There are no seasons and no weather. The quality of light is constant. NPCs stand in the same place all day, every day--unless they walk a predictable and prescribed path. If I kill a monster, a few minutes later it will be standing in exactly the same place where it fell, sometimes even looking over its own corpse. If I complete a quest, that same crisis will still be unresolved if I take another character to the same place. The world is persistent--which means that there is nothing I can do that will have any lasting effect on the game world. How could it, if it were to mean that one character gets to do something and then it is closed off to all of the thousands of other players on the server? I guess some Chinese or Korean MMORPGs have such things, but that is a large part of why they are terrible.
I love WoW because it makes me feel like I'm not alone.
I hate WoW because it makes me realize how alone I really am. The other players in WoW--they don't tend to be people who appreciate quality fantasy literature, or epic poetry, or even tabletop RPGs. They approach WoW from the perspective of a FPS (i.e., a first person shooter). To them, WoW is like Halo. What matters is score, kill count, and superiority. If they meet you in battle, they will kill you and then humiliate your corpse by an act of virtual rape, and then they will probably hang around for ten or fifteen minutes just to prevent you from getting back up and playing again. If they are in your group, they will constantly be checking damage meters and bragging about their primacy and criticizing those on the bottom. I'm not like that. I care about story and feelings and setting. And when I take all kinds of criticism because I'm not hardcore enough, it only serves to hurt me. A lot.
Or when the other players do want to discuss things, it tends to be television shows, or abrasive and uninformed political commentary, or how work sucks, or such things. It's generic, uninteresting, unstimulating, impersonal.
Or when the other players do want to engage in the actual "role-playing" elements of an MMORPG, it's even worse. They manufacture crises for themselves, and play out such dramas as though they mattered. They play at being nobles, or vampires, or great heroes (greater than the other heroes who are all around them), or tragic scions of extinguished families, and other such insufferable narcissistic bullshit. They have feuds and duels and factional wars, for no other reason that to generate conflict and resentment and opportunities for irrelevant antics.
Compounding all this is the fact that people tend to be extremely unpleasant while playing WoW. Much of this unpleasantness is attributed to foreigners and teenage boys, but I don't think all of it can be attributed to them. There is the bragging and verbal abuse and humiliation mentioned above. Then there are those people who engage in price gouging by purchasing all the items at auction and re-selling them at higher prices. Then there are the people who incessantly beg for money. Then there are those people who slander Horde or Alliance players in terms that would be hatefully racist, if they weren't referring to virtual identities. Then there are those people who overreact with threats or profanity at even the slightest of mistakes (or non-mistakes). Then there are those people who abandon your group for no reason at all. Then there are those people who refuse to help out with even the smallest of tasks, even when such an alliance would clearly be of mutual benefit, and instead insist on working at cross-purposes.
Two of my books now have been about the failure of the virtual world to sustain interest and a sense of self-worth. My current novel, After Life, describes an MMORPG that is so immersive that the characters have forgotten that they are characters at all, and they play out all of the racism and greed and meaningless agonistics that choke the real world, believing all the while that these tendencies are "perfection" in their virtual utopia. But, of course, it's all crap, isn't it?
All this...and it draws me back. Like the need of a clean junkie for just one last needle, WoW tries to pull me back in. It gets worst whenever I experience a fit of depression; then it seems most soothing to submerge my consciousness in a virtual world for a while, and so afford my soul a chance to regenerate. Until, of course, the injuries I sustain in WoW hurl me back out again.
I don't want to go back to playing WoW. I don't want to get back to those days when I begrudged the 30 seconds it took to go to the kitchen to get a cereal bar or to go to the bathroom to urinate before plunging back into playing again. I don't want to feel that intense sense of inferiority to those cruel bastard braggarts who enjoy making others feel bad about themselves, and so often feeling as though I am failing at life.
But there's an entire continent I've yet to explore, and a class I've yet to try. And I have been very depressed lately.
Fuck.
WoW is haunting my thoughts right now; recurring every thirty to sixty seconds or so. It won't be much--just a slight sting, an ache, a pang; a screenshot, a memory, a "What if" moment.
We shall overcome.
I hope.
I hate WoW. But I love WoW.
WoW (and EQ before it) is wonderful in providing me with a sense of purpose. "Here's a quest, go do it!" says WoW. And, unlike in other MMORPGs, many of the quests are actually doable. And there are a lot of them. Many hundreds of hours' worth of quests. And in addition to the quests that I could ever actually do, there are a great many more that were contingent upon the assistance of other players, and these always hung just out of reach, like a fruit on Tantalus' tree, and they kept me interested even if I was barely ever able to satisfy them.
The so-called "real world" is very bad about providing me with a sense of purpose. Most times, when I complete a task, the reward is vague or long-term. If I motivate myself sufficiently to do my push-ups and sit-ups in the morning, do I get fanfare and a monetary reward and a sense that the world is right again and an observable increase in my capabilities? No, no, no, and no. If I write a piece, what is the reward? A brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by agonizing doubt, followed by nothing at all, as the piece lingers and dies on my hard drive. Or else goes to a workshop where my fellows pick it apart and show it to be the ugly and ungainly thing it is. That feels like more of a punishment than a reward.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of purpose. Even if I achieve maximum level--a feat which takes about a hundred hours of gametime, if not more, which equates to several weeks of real-world life spent doing nothing other than experience grinding--the finish line recedes away from me. "Oh, you're level 70," says WoW, "That's cute and all, but do you have a thousand gold for an epic flying mount? And you don't have any Tiered gear from the dungeons. So you need to start at the bottom of the level 70 instances and run each one between five to ten times (each run taking several hours to complete, and more hours to initiate and arrange, if it ever gets off the ground at all; most of them don't), and then work your way up until you have the gear you need to go see the biggest and baddest and most exciting dungeons." And all of this participation in the "uber" end-game is contingent upon other people to go into these dungeons with you. So that means that groups fall apart, or that if I am not up to an elite hardcore standard set by people who *only* play WoW in terms of gear or damage per second or knowledge of the intricacies of every little aspect of the dungeon, I am open to extreme and mean-spirited criticism at any time.
WoW is wonderful in providing me with a sense of discovery. Every new quest and new zone is an opportunity to see something new. And I like exploring. Not physically, so much, but intellectually, absolutely. There was so much to see in WoW--I don't know how many virtual miles of terrain actually exist in the game, but it's a lot. There are caves, and marsh channels, and purple-leafed forests, and cities built atop colossal mushrooms, and floating islands, and all kinds of interesting things to check out. And all of it filled with ore deposits and rare herbs and treasure chests and other exciting things to find, as well as strange beasts. And there are a number of classes to try, each with its own different playstyle.
But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of discovery. With all those pressures to get more gold and get better gear, now now now now now, many times it's difficult to actually appreciate exploring the virtual world. And with all of the pressure on being uber, the pressure is always on to copy somebody else's approach to playing one's class, or to be open to such comments as "You suck" or "You fail at life" or "Learn to play" if one does not. That, and it becomes abundantly clear after a while that the game rewards certain classes and builds (i.e., the ones that do a lot of damage) and punishes others that might have utility but that utility is too limited in solo play. But I know there are some people who always have groups and for whom this is not an issue; I've just never been one of them. You want to be a healer, or a warrior who uses a sword and shield? Tough shit, unless you're already level 80 with tier 8 gear (or whatever it is these days).
That, and over the course of leveling up many characters in both the Horde and the Alliance, I've been there and seen that. The world doesn't change--or if it does, the change is slow in coming. There are no seasons and no weather. The quality of light is constant. NPCs stand in the same place all day, every day--unless they walk a predictable and prescribed path. If I kill a monster, a few minutes later it will be standing in exactly the same place where it fell, sometimes even looking over its own corpse. If I complete a quest, that same crisis will still be unresolved if I take another character to the same place. The world is persistent--which means that there is nothing I can do that will have any lasting effect on the game world. How could it, if it were to mean that one character gets to do something and then it is closed off to all of the thousands of other players on the server? I guess some Chinese or Korean MMORPGs have such things, but that is a large part of why they are terrible.
I love WoW because it makes me feel like I'm not alone.
I hate WoW because it makes me realize how alone I really am. The other players in WoW--they don't tend to be people who appreciate quality fantasy literature, or epic poetry, or even tabletop RPGs. They approach WoW from the perspective of a FPS (i.e., a first person shooter). To them, WoW is like Halo. What matters is score, kill count, and superiority. If they meet you in battle, they will kill you and then humiliate your corpse by an act of virtual rape, and then they will probably hang around for ten or fifteen minutes just to prevent you from getting back up and playing again. If they are in your group, they will constantly be checking damage meters and bragging about their primacy and criticizing those on the bottom. I'm not like that. I care about story and feelings and setting. And when I take all kinds of criticism because I'm not hardcore enough, it only serves to hurt me. A lot.
Or when the other players do want to discuss things, it tends to be television shows, or abrasive and uninformed political commentary, or how work sucks, or such things. It's generic, uninteresting, unstimulating, impersonal.
Or when the other players do want to engage in the actual "role-playing" elements of an MMORPG, it's even worse. They manufacture crises for themselves, and play out such dramas as though they mattered. They play at being nobles, or vampires, or great heroes (greater than the other heroes who are all around them), or tragic scions of extinguished families, and other such insufferable narcissistic bullshit. They have feuds and duels and factional wars, for no other reason that to generate conflict and resentment and opportunities for irrelevant antics.
Compounding all this is the fact that people tend to be extremely unpleasant while playing WoW. Much of this unpleasantness is attributed to foreigners and teenage boys, but I don't think all of it can be attributed to them. There is the bragging and verbal abuse and humiliation mentioned above. Then there are those people who engage in price gouging by purchasing all the items at auction and re-selling them at higher prices. Then there are the people who incessantly beg for money. Then there are those people who slander Horde or Alliance players in terms that would be hatefully racist, if they weren't referring to virtual identities. Then there are those people who overreact with threats or profanity at even the slightest of mistakes (or non-mistakes). Then there are those people who abandon your group for no reason at all. Then there are those people who refuse to help out with even the smallest of tasks, even when such an alliance would clearly be of mutual benefit, and instead insist on working at cross-purposes.
Two of my books now have been about the failure of the virtual world to sustain interest and a sense of self-worth. My current novel, After Life, describes an MMORPG that is so immersive that the characters have forgotten that they are characters at all, and they play out all of the racism and greed and meaningless agonistics that choke the real world, believing all the while that these tendencies are "perfection" in their virtual utopia. But, of course, it's all crap, isn't it?
All this...and it draws me back. Like the need of a clean junkie for just one last needle, WoW tries to pull me back in. It gets worst whenever I experience a fit of depression; then it seems most soothing to submerge my consciousness in a virtual world for a while, and so afford my soul a chance to regenerate. Until, of course, the injuries I sustain in WoW hurl me back out again.
I don't want to go back to playing WoW. I don't want to get back to those days when I begrudged the 30 seconds it took to go to the kitchen to get a cereal bar or to go to the bathroom to urinate before plunging back into playing again. I don't want to feel that intense sense of inferiority to those cruel bastard braggarts who enjoy making others feel bad about themselves, and so often feeling as though I am failing at life.
But there's an entire continent I've yet to explore, and a class I've yet to try. And I have been very depressed lately.
Fuck.
WoW is haunting my thoughts right now; recurring every thirty to sixty seconds or so. It won't be much--just a slight sting, an ache, a pang; a screenshot, a memory, a "What if" moment.
We shall overcome.
I hope.
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