Record Scratch…

Wait, has it really been twenty years since Vampire hit the scene? I haven’t been playing Vampire for the full twenty years but I have been playing it for fifteen. Fifteen years ago I sat down with a few members of my fraternity and made my first VtM character after complaining that D&D was fun but I constantly found myself wishing my character could just pull a gun and start shooting.

One fae-obsessed Malkavian neonate later, I had what I wanted and I never looked back.

For the intervening decade and a half I’ve been in two gaming groups with overlapping memberships, known colloquially as “the vampire group” and “the D&D group”. The former has actually played a wide variety of systems and settings and games, not just Vampire: Trinity, Exalted, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, Pathfinder, Palladium Fantasy, Aberrant, Mage, Changeling, Kindred of the East, non-Werewolf-but-still-WoD shapeshifters (Judge Fang! ♥), Vampire: the Dark Ages, Vampire: the Requiem, Vampire: the Dark Ages fast-forwarded to modern day and any other combination of World of Darkness systems and settings we could possibly put together. We’ve also swapped around player and GM roles, traded people and characters in and out with wild abandon (including roping in members of the D&D group from time to time) and scheduled games of Vampire to start at 11:00 AM on Sundays because the bells of the church across the street made for a deliciously ironic way to call the game to order.

The D&D group has always played D&D and always will and that is completely OK. Our D&D group is happy playing D&D and so am I. I’m not happy just playing D&D, though, and neither is anyone in the vampire group. That’s why we keep branching out into something different and swapping roles and trailing off mid-chronicle to try something new: we’re curious, restless, fickle people and the only cure for boredom is the new.

Opportunity Knocks

It just happens that a gaming blog to which I am completely addicted, Gnome Stew, is running a New Year, New Game contest. That’s all the excuse I need. As soon as I read the post about it I realized that I had the excuse I needed to run a game of Third Eye Games‘ excellent-looking Apocalypse Prevention, Inc. It’s all zany action and crazy apocalypse stuff and the creator of the game is very explicit when discussing it that he draws on White Wolf’s World of Darkness games as one of his influences. Whereas WoD sometimes tries really hard to make the player feel bad about their character, however, API seems to have “fun first” as its conceptual foundation. It’s meant to be a little funny. It’s meant to be a lot of fun. It’s meant to be over-the-top and silly and at the same time it’s meant to be scary and horrifying, too. It’s all the things I love about a lot of different games and shows and ideas: Buffy mashed up with X-Files and John Woo and China Miéville’s Kraken and some Good Omens and a dash of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. It reminds me of the crazy good times that group has had in our most memorable, most reminisced-about games: Pants Wilder’s “Seattle by Lava Lamp” and C’s Trinity game are two that leap to mind. Those were games in which we, as players, were rewarded for being creative. I want again to nourish and produce that sense of wondrous delight at toys of our own making and I think one of the keys will be to engage what hunger everyone in that group already knows we all feel: the need for new.

Running a game of API is going to require a lot of preparation, though. I envision this as third-rate globe-hopping adventure: being sent to Cleveland instead of Malibu to cap a demon with distinctly bargain-basement desires; at least, that’s how it starts. If I’m going to run a short game of API – I’m a big fan of limited series and short campaigns – then I’m going to need two or three really evocative locations in one or two cities that are not exactly vacation destinations and at least one setting for a big-finish set piece. The exotic, in the world of API, is as often found in a grimy, shadowed alley as it is anywhere else. I want to preserve that sense of the gritty and faded, of encroaching entropy, that the World of Darkness so effectively presents. I want the mood to be one of fighting to save a world that could, when all is said and done, use a good washing up.

The Big Problems

There are a lot of challenges to this idea, though, and I’m pretty sure they’re challenges faced by many gaming groups if not most:

• We had a lot more time on our hands ten years ago than any of us does now. We’ve got careers, mortgages, trash to take out, cats to feed, work to do. A couple of us even have schoolwork, still, on top of all the petty water-carrying required to maintain a pretense of adulthood. Players may not have the time or desire to read and absorb an entirely new game system, especially not for a short game.
• That Vampire game I just ran? It was about people madly obsessed with an apocalypse and all the stupid/crazy things they do to make it happen or try to avoid it and both the final combat boss and the off-screen figure manipulating the party to arrange events in a certain way were obsessed with that apocalypse. So, yeah, I know, why don’t I run a game about people trying to stop apocalypses? Er…
• API might feel too much like White Wolf’s World of Darkness. There’s an argument to be made that there’s no reason not to run a WoD game instead, especially since they already have characters created and one of the players said just yesterday that he hopes we come back to them. It’s possible that the most practical option would be to come back to what we’ve got in a few months rather than yet again reinvent the wheel. The main advantages of API are (a) its unbelievably diverse array of possible characters and (b) the fun of trying a new system. WoD isn’t exactly lacking in options, however, and I have always had a strict “play whatever you want” policy when running games; as to new systems, see problem #1 above.
• Someone else might want to run a game! I’ve heard murmurs from other players about other games they’re interested in trying, especially Mouse Guard and the E6 variant of D&D. The very little I’ve read or heard about them has me very intrigued as a player!
• I’m in my second semester of grad school. Yikes! Am I crazy?

Medium-Sized Solutions

There are ways I can imagine to try to address those concerns. Some of them probably need a lot of work and no plan is ever perfect, but I’m going to give it a whirl:

• One of the best solutions to the time issue is just that: short-term, limited-run games. Our most memorable campaigns have felt open-ended but had defined victory conditions that, when met, meant the story had come to a natural conclusion. The V20 game was an experiment in shortening that to just a few sessions instead of a year or two and it seemed to work reasonably well. The last session ran long and I did a terrible job of explaining why certain things had happened behind the scenes but it was fun and it worked and I never felt like anyone at the table hated me for wasting their time. Those are the real victory conditions for any game: a fun, worthwhile way to invest a few hours. Viewing that time as just that – an investment – is key. I worked to set hard start and end times for each session as a way to respect that all of us have stuff to do. Only with the final session did I fail to stay within my boundaries but that’s at least in part because I also failed in the first place to set them for that session.
• One big difference between “the apocalypse” in API, in contrast to most games, is that there are many apocalypses. This is where some of it reminds me of Miéville’s Kraken, actually. The eponymous investigative organization in this game isn’t trying to stop an apocalypse, it’s constantly trying to uncover and defuse new ones. In many of our games there’s an overarching narrative of stopping the end of the world or otherwise overthrowing a specific power structure to establish our own. In the Vampire game, much of the plot was driven by trying to stamp out a specific aberration of the normal order – an obsessed Salubri antitribu who believed a specific spontaneous revenant was the key to preventing Gehenna – and an assumption that dealing with those factors would resolve the situation more or less permanently. Getting there required learning what it was the various NPCs wanted and finding out their relationships. In API, characters and players know from the get-go what the story is about. Also, having the day-to-day of the company be the prevention of the apocalypse opens up the idea that the exceptional series of events – and every good game tells a story that is somehow outside the bounds of the expected or the known – is about something else.
• One big advantage of going with API is that the tremendous diversity of player options for characters is built in and I have access to the books such that I can lend them to players. No one will need to spend money on new books and no one will need to do more than the degree of reading up on the various character species than they would if they decided to try on a new flavor of White Wolf character for a White Wolf game. On the other hand, figuring that stuff out and getting to flip through new books is sometimes half the fun of a new character.
• I’m going to stay mum about my new game idea (except for this post and a few conversations and – OK, no I’m not, but neither will I hammer away at it) and give others the chance to suggest something. If no one else does, I’ll bring up Apocalypse Prevention, Inc. If anyone else suggests something first then I will respect our group’s give-and-take dynamic and shelve this idea until the autumn.
• Grad school is a huge time sink, it turns out. Not only that, but I’m also playing SWTOR a little here and there. YOWZA! It’s like I want to fail! That said, I successfully juggled the huge group project phase of my Autumn 2011 class with D&D and National Novel Writing Month, so surely I can manage doing nothing more than prep work and planning during the spring semester, right? If I do run this game this year then I will schedule it for the summer and that will relieve me of a lot of the pressure.

All those sound good, but there will undoubtedly be things that crop up that I can’t anticipate. It may be that no one else shows any interest whatsoever, in which case I’ll tuck this away and come back to it at a later time. Even if the group doesn’t bite, the “New Year, New Game” challenge is a great way to reinvigorate my interest in running games and to get groups like mine to come up with strategies for continuing to enjoy a favorite way for us to spend time together.

–

This post was written for the first annual New Year, New Game blog carnival hosted by Gnome Stew as part of the 2012 New Year, New Game challenge and, for it, I have blatantly ripped off elements of what I think of as the Gnome Stew style.

In a lot of ways, 2011 was a big bag of suck.

Several years ago I wrote two short stories about zombies. One is about a vampire who’s at a meeting of his HOA when zombies attack and the other is about a woman who feels out of place in a tiny religious school when the dead rise. There were problems with each story and I had only done the first draft of either of them but I liked the concepts and I would occasionally get email from someone who had read them and wanted to know if there would be a third. Instead, last year I sold them to someone who wanted to include them in an anthology with a really clever connecting thematic thread only to have the publication of that anthology fall apart.

There was also the small matter of getting mugged, an event which still resonates in my daily life. Stupid, I know. There are people who get mugged all the time. There are people who live in places where muggings are just a fact of life. There are people who get mugged and instead of simply having a few things taken from them they are hurt or killed. I know, I need to stop throwing a pity party or firing up the inner mosh pit every time I think or talk about it, but it’s still there, still weird and freaky to think about, still making me jump out of my skin every time I’m surprised or caught off-guard or walk into Target and see someone of the same approximate morphology as any of my muggers. As noted in that post, a particular regret was that they had taken my last Russian money – a 500 ruble bill from my trip to Russia with KJ nearly twenty years ago. KJ sent me a card later in the year, around our birthdays, that contained a coin for fifty rubles. It is my new Russian money and I cherish it.

There were plenty of things to bitch about regarding last year. I could whinge about 2011 for hours but instead I will simply say that it was the worst year I’ve had since my cousin Chris died, which was the worst year I’d had since my sister Mona died, which was the worst year I’ve ever had. 2011 was #3 out of all 37 if ranked in descending order from worst to best, hands down, and I’m someone who dropped out of college three times, survived the tech bubble and spent a few years as a problem drinker.

There were two major good things that happened: I lost 100 pounds and I got an A in my first class in grad school. There were other good things that happened – excellent gaming experiences at Dragon*Con and my trip to Columbia, SC, to visit high school friends spring to mind – but the highs were few and far between. I just have to be honest about that. One of the things that wore me down more and more as the year went on was how much work it seemed to take to get anything good out of life. Losing weight was a tremendous amount of effort and I’m having to maintain that regimen of exercise and diet to maintain the weight loss even now, months after hitting my target weight and figuring out how to stay there. My grad school class took many hours of study and work, including one night when I essentially missed one of my closest friends’ housewarming party because MS Word used curly single-quotes and Firefox preserved them when pasting commands into a MySQL interface and I couldn’t figure out why my queries wouldn’t run and they were due the next day. I won a major victory at work but it took months of campaigning and cajoling and lining up all the pieces in exactly the right pattern to convince someone powerful of the thing I needed them to acknowledge. Every victory was exhausting last year and I had become convinced that the only joy in life is that which we make for ourselves; that tragedy is prone to walk in the door any fucking time it feels like it but that happiness was prey we must chase or abandon.

Today, though! Today has helped.

For one thing, I started work on the third of the zombie stories. It, combined with the other two, could make for a nifty little novella. The would-be editor of that anthology knows that I have withdrawn my stories to use for another project and I’m going to use them by combining the three into a work that I can release on Kindle. Why not, right? The only way to guarantee that I never sell a book to anyone else in my whole life is never to try.

Another great goodness is that I found a long-forgotten cache of ruble bills. Now I get to have the 50 ruble coin from KJ on my altar at home – the space where I put the things I really value – and carry a bill with me as well. Finding those bills was like winning the lottery. I teared up a little as soon as I realized what they were.

Last, when organizing some papers on my desk at home I randomly discovered the schedule from my gaming sessions at Dragon*Con. My major regret from Dragon*Con was that I hadn’t gotten the email addresses of any of the other players or of any of my DMs and I had wanted to thank the DMs for running great games. I went into Dragon*Con just terrified of gaming with strangers and had nothing but incredibly positive experiences. The schedule made it easy for me to track down the DMs on Facebook and lo, the best of them – the guy whose one-shot was so good that the next day I realized what I was planning to do during the next session even though I knew that session would never occur – has an old friend of mine from high school as one of our mutual friends. All of a sudden I had the chance to say thank you.

So, I did.

And now I’m grateful that it’s 2012; that there can be moments of unexpected good in life; that the construct of a calendrical year gives us the chance to compartmentalize the past and move on when we need it; that there is more Russian money in my house; that I can still make myself smile when a story idea occurs to me; and that I got to tell a DM he did a great job.

Eight months later, I weigh 199 pounds.

I’ve held steady between 197 (after a couple of meatless days) and 202 (after the State Fair, bless its fried bounty) for three weeks now with basically zero effort beyond my now-thoroughly-established habits of diet and exercise. I’ve scaled back on the amount of walking/running/biking I do, in part because it’s no fun to bike in 50F temps and in part because I was trying to “air brake” into the ~200 range rather than shoot past it. I’ve allowed myself tiny increases in calories – the caramel dip included in my apple slices here, an extra banana there – and I even ate two slices, over a few days, of a homemade dark chocolate ganache & strawberry pie so thin it was more tart than pie. The only food I’ve completely written off is Oreos because, y’know, there’s just no healthy way to eat Oreos and if I started I wouldn’t stop.

I’ve burned through two generations of cheap jeans and shorts and am now on my third. I’ve dropped two shirt sizes in all varieties: work shirts, t-shirts, even undershirts. I’ve given something like $1500 worth of clothes to the rescue mission up the street. I knew I’d really lost weight when I had to buy new underwear. My shoes fit differently. When I’m doing the running portion of my walks I feel agile in a way I’ve simply never felt before, jogging along, dodging obstacles, jumping curbs in little leaps. A few weeks ago I was waiting for a walk signal at a place where the American Tobacco Trail crosses a major street and I realized I was bouncing back and forth in anticipation of getting to go again. I’ve walked parts of my city that I didn’t know existed. I’ve seen abandoned houses that would make great vampire havens and cute little brick boxes from the ’50s with carefully-tended gardens and a valley so thick with kudzu that it looks like a crocheted throw. I joined Pants Wilder’s gym to use the weight machines and treadmills and because I can park there, walk 9 miles of the ATT and then meditate in a steam room before going to study. I got off my ass and started my first foray into grad school after years of talking about it. I went to a running store and was fitted for shoes by people who were friendly instead of critical. I had a doctor take my pulse repeatedly and then say, “Wow. Your heart rate is beautiful.” I’ve gotten robbed without letting myself completely obsess over it or give up. I’ve had a colleague from another team say, in the hallway, “I was biking the American Tobacco Trail last weekend and I think I saw you running with a baseball bat.” I’ve gotten an email from a long-ago ex that read, in whole, “Rode past you on the Trail last week. Looking great!”

I spent years saying all this endorphin-high, body-as-drug stuff was a bunch of bullshit or, alternately, that it was simply out of reach for me because I would never have the patience/time/body-type/discipline/joints/endurance/diet/desire for it. There are absolutely people for whom that’s true and I don’t think anyone who does not go out and walk off 96 lb is a loser or isn’t trying or is unhealthy or anything at all like that. Neither am I in any way kidding myself that it’s easy or that it will suddenly get easy. In order to stay fit, in opposition to my genetics and my health history and my family’s health history, I will have to work like this for the rest of my life without ceasing.

It turned out that it was not impossible, however, for me to start and to see it through. It isn’t even unpleasant. It’s fun, even when I walk through the spot where I got robbed, and I’ll be the first one to admit how very surprised I am by that.

Added Later So Nobody Thinks I’m Bulimic

Worth mentioning, I feel, are that:

• the nutritionist running the weight loss study worked with me to continue adjusting my weight loss goal in a sane, rational way as I continued to lose weight and she suggested ~200 as an ultimate target;
• the doctor in question was in no way associated with the weight loss study and endorsed its effects;
• only one colleague has asked if I am dying (hee!);
• the actual goal suggested by my nutritionist, and which I am happily following, is that I consider any weight between 195 and 205 to be just fine and not worth trying to adjust in some conscious fashion; and
• drifting down from 202 to 199 took a week and a half and didn’t involve any effort, it just happened, and tomorrow it could be right back up and c’est la vie.

To be honest, I have spent years scared of trying to lose weight – including this year of actual weight loss – because my oldest sister had more than one eating disorder as she battled her own body over the course of her entire adult life. I have been, and sometimes still am, scared that a program of successfully re-engineering my body might turn into an obsession. Staying conscious of that has helped me avoid it. Viewing this as an engineering project instead of a Serious Lifestyle Change has helped me avoid it. Reminding myself in frank fashion of the literal madness my sister endured has helped me avoid it. Saying that my sister was battling her own body isn’t much of a metaphor or exaggeration; she hated her body and was, I think, to some degree trying to destroy it. I am trying to build mine up rather than tear it down. The C.S. Lewis line about not having a soul but being one and instead having a body is a great line, yes, and it’s been going around a lot lately, but unless I’ve missed a news bulletin then this body is the only one I’m going to get so it’s worth maintaining.

I’ve also been a little scared that someone would think I had AIDS, after a friend-of-a-friend in college got asked that ten million times while he lost a bunch of weight, but thank all the gods we live in different times and I have better friends than he did.

I now conclude this episode of Over-Sharing Theatre.

I will not let my respect for my fellow citizens or the democratic process be drowned in the irony that some eventual percentage of voters in my precinct will trust me to certify poll results but not to sign a marriage license or that, in that moment, those persons’ ballots have more legal protections than half my personal life.

It is possible that I will have to repeat that to myself many times between now and May of next year.

Speaking personally, any person who knows me and who lives in NC and votes for the amendment will be stating pretty clearly that they do not think of me as fully a person. They will be choosing, right then, explicitly, to inflict a measure of harm on my life. Doing so will be an act of aggression and injury. It’s that simple. There’s no way to dress it up otherwise. The amendment itself cannot be compared to institutionalized gay-bashing because it IS institutionalized gay-bashing.

In the meantime, I’m contemplating starting a new blog to summarize our ongoing D&D campaign from the perspective of my Thri-Kreen Ranger. It’s a lot of fun playing him – extremely low Charisma score so I play him as being extremely shy, socially awkward and halting in his speech. The Charisma penalty is largely the result of being an ant-man with a voice that sounds like a shrieky cricket on helium, but I have zero desire to force my friends to endure that. Instead, I play it as being the consequence of living among races that don’t use scent and antennae to augment verbal communications and the body language of which is all wrong. He’s got a Wisdom bonus, though, and he tends to be fairly thoughtful if a bit quick on the trigger when it comes time to fight, so I would enjoy writing down his perspective. Thri-Kreen don’t sleep, which leaves him lots of time to occupy his own self while everyone else stretches out and plays dead for eight hours. He finds sleep the creepiest and freakiest of all the things that make friends different from him.

If I do start it, that will mean that I have kind of a lot of writing projects going:

• editing/rewriting my Machine of Death 2 submission
• waiting to hear back from my two submissions for the anthology of zombie stories + post-apocalyptic recipes (I was rather proud of my recipes if I do say so myself)
• contemplating a second Machine of Death 2 submission
• writing a 100-word hyaku every week for this site
• writing for Pink Kryptonite
• debating what to write for NaNoWriMo in November (gay-teen-sleuth-adventure vs. sleazy-gay-real-estate-agent-noir)
• collecting story ideas for a possible short-run (four or five sessions) game of Vampire: the Masquerade late this year or early next
• collecting story ideas for a possible Call of Cthulhu one-shot this fall

That’s kind of a lot of writing to have floating around in my head even if I don’t exactly have to put pen to paper every day. It’s good, though, to have that much going on. I have an attention span best measured in microns, so having lots of possibilities makes it more likely I’ll act on one of them. I was considering trying to do Camp NaNoWriMo this summer, which would mean doing, effectively, two NaNos this year, but good grief. I have to walk and sleep and play videogames sometime.

Speaking of videogames, I have officially retitled Fallout: New Vegas, as I experience it, to Fallout: A Game About Hunting And Killing Legionnaires. I keep shooting fake Romans in the head with a modified Laser Rifle and it keeps not getting old. I’ve been doing this for months and there’s no end in sight.

In terms of methods, it’s the ol’ “eat less, move more.” Changes in cooking habits, eating habits, restaurant habits, etc., coupled with a huge program of walking. I find I really enjoy walking. Yesterday I went out in the early evening because the forecast said it would rain later that night. It turned out they were wrong – the rain arrived early – and a huge and violent thunderstorm pounded Durham while I was out on the American Tobacco Trail. I opened the umbrella, tucked my iPhone and headphones away in my backpack and listened to the rain fall and the sky shatter for a very pleasant 45 minutes or so while the storm moved past. Almost no one else was out on the trail in those conditions, but those of us who were really seemed to be enjoying it.

They took the following things:

• $80 cash that I had forgotten I even had on me
• the Conjured Glacier Water water bottle that Katastrophes brought back for me from BlizzCon
• my driver’s license and work ID
• a small card that read, simply, “Miracles,” given to me by the now-deceased owner of a now-defunct pagan store in Carrboro many years ago
• one small umbrella
• my car and house keys
• my iPhone 3GS
• my fancy noise-cancelling Klipsch headphones
• the capacity to be in a crowded, public place without a reflexive, rising panic
• $1200 so far in necessary purchases and fees to replace and re-secure property stolen or threatened
• the exercise armband for my phone
• the last rubles I possessed from my trip to Russia in 1994
• my Election Judge identification card
• a small backpack given to me by The Boyf
• a flashlight
• a wallet that had started to fall apart
• two and a half work days
• 19 hours and counting spent standing in line, shopping for a new bag, buying a softball bat to use as my “walking stick” in future, buying a new phone, waiting at the dealership while my car was reprogrammed for new key fobs and so on
• the capacity to interact with a stranger without feeling afraid
• approximately 7 hours of sleep so far
• at least three peaceful dreams that were nightmares instead
• some degree of dignity as I have had to share this experience repeatedly with neighbors and friends who use the ATT in order to warn them
• the capacity to walk around a store without checking every single person I see in order to determine if they could be the people who mugged me
• two pounds in regained weight as I sat idle instead of walking the ATT for exercise
• several dollars spent unnecessarily at the grocery store due to no longer having my discount cards
• my member card for Sci-Fi Genre
• my original VisArt Video card from 1993
• one check card, now cancelled
• one credit card, now cancelled
• $14.95/month in credit monitoring fees
• a total of approximately three hours spent checking “Find My iPhone” to see if they would turn the phone back on
• several hours speaking with police and emailing with people on my neighborhood listserv and those of neighborhoods near mine or near the scene of the crime
• the capacity to think about a given topic for any length of time without realizing that I have slipped into a looped replay of the event itself
• the capacity to have much respect for the neighbors who thought I would have been fine if I’d had a gun
• and the minutes spent compiling this list, typing this post and revising it in future.

The thing that I find most frustrating about this is how they only had to invest thirty seconds of their time to steal from me for days upon days. They don’t even have to be here to steal from me. They’re still stealing from me. They will continue to steal from me every time I walk into Target and out of nowhere wonder if I’m going to turn a corner and see one of them standing there and what I’ll do if that happens. They didn’t physically hurt me but they did take something: they took my ability to live life the way I wanted to live it, walking around wherever and whenever on the assumption that in my town, in my neck of the woods, I would be able to enjoy a confidence about my safety. They took all those things and just walked away. To them, all that has no value.

I hope they all live long and healthy lives so that they can get very old, and very frail, and be jumped from behind when they’re out for a walk one day in a place they love.

Last night KJ posted that Steve had, in conversation, wondered aloud why there aren’t more President’s Day carols. I’m snowed in and bored, and I felt that I could rise to that challenge. Behold, seven verses of the President’s Day version of O Tannenbaum:

Oh Washington, oh Washington,
Your wooden teeth delight us.
They were not real, but they are cool;
So we still learn of them in school.
Oh Washington, oh Washington,
You hated pomp and tyrrany.

Oh Roosevelt, oh Roosevelt,
Social Security is great.
You couldn’t walk but hid it well;
By firesides you sat a spell.
Oh Roosevelt, oh Roosevelt,
You beat the Great Depression.

Oh Jimmy C., oh Jimmy C.,
You only got one term, I see.
But we don’t care because you are
The only Prez who has real heart.
Oh Jimmy C., oh Jimmy C.,
Y’ra decent human being.

Ulysses Grant, Ulysses Grant,
You doubtless saved the nation.
But politics was not your game.
Lackeys corrupt ruined your name.
Ulysses Grant, Ulysses Grant,
Regardless you’re a hero.

O James K. Polk, O James K. Polk,
Born in Carolina!
You took Texas; dropped tariffs, too;
Invented stamps; yes, we thank you!
O James K. Polk, O James K. Polk,
I’d like to give back Texas.

Grover Cleveland, Grover Cleveland,
The ‘Lectoral College screwed you.
You won three times, served only twice.
Your Pullman stance was not so nice.
Grover Cleveland, Grover Cleveland,
You kind of were a bastard.

O LBJ, O LBJ,
You’re tough to get a fix on.
Voting Rights Act; Great Society;
But did you whack Jack Kennedy?
O LBJ, O LBJ,
We’ll have to wonder always.

Share these lyrics with those you love when President’s Day comes around this year. May no third-Monday-in-February pass by in dreary silence.

After that we went over to the huge indoor flea market on East Pettigrew, a place we’d both heard about more than once but had never gotten around to checking out. This place turned out to be more than a flea market, though. It was an experience.

The indoor section is mostly clothing, jewelry and vast swaths of unabashedly counterfeit DVDs. There are banquet tables literally covered in three-ring binders of photocopied box art and movies burned to DVDs. It doesn’t really matter how your tastes run, as there’s a booth for every genre iteration known to film: Asian action flicks, American blockbusters, telenovelas, name your movie and someone there will have it. There were a couple of extremely lackluster booths of car parts and used appliances, too, but the real stars of the indoor area were the food booths. There were four or five booths indoors and a few more outdoors selling food, booths where the staff and the clientele were all of the same ethnicity and the food was clearly as authentic as it’s ever going to get in these parts. We weren’t hungry at all after the OnlyBurger or I would have gladly bellied up to a counter and seen what I could eat.

The food booths alone would be reason enough to go back but the real stars were the produce stands. Located outdoors, on either side of the building, there were produce stands that sold everything from the standard fare to plantains, mangoes, dried peppers that smelled rich and dark like cured tobacco, scarred and pitted jalapeños that looked like they could burn your tongue from across the room and more. We found thick, beautiful carrots, huge stalks of celery, avocados, weird albino zucchini squash and bags of napoles trimmed and chopped on demand. All of this was extremely fresh and at absolutely rock-bottom prices. We could not believe our eyes. They can sell all the counterfeit movies they want, my friend, as long as they keep the fat, juicy, 3-for-$2 mangoes coming. The folks we talked to were all extremely friendly and the place was a riot.

My absolute favorite thing, though, had to be the “Let Me Fill Your MP3 Player” booth, where for a few bucks a guy would load all the mp3′s one could want onto any kind of device one could want. No thanks, dude, but it’s nice to see the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.

So what was my small humiliation? After all that, we split up so The Boyf could go to work and I could take our shopping home and head to Katastrophes’ & Mr. Pink Eyes’ place for the afternoon/evening. First, though, I swung by The Bicycle Chain to see if they had in stock the bike I’ve had my eye on when browsing their website of late. I haven’t ridden a bike in probably twenty years but I’ve been itching to try it again and we have miles and miles of gorgeous trails around here that I’ll never experience without a bike and I could use the exercise and blah blah blah. I walk a lot, yes, but I want to be able to bike, too. At any rate, I walked in and a nice young man was talking to me about the bike that interested me – after I had stated that I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in twenty years and was just interested in easing back into it in a low-impact way – and he pulled down the next-largest-size model of the one I want (the Trek 7000 – they didn’t have my size in stock) and suggested I try to climb on and “go for a lap around the store”. I did so and immediately – I mean, immediately – crashed into a row of bicycles and knocked three of them over. Employees swarmed me and the bikes and started checking to see if I had damaged anything and I was absolutely mortified. I am a big guy and I have a lot of self-consciousness about fitness and my lack thereof and the big hurdle I think most people encounter when they try to get into better shape is that initial act of being willing to be seen exercising when they’re still, like me, fat as the queen of sea cows.

I had gone in with this vision of something happening that would cause the staff of this fancy-pants bike store to think of me as a hopeless rube and then immediately taken an action creating that scenario. The guy was nice enough to talk to me about helmets and bike racks for my car after that but he pretty clearly was ready for me to leave and so was I. When I called later to be double-sure that I hadn’t caused damage that I might need to compensate them for (I had not), I introduced myself on the phone as “the guy who crashed into those bikes earlier” and the person who had answered simply said, “Oh, yeah, you.” He thanked me for calling and seemed genuinely surprised that I had, but he didn’t really make me feel like going right back out and leaping onto the first bike I saw. I felt doubly humiliated and I haven’t really been able to shake that all weekend. Normally I just couldn’t give less of a damn if it paid double wages, in terms of what other people think of me, but for some reason this has touched some raw nerves. Now I’m kind of thinking that maybe walking should be where I stay. I’ll probably get over that, but damn, the looks on their faces is burned into my memory and I can still feel the heat on my face.

I also ponied up the cash for a fancy pair of headphones because I am sick to death of the default iPhone earbuds. The originals were fine and all for occasional use but once I started wearing them for long periods I realized that whereas the left one fit great the right one couldn’t decide whether it most loved to fall out or to rub my ear bloodily raw. No thanks. I opted for earbuds I thought were crazily expensive but extremely well-reviewed: the Klipsch Image S4i.

Long story short, they stay in without issue, are very comfortable, have bud tips large enough to fit my ears and sound good enough that I can understand a podcast or the lyrics to a song without turning the volume up beyond quite modest levels. Given that my hearing is already iffy in certain circumstances, this is an excellent thing. I do not need to damage my hearing further than marching in front of the drums and years of Legends’ goth nights already did for me. They also don’t completely deafen me to the outside world. I can hear cars and bicycle bells and the clank of chains just fine so I don’t find myself shocked when a car or a dog walker or the like turn up right behind me.

The weather this weekend really was exceptionally good and the walks were incredibly restorative. I get an uncontrolled twitch in my right eyelid when I’m too tired or too stressed and that thing had been going crazy for weeks. Last weekend we consciously took it easy and that helped but this weekend seems to have made it go away. It’s nice to feel a little more in control of my health and it’s nice to spend hours in the big blue room and feel good after.