The Beach

Spent the day at Sylvan Lake Beach today, temperature 30-31 C (84-86 F), with a humidity index of 33 C (91 F). I am now nicely boiled like a lobster, with putting sunscreen on twice. Now rich with medicated cream and comfortable. It was a very fine day, plenty of play with my grandson, water, sand, a terrific spot on the beach and great food. Just wanted to write this for the sake of days come this winter, so I can look back on this and sigh.

I will get that Session report out as soon as I can.

Kicking the Can

This is a very frank conversation about aging. Do not read if your age says you're not old enough to get on this ride.

As someone in my early 60s, I'm supposed to be concerned about the future and the changes that it's going to bring. Just as I was supposed to be confused about the internet, and confused about the youtube, and then streaming, I'm likewise expected to be frightened of A.I. and whatever else might follow, because I'm an old man.

Of necessity, I found myself stumbling over the use of Discord, which I've had to engage with in order to make the online D&D campaign work. And no, I'm not especially good at it, or experienced with it, or anxious to become experienced with it... and it's a bit of a joke with the experienced players, which I don't mind. Where technology is concerned, I've always been a step or two behind the curve.

That does not make me afraid of the curve.

A few days ago my partner and I fell into one of those conversations that people in their 60s have... what is going to happen to us when we can no longer do the dishes, drive to the store for groceries, keep up with the bare minimum of housecleaning and so on. We're not so wealthy that we can hire someone, our younger family are very busy being a young family and obviously, there's a desire not to burden people we care about. I know from experience that there are people our age who have the attitude, "Well, the young will take care of us, that's what they're good for."  This, of course, is evidence of these people having totally forgotten what it was like to be young. It wasn't just that they didn't care, it's that when they were in their 30s, they were telling their friends, "No, I can't go to the bar, I really need this done because we desperately need me to keep this job."

Yet now, these same people assume other 30 year olds will drop the bar and the job to go vacuum their carpets. It's a little funny.

All this is to confirm that, for the most part, people aren't prepared to be in their late 60s, should they live so long. This despite having thirty or even forty years to prepare for it. There's too much resistance, too deep a desire to just argue that no, we're not getting old, or that when they do it can't be that bad, or whatever, to actually sit down and think, this body has a best-before date. Maybe that's something I should consider.

This hits a wall when we find ourselves having a combined ten visits to the hospital, doctor and lab all in the space of a month, ending in nothing actually being "fixed." Because this is the reality of hitting this particular stretch... the stuff that starts to break down does it in a way that can't be corrected. It can only be managed. That is very sobering.

I met this wall when I was 30, when my daughter was aged six, and when my first wife's multiple schlerosis reduced her to a quadrapelegic. This is where I did my training in "no-solution medicine." It was more than sobering, it was catastrophic. Comparatively, every horror I've faced since has the edges smoothed off. That's a part of what makes me me.

Life, if you'll pardon the expression, is essentially kicking a can down the road. When you're young, can-kicking is fun. As you age and start to work, that can-kicking feels awful at first, then you're so busy you've forgotten that it's what you're doing. But then, steadily, as things fall away, as your children move away from home, as your parents die and leave you the pater or mater familias, as friends go, as the places you hung out go, as the things you liked to do once and can't any more, or have simply ceased to be, go, there you are, still kicking that same can, wondering how long this part is going to go on. After all, realistically, I could live to be a hundred. A hundred is the same distance from me now that 24 is. This gives me an awful lot of time to kick a can with not that much else to do.

A different game that my generation likes to play, that my parents generation did without much hope, is this: "How far will technology progress before I'm really old?" That matters, particularly with medicine. My mother had a heart valve installed in 1977, when she was told that it might give her "two or three years, perhaps more."  The valve did not in fact fail until 1995, when she was still alive... and long enough to get a better heart valve installed in another operation, and this time with the adjoiner, "We don't know how long this is going to work."  My mother lived until 2012. She did not die of heart failure. Which is what makes this game, "Will technology keep me alive?" so much fun to play at this age.

I understand that at present, the fastest growing job market — where the numbers of actual workers are increasing at the fastest rate — is aged care. Looking after the old and dying is, right now, a big growth industry. I brought this up with my partner, which inspired the usual discussion called, "Why the fuck we don't want to end up in an old age home," an old favourite, complimented by this technology thing. Usually, as soon as a lot of people start working in a particular growth industry occurs, there follows a desire to automate that thing because there's more money to be made there. I'm sure the gentle reader has noticed there's quite a lot of discussion about robots right now.

Let me walk you through that thinking again. When a sector swells, it attracts capital. When capital arrives, it looks for ways to reduce dependence on labour. The needs of the ailing and the dying are minimal. An 90-year-old does not need a robot to help her prepare for a big party, or anything complex like that. She needs something that can move a spoon to her lips. And change things. And be able to lift her, so the bed can be made. The needs of a 90-year-old makes a very limited yet practical number of things that a robot can be taught to do.

None of those being commit euthanasia, but I know you young people. That's where you all went.

Tamara and I have agreed. We would rather have a robot take care of us in our later years than a person. A robot doesn't make assumptions such as, "You're old, of course you want to watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News with the other old people here."  A robot doesn't care if you don't conform. A robot can be programmed to just adapt to the patient, unlike a human who recognises, "Hey, the patient is helpless, they can adapt to me."  These are things, trust me, that you'll think about one day.

Oh yes, of course I know that most people my age would cringe in horror at this idea. They live in this fantasy land where "care" means warmth, company, presence, concern... but we're under no such delusions. People suck. Having a person in your home, making decisions for you, about what you need, and what you have to accept now, I did that in my early 30s with my first wife's nurses. And it SUCKS. They are not reasonable, they are not human, they are "educated" with a set of precepts that say, in essence, "my life is really fucking hard, and you're sick, so shut up and make my really hard life easier."

I still bounce against this in hospitals. I did just 6 days ago. I don't mean to disparage nurses, we all depend on them. But they aren't reasonable as people. What they do for a living precludes any possibility of them being that.

On the other hand, a robot is like a toaster. It doesn't work without effort, but when it works, it does not tell you what to think, or what tone to speak in, or what expression you ought to have on your face. You are never judged by your toaster. You don't stuff bread into it at 1 AM to have it carp, "How come you're not in bed yet? I can't be expected to make toast at this hour? Why don't you behave like a responsible person?"

I'm at a point in this post where I want to tell as story about something I said to a nurse before the surgery I had in 2008 for when I snapped my quadraceps tendon on a diving board. She asked me a personal question about my sex life, the question being on her clipboard, and I gave her a wholly blase answer that offended the ever royal shit out of her. She immediately turned to me and SCOLDED me for answering in an inappropriate, albeit joking manner. I won't write the line here. I'm not ashamed of it, its only that in all my trafficking around the internet, I still haven't heard this phrase yet. So I guess, yeah, I'm kinda still out there.

To give a fairly parallel example, George Carlin once did a sketch back in the 70s based on answers you don't give to your parents, though you think of them at the time. It consisted of the parent saying cliche things and then him giving the answer he said he did not give when he was a boy.

One I remember had the parent saying, "How many times do I have to tell you?" and Carlin smugly answering, "Seven."

Oh, how I wish I could have said that to my father. He'd have beaten the shit out of me, quite literally. Anyway, that's about the level of my answer to the nurse.

All this is to say that locking me up in a care centre where the same people feed me, change my diapers and help wheel me into a room where I have to watch a news feed that's obviously tainted with the other old people isn't going to go well. I'm not going to shut up and that means I'm going to lay there in filthy diapers a lot of the time, subject to some nurse's passive aggressiveness. Not looking forward to that.

See? I'm already talking about things in an ordinary blog post than we're all supposed to pretend doesn't exist on the internet.

Yet if I say the words to a robot, one assigned to my actual home, not a care facility, because the government finds it cheaper to house me in my own home than in a grand whatever, well damn, bring that future on, I'll love it. The robot can carry me to my keyboard and I'll spend them morning hitting a key when I can, taking weeks to finish a blog post this long. Sounds like heaven.

The robot might even be programmed to answer, "Oh Alexis, you're so funny."

Truth

In 1999, my life had fallen apart. My wife had been taken from me by multiple schlerosis and I'd had something of a breakdown. The year before I'd tried to wrest myself out of a tailspin by starting a zine, that had begun to get some attention from actual mainstream media in the city... but then my business partner had a collision just before Christmas and emptied the joint bank account to cover his loss, at the same time that I'd had an accident and broken my left ulna. All that spring I'd tried to put myself together again emotionally, fought to get enough coverage for my arm to cover at least a part of my rent; finally I'd had to abandon the apartment I was living in so I could sleep on the living room floor of a fellow I barely knew through a coffee-shop bookstore where I used to go to play chess and engage in discussions about politics, art, philosophy and the like. I was just 34.

I got work as a cook and got a new room to live-in with a roommate who seemed steady at first but eventually bailed on me. The apartment got switched to my name and I got another roommate who turned out to be easier to live with though a bit of a slob. Around the same time the bookstore, which was run by an ex-hippie who was not a businessman and did not care about business, or the law really, needed someone to run it five days a week and I jumped at it. I moved behind the counter and started making and serving the coffee as well as drinking it.

The bookstore was nominally open from 11 a.m. to 9, which made a ten-hour shift. The owner couldn't afford to pay minimum wage for that, so he made a deal to pay me a quarter of the day's take, which I'd take home each night, with the other three quarters put in an envelope and dropped through the slot of the place next door, which he also owned. Since it didn't matter to me how long I worked, I began opening at 7 a.m., then staying until midnight. I lived a 7 minute walk from the place, so I would get up about 6:40, scrub my body, do the basic things and then walk over and open the place. At night, I'd close, mop up for half an hour and then go home to crash. I got about 28-30 hours of sleep total between Sunday and Thursday; then I'd sleep on the weekends.

Meanwhile, I got neighbourhood regulars who made it practical for me to be up that early; I'd usually make a hundred and fifty by the bookstore's actual opening time, when the place would fill up with all familiar faces. There were about twenty diehards who came in every day, another twenty who might come in once every three days and hardly any strangers. The place was loaded with couches and tables with chessboard surfaces, while behind the bar were a dozen chess-sets. The chessplayers would roll in around six and stay 'til eleven; the university students appeared around four; the musicians around six. Most would hang for four or five hours. We treated the shop like a living room.

As I said, my workday ran about 16-17 hours. If I felt up to it, I closed later. I drank buckets of coffee. I began talking with professionals in the early hours and various forms of people, from those a foot from the street to those working through their PhDs, steadily and without a break for hour after hour, day after day. I brought in a crock pot and made soup that I sold to make a little extra money, since we were selling squares and bakery goods already. I brought my own music, an eclectic collection of mixed casette tapes with music that ranged from 1955 to the present of that time. Technically, playing the tapes in a public business was illegal. No one noticed. No cop ever set foot in the door, because no one drank, no one fought, no one was loud enough to be heard. The store was in a little strip mall with the nearest apartment building about a hundred yards away. I was never robbed. The customers were all "friends" of mine. Over the next ten years, I'd go to their birthday parties, their weddings (where sometimes I'd be the M.C.). I still know some of these people.

A lot of that talking involved what I called "list conversations." There was an internet, but it in November of 1999 it was in its infancy... which is to say that these talks were a sort of in-person social media. Somebody would mention a movie they liked, then someone would mention another movie, then that would remind someone of another, and another, and another, and for half an hour or more the whole conversation would just be making these group lists of movies that people had seen, and what ought to be seen, and what was all right, and what never should have been made and so on. Another day it would be music, say jazz Monday, then metal on Wednesday. Or politicians. Or places people visited. Or languages people had tried to learn, had learned, had learned and had now forgotten. Basically, anything could be a list conversation.

Another kind of group conversation was certainly what would later develop as the "flame war," but such terms didn't exist yet. Between five and nine just about every day, there'd be at least thirty people, counting the chessplayers; and like I say, we all knew each other. And we didn't think alike, so we'd argue. Mostly, people would argue with me. Not because I'm argumentative in and of itself, please understand, but because an argument would start in front of me about something, and two people would have opinions, and say this and that, and I'd be right there, playing chess with someone across the bar, or cleaning dishes in the sink, or working on D&D, which I could do while I worked, because I didn't have a boss to tell me to "get to work" or anything, so long as the place was clean at night and the till managed. And being right there, I'd have something to say when someone said something I didn't agree with. Moreover, in any room, especially one that I'm managing, I'm better at arguing than anyone else. It's not like I'm going to stand there and have someone say that Robert Borden built the railway across Canada, am I?  I'm certainly not going to listen quietly while someone fails to recall that Louis Riel was a Metis. And if someone says that the Federal government tried to "take away Alberta's oil" in 1980 because they were greedy, well no, I'm not going to listen and accept that garbage either. I'm going to weigh in. I'm going to correct. I'm going to walk over to the shelf in the bookshop I'm in and get out the book there and prove my bloody point. Right?

Because, see, there's a few very interesting things about having a bookstore at your disposal, depending on the person you are. One behind the counter might stand among all those books and be vaguely aware of what they are or what's in them. Another might resent having to dust them, since this really was more of a coffee shop than a bookstore; I think I actually sold about a book a month for the eight months I was there... though of course people would pick a book and read it while drinking their coffee.  But I am, or was, before the internet, a lover of books. I am a writer, after all. And I had many, many hours to just hang and wait for money to come in the door, with the time to take note of where all the books were. Too, I was 35 by then, and about 8 to 10 years older than the main body of the regulars who hung out there. I had a university degree in Classical History and Archeology, I'd been a professional student between 1986 and 1992 and I already knew a lot of books that were there. Plus I had a mind that kept track of book shelf geography, because I'd spent 20 years haunting libraries for fun at that point. So when I say, I walked "over to the shelf," I mean straight to it, knowing where the book was, like a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat, while flipping to page 85 to read the second paragraph from the top of that page. For a lot of people, that's fucking scary. It's not the way someone who is schlepping coffee is supposed to be.  After all, people who work pouring coffee for a living are losers.

All this is to give an impression of what confidence looks like to people who don't possess it. Confidence is not caring where one works; or caring what one looks like in a given moment, or the state of one's present circumstance. Confidence is not a suit and a tie or a job and money and a big house. It isn't an education or a fat list of books read or talents had or how well one can speak or even the stupidity not to care what others think. Confidence is holding a standard in one's mind that is bigger than the presence of every person in the room and then insisting that everyone it going to be held to that standard, come hell or hurt feelings or embarrassment or a friendship potentially lost. My world at that time, and now, was made of facts. Not in the sense that we have a perfect knowledge of truth or can accurately state that anything is a "fact," really, not if one has read Plato, Kant or Nietzsche, certainly.  But a fact in the sense that what just came out of your mouth is total bullshit, while what came out of this book is at least agreed upon by someone outside this room we're in. This is a very important measure to weigh in these things, and despite those who feel it doesn't have to be, especially now in this wild west of the internet, it remains as true today as it was then. Nothing is a fact. But an opinion that has been vouchsafed by someone with enough skin in the game to make it public has more validity that whatever half-baked thing that came out of your brain ten seconds ago.

That standard, to count for everything, must be external. It must be. It cannot be what I think in my gut, or what my group of friends think, or what my professors happened to think or what some large NGO banging doors in a goverment house think we should all think — no. The only standard that matters, that can matter, is one that is so widespread that it is impossible to point to one person or one gang or one institution as its source. We do not know that Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa because he wrote a letter about it, or because the Louvre says so, or because someone made a movie about it or some group of experts took paint samples... but because everyone that counts has already, for the last five centuries, put this one to bed. It's not a question. And when it becomes a question, and people in authority allow it to become a question, that's not because it is one... it's because someone, somewhere, has lowered the standard so they can justify awarding themselves some importance as a fact-wrecker. It's not the pursuit of truth that's going on, it's the pursuit of bullshit.

We are being taught every day, and in a very narrow window of time when compared with human existence, a mere 25 years, since the arrival of a google sorting program, that every challenge to settled knowledge is a brave, truth-seeking phenomenon, in which the internet has "finally and at last allowed us to expose the lies that have led to our time," with the assumption that somehow everything we know, everything, is only known because some kind of cover-up has occurred. And because of the structure in which money whirls around between media and politics, there is more than enough impetus to throw sand in everyone's eyes and call it water, and shove it down their throats and call it water, and then expand this charade by crying out, "thank gawd we've found water at last! Click to pay for it."

We live in a system that can surface, rank and monetise contrarian claims at the speed of the electron, while actual verification still happens at a comparative snail's pace. On one level, it's scary terrifying, much moreso than the made-up panic about A.I. On another, we are mere days from technology from creating something so unimaginably immersive, like Larry Niven's wire, that I expect we're going to see a significant part of humanity just "tap out" to a place where nothing can be sold to them because whatever's coming is going to make the internet so boring no one's going to come round to the party any more. That's not truth. That's just how it looks to me. Eventually, someone's going to invent a product so enticing to stupid people that it will make it impossible to sell them sand any more. They'll have all they can gorge.

The people who came to my coffeeshop every day suffered from one simple disease: boredom. They were not looking for enlightenment, or company, or togetherness, or any of the crap that socio-scientists like to haul out and claim without offering a shred of proof beyond "we asked two hundred people and they said..."  No, they were bored. There was no internet, there was nothing on television, they didn't like to read, they did not do anything for themselves — except the chessplayers who were addicted to a game that could be played healthily with other addicts. The rest needed someone, or something, or some place to fill the void of endless pointless days without expectation of purpose or success with company as entertainment. Just as I was doing, since I didn't really think I was going to be a writer, I didn't have a group of D&D players, I wasn't in a relationship, I wasn't likely to meet anyone on my economic level that would serve in that capacity... and I had 85 hours a week to give to a place where I could drink coffee, sit, read, chat, argue and clean, to keep myself busy. And at that, because I had a purpose, I did better than most everyone there.

The exception were the small group of folks who dropped in between 7:00 and 7:30 to get coffee before work. The best of these was Tony.  Tony was a Major in the Canadian Armed Forces, who worked at Mewata base, starting at 9:00. His day mostly consisted of scaring the bloody blue bejeezus out of anyone who dared exist in the same space as he did, which they had to, because they answered to him, because he was a Major.

Tony invariably came in four days a week just after 7:30, once he learned I was always there. We'd play a game of chess, we were about evenly matched, talking while playing. He started off by talking about work; about the position he had; about the absurdity of it as he saw it. Not the absurdity of the military, or of the terror he left in his wake, because all that was necessary, which I understood despite not having ever been in the military because I read books. No, Tony found it all funny because he had ended up there; his success had all been utterly natural. He had simply been built as a human being in the womb, most likely, to eventually rise to his rank with his capability and his capacity to be an excellent Major. I talked to this man over many months, and we talked about everything he couldn't talk about with other people. That is why he came so consistently, and stayed until the last minute, because it took him ten minutes to drive to Mewata. Because, strangely, we were built to talk to each other.

Because Tony was used to being obeyed, deferred to, tiptoed around and distanced because of his rank, it mattered to him to have someone not subordinate to him, not dazzled by him, not trying to impress him and not frightened of him. My role was something like that of Ben from Next Generation's Lower Decks. It's an interesting place to be.

That relationship with Tony is memorable to me now because it wasn't a part of the "eddy" that the bookstore-coffeeshop made in my life. The drifters, the students, the regulars, they didn't come in that early. They never met Tony. He never met them. Which means my overall gestalt of learning as I pulled myself from circling the drain and chose instead to start living again hinges on a reward I got because I was willing to wake up very early in the morning and work as someone who, for the first three hours a day, ran a "coffeeshop" as well as a living room. The distinction may be lost on some. It isn't lost on me.

On the whole, I do better with people who aren't easily threatened by me. Who aren't impressed. Who don't need my approval. And yet, are perfectly free and easy with their own. Tony approved of me every time he came in, by coming in. Most customers who came to the shop would have no matter who worked there. Many would have preferred another barista... and, of course, those people got their wish. In not that much time, eight months I said, they got one.

A person who writes a post that is this long, that is this damning, this arrogant, this presumptive, is not looking for praise. He is not selling sand. I'll try to put this is plainly as I can. Water is everywhere, and it's free. But it can't be bought. It has to be earned. We earn it by ceasing to seek outside sources to soothe our boredom. We don't earn water by buying another video game, or looking for it on the internet, or watching a streaming service, or any of the things that rely on our going to someone else to get it. Water is earned by sitting down and finding a way to amuse oneself by arranging what we know into a shape that we made ourselves. It's very frustrating. It's largely unrewarding for a very long time. But this is the only way we get the sand out of our mouths and drink water instead.

There are two very funny things about this. The first is that it doesn't really cost anything. Oh, materials, maybe, or a single tool, plus a bit of upkeep. And a room to do it in, but heck, you already have to have a place to sleep. On the whole, it's not expensive to become self-entertaining. It's really just about making things with as little help as possible.

The other funny thing is that almost no one believes it works. Including an awful lot of people in the process of trying it.

That's the truth.

Interruptions

Well, I'm afraid no wiki content today.  And for a little while, there's going to be no content at all.  Come Tuesday, I'm going in for surgery.  Not a big deal, it's a hernia in my belly button; seems a loop of my intestine has popped in there and has taken up residence these last three years.  It's not considered overly essential, but is still covered by healthcare... but essentially I've had to live with it for some time while waiting for a table.  I settled the date in late January, and now it's coming in four days.

It means a total anesthetic, so there's a 1 in 10,000 chance, or probably less, that I might have a bad reaction and if so, that's the ball game.  The doctors like to be very clear about that, though the chances are minimal.  The surgery itself, I'm told, isn't that serious; but I'll likely be laid up for a few days, mostly because I won't want to do anything.  Since its right in my belly button, sitting at a computer working is probably going to be low on my priorities.  I'll try to have someone drop a note that says I'm okay, for those who want to know.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to take it easy.  There's two projects I'd like to get up before I go under.  Mostly, though, I want to feel rested, strong, not stressed, not beholden in general, and positive.  Like a vacation.  For some time afterwards, I'll feel none of those things, so I want to enjoy myself while I can.

None of you get worried.  I'll be fine.

No Control at All

Let's continue in the spirit of the last post.  This may seem an odd series, one that I hope may provide some perspective — though I suppose somewhat self-aggrandising, as I include superfluous autobiographical detail about myself.  Ah well.  Writing has to be fun for me, too, as well as the reader.

As the reader may remember, it's 1973, and I am nine.  D&D hasn't been invented yet officially, and so none of my few friends have heard of it, nor have I any rule books nor places where I may go and buy them.  The rules are sufficient different from anything else in 1973 that it would be useless to hunt up other game rulebooks as a template.  All I have is my imagination — for, as I said, I've travelled back in time and I retain all of my knowledge and experience, though now lodged in a 9-y.o. body, in a home that's familiar to me, with parents who nominally love me in name if not in nature.

And I want to play D&D.

So, three problems: I haven't any players, I haven't any written rules and I haven't a game setting of any kind.  On top of that, I live in quite a strict home by today's standards, bedtime at 8 o'clock, nine on Fridays, and I absolutely wouldn't have been given permission to run a "party" once a week, which is how my parents would have viewed putting a game together.  My elementary school's library closes half-an-hour after the end of school.  If we assume today is the date I jump back in time, so that it's December 14, 1973, I'm in grade 4 ... and of all the people in the school, I'm the only one who knows that the school, Dr. E.W. Coffin, is going to burn down come the very early morning of January 13th, 30 days hence.  I remember waking up that night and seeing the bright orange light coming from up the hill about three A.M., and not knowing what it was.  I lived a block from school.  The next day, Sunday morning, a lot of us went to look at the smoking ruins.

I have a vague memory of who was responsible; some boys from the Junior High School did it as a revenge against school in general, setting a blowtorch in the maintenance room near the office and letting it burn against the wall while they fled.  They were caught.  I don't remember their names, so I'd have trouble convincing anyone I knew the school was going to burn down.  That would probably get me in trouble.  I'd be damn sure to empty out my desk the previous Friday, though.  I lost personal books and other things in that fire — though all these years later, I don't remember their titles or any specific item.  I imagine that returning to the age of nine would involve a lot of staring at things that I haven't seen and have long forgotten, fascinated with the very fact of their existence.

After the school burns down, in desperation the school board is going to stuff the first three grades into Brentwood Elementary, and make space in Sir Winston Churchill High School for grades four to six — including me.  Thus, I went to high school at the age of nine.  The same high school I'd return to later.  We occupied all of five classrooms at Churchill, without access to the library there (I don't remember any books at all, to be honest).  We were there for the rest of the school year; starting grade five, we were bussed half an hour to Westgate Elementary, so again there was no opportunity to use a library either before or after school.  I didn't get to use a library again until E.W. Coffin had been rebuilt; we were returned to the rebuilt, much more modern school the spring of 1975.

All this is to explain that I had next to no control over my life at that time ... certainly not the sort of control I'd have needed to run D&D with my peers, even if I had rules and game written out for me.  We could have gotten together on Saturday afternoons, perhaps; but at that time, it was very common for suburban parents to dictate chores and other activities during our free time.  In the summer, my parents would relocate us to our cabin at Sylvan Lake, often picking us up from school on Friday afternoon and returning us on Sunday night, every weekend.  In the winters, we weren't allowed to leave the house at all after dark (which, in December, comes around 4:30 p.m. in Calgary) — a moratorium that wasn't lifted until sunlight lasted until 7 or 7:30 ... whereupon we'd be allowed to go out for half an hour or 45 minutes, as bedtime came soon after.

I know how alien this sounds to the present-day ear.  I was just explaining to my partner Tamara the other day that none of this was unique or odd to my parents.  These were the rules all my friends were held to — except for those who had parents who were even more strict.  My friend Andrew, for example, was never allowed to play after school, ever, as he had piano lessons and chores, along with having to do his homework while his father supervised.  We drifted apart as we got into Junior High, but I took classes with him right up to High School graduation.  Andrew wound up in International Baccalaureate, doing four to six hours of homework a night ... and when he got into university, and out from under the thumb of his parents, discovered drinking and drugs and how to fail classes for the first time in his life.  I don't remember him amounting to anything.

Not the only IB student I knew who walked that path.

So ...

I don't think I'd be very concerned about players for a good while.  Things did ease up by grade six; my bedtimes were extended, I was allowed to stay up until ten (!) on Fridays and nine on Saturdays, though it was church the next day.  My sister turned 12 that year and that was the end of babysitters.  That was my brother's last year at home; he was 17, not home a lot, and he'd end up leaving in a rage after graduating high school.  I kinda did the same thing, though I was a little older than him.

My first priority, I think, would be the game world.  I've been clear that I like my present world, and wouldn't feel the need to change it.  Thus, I still choose to run the real Earth as a fantasy world.  Those same encyclopedias I have now were there in my parents house.  Their set was dated 1959; I found my set in a used bookstore in 1986, dated 1952.  The differences were minimal.  Thus I'd have the wherewithal to establish my "settlements" and scan the encyclopedia to build up "references" for my eventually built trade tables — though, like I said, I'd wait for Lotus in 1983/4 to tackle that project.

Before launching myself into computer graphic design in the 90s, I'd learned a lot about drafting and the use of graphic tools: the right pencils, erasers, brushes, tape, t-squares, drafting boards and so on.  All that expertise is entirely worthless to me now, though no doubt it built good instincts and work focus.  For a time, with world building, I'd immerse myself in all that again, and learn a lot more to boot.  That'd please my father the engineer, who'd get all weepy-eyed about his son taking his first steps towards becoming an engineer like his old man.  I got the "you're going to be an engineer someday" lecture about every two months growing up.  As such, so long as I didn't tell him why I wanted a drafting table for Christmas, I'd probably actually get one.  Though not at 9.  Maybe by 12 or 13 ... with an expectation that I'd have to raise half the price myself.

My father was a Methodist.  You know the joke about the Methodist Santa that knocks on the front door and offers the kids toys if they'll help paint the sleigh?  There you are.

Here's a good time to put this down.  I'll get more into starting the setting and building a rule set with my next post.

Fading Time

These past two months, I've not been very healthy ... the cold I had through October has just hung on week by week, and come last Saturday I was struck down by something so brutal that it knocked me off my feet for three days.  I'm quite sure it was covid though the two home tests both came back negative.  The weight on my lungs, though I felt little breathlessness, coupled with a weakness and chills that made minimal self-care nearly useless, says otherwise.  I've recovered steadily these last three days, to where I now seem to have only a head cold.  It's been unpleasant.

I want to write a post.  I've done just a little writing of late: editing for the workplace and some on the wiki, all at a turtle's pace.  I have an idea for a post but as of writing this sentence, it's naught but scattered pieces and thoughts.  I think it'll be a swing and a miss, but here goes.  Warning, spoilers.

The Hundred Foot Journey is a film released in 2014 about a family from Mumbai who are seeking a better life in France, where they hope to establish a restaurant.  The story thread follows the young Hassan, whose fascination with food was emplaced by his mother, whose passing away violently at the film's start initiates the family's journey.

Though Hassan is a naturally gifted Indian chef, he at first becomes fascinated with French cooking techniques, the cooking of which he succeeds at through diligence and talent.  Soon after, he learns to blend his heritage with French cuisine, achieving success and fame through the process that delivers him into the epicentre of Parisian haut cuisine and the "next big thing."  The film's development of this narrative is careful, patient, intuitive and completely believable; this, I argue, from twenty years that I've spent in the food industry in light of the people I've met and worked with.

Nothing I've said so far could possibly spoil the film for anyone who enjoys food.  There is much going on that I haven't mentioned, and won't ... but with one more spoiler, I wish to explain that this Parisian life turns out to be wholly unsatisfying for the character.  The film manages this subtly; it would be easy for an individual without experience in food to believe that the end is all about family ... but the details of the film are quite clear.

The pursuit of new things, for the sake of novelty, is empty.  Appearance for the sake of appearance is hollow and lifeless.  Personal satisfaction cannot be found in doing "great things," because such things are transient.  Once they've been done, once the celebration is passed, it's as though the great thing was never done, and the rest of one's life opens like a yawning abyss devoid of meaning.  This is what Hassan realises.  He ceases to pursue the new; he turns his back upon Paris.  He returns to cooking good food, for the sake of the food being good.  This is why I like the film.

Forgive my indulgence in this rhetoric.  It's only that of late, I've progressively become aware of something that — though having encountered it many times before — has never been quite so clear as now.  I ascribe this to a number of chance films I've seen over the last ten days, about which I've had time to think and consider.

Once upon a time there was an actress named Marlene Dietrich.  The reader may have heard of her.  Spanning over a portion of the 20th century, she was perhaps the most glamorous and intensely mysterious woman in the world, possessing qualities that allowed her a career that would defy comparison to any actress that's worked in the past thirty years.  It's difficult to truly express what this meant.  Dietrich's relationship to Germany in the 1940s, to millions of G.I.'s, to the presence of sexuality in film, would be difficult to grasp for anyone without some sort of personal experience with that time and the people who loved her.

This, I'm finding, is one of the more bizarre elements of growing older.  To be clear, I have no personal memory of the time that Dietrich was a moving force in the world.  I was born in 1964, well after her "heyday," and to me she was just another old star like Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart.  But I was alive and conscious in the 1970s, when the mention of such persons was a common, everyday part of conversation.  Were I to write this in 1971, there'd have been no need to explain who Dietrich was.

I have more to say about her, but first I want to address this phenomenon ... not as something negative or positive, but just as something that's impossible not to notice.  One of the more fascinating things about the decline of fame isn't that people cease to be famous ... but that idioms and common references to things steadily dwindle away.  This is hard to explain without having experienced it, but I'll try.

A couple weeks ago, listening to Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (published in 1951), a paragraph in the book referred to events in "Little America."  Hearing that, I had to pause and remember what that meant.  Naturally, the reader might think of the show on Apple TV, but this reference was to a part of Antarctica that was claimed by the United States during the mid-20th century as part of their scientific exploration and research efforts.  In my youth, the region was mentioned as often as the moon with respect to science writing and fiction, as a place of great adventure, as somewhere so profoundly unreachable that it thrummed with romance.

But, until reading the book, I don't think I've heard the term used in more than 20 years.  It's still in my head ... but for nearly everyone younger than 50, the term might just as well never existed.  And that's just one of hundreds of such terms for every decade that's slipped into the past ... that, for me, are still progressively slipping into the past.

I'm not a "live-in-the-past" sort of person.  I'm educated about the present too, as much as I can be ... which weirdly makes all the detritus from the past that much more strangely irrelevant.  To pull a moment of thoroughly irrelevant garbage out on the spur of the moment, I saw the television episode of Murphy Brown where she had the kid, personally witnessing all the hullabaloo that went around on the news at the time, talked about it with people at the university and so on — and it's always funny to me when some youtuber dredges up an event like that, reads a few magazine articles and then purports to shove out a cruddily-researched stockumentary.  I'm always stuck going in my head, "It wasn't like that at all," but what good would it be to say that?  For one thing, as details of world history go, it's utterly irrelevant; for another, all history is changed.

Let's go back to Marlene Dietrich.  By the 1950s, she was growing tired of the industry.  She could choose any film she liked and if she graciously agreed to appear in a film, the film did well.  But her discontent had become well-known; people talking about her would never fail to mention that they wished she'd work more.  That is, people talking around me when I was a young kid, completely fascinated with watching old films, as I still am now.  In her last decade with Hollywood, before returning to her cabaret roots, she chose to work for friends like Fritz Lang, Orson Welles or Stanley Kramer, masters of filmcraft in their day.

In 1951, she played a small part in an obscure film based on a Nevil Shute novel, No Highway in the Sky, working with Jimmy Stewart.  The story is immaterial.  Dietrich plays a famous film star, essentially herself, who has reason to believe the plane she's on is going to crash.  This allows her to give this speech:

"The moment and each one is like, kind of a present isn't it?  You know what I was thinking about just then?  All the people who come to my funeral.  That'll be quite an occasion ... there's my agent.  Oh, he'll be so sad.  He had five more years to go at ten per cent.  And then there's Laureen Carin; oh, she'll cry the most.  She'll give a beautiful performance.  And then she'll try to get the part in the picture I was going to make.  I suppose that's why I don't feel the way I thought I would.  I would have stopped working quite a while ago if I could have figured out what to do with myself.  I was married three times but it never came to anything.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was all my fault.  Maybe providence is trying to tell me something.  Maybe it took a first class high dive into the middle of the Atlantic to make me quit."

What an odd vignette, from this star, to a largely British audience; the film was made at Denham Studios in Hampshire England, in a time when such films rarely jumped the pond.  But of course Dietrich made many British films in the 1930s.  Did she find it funny?  There are a dozen self-referential moments in the film, as one might expect.  It can be seen for free on youtube; I watched it for the first time last week.

"Greatness" is not what we think it is.  For the great, as I said, it's something that happened ... not something that's happening.  I don't want to haul out Sunset Boulevard here.  There are literally thousands of real life examples, we don't need to reach for fictional ones.  If you're old enough to remember the 1990s, sit for a moment and consider how many names you can dredge from your memory right now, you have no idea what they're doing, or even if they're alive.  How many from the '80s?  From the '70s?  And if you've lived long enough, how many celebrities, sports figures or politicians can you remember taking for granted as recently as 9/11, who aren't dead, but might as well be?

Value in life is not found through greatness.  It's found in the standard we hold ourselves to, and only that.

Well, I've had my say.  I'll apply myself now to getting healthier and pursuing work on my game world.  Someday, I hope I feel well enough to actually write my book.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

Change

My partner Tamara has had an accident and broken the neck of her left humerus bone.  The doctor was pleased; it's an easy bone to heal, so she isn't in a cast, just a sling.  As such, we're not going on vacation this month.  Thankfully, I work from home, so I can play nurse to her as she recovers.  With luck, that'll be in six weeks, with physio, whereupon I'll negotiate for time off I'm not going to be taking in May.

Yesterday was a crisis from 2:30 pm in the afternoon until 1:30 am in the morning.  Today has been a trial, but she's settling in.  I'm only writing it here because this blog is also a diary of sorts.

I'm going to address a comment made recently by Maxwell, about this post, and discuss habits for a bit.  Then, in the next day or so (I'm having a crown on my tooth finished on Thursday), we'll talk about the party returning to town.

"I'm finding myself really hard pressed to come up with descriptions and possible hooks on the fly. You'd gnash your teeth if you saw how often I've shamefully zipped the players from A to B, with minimal mention of the people, buildings, roads, signposts, smells, sounds, sights along the way ..."

Let me stress that no, I wouldn't.  I've done it myself; sometimes it's all one can do, if a session isn't going well and needs a reboot.  Plus, as I've stressed from time to time, I have 43 years of DMing experience ... that's more than a lot of you have been alive.  It's not like I played the way I describe now during the first 20 years of my gaming.  This approach I'm describing took time, and no one, not even those who have played as long as me, should feel in any way that I have an expectation about the reader's standards.

My goal is not to change the reader over to my way of thinking the moment you read my words.  That would be ridiculous.  Usually, we all have to hear something dozens of times before it becomes something we've learned ... and learning is itself a process requiring us to test a theory ourselves before accepting it, no matter where that knowledge came from.  It's not "wrong" to zip your players from place to place.  It that you've done what you knew to do.  That applies to everything I've said here.  My words can only suggest, or push you towards another way of thinking ... that you'll have to explore before you really come to adopt it.  If you ever do.

Explaining these parts of the game, one step at a time, serves to outline observations and principles I've collected for myself, because they made each element of the game a little better as I tried them out.  The players responded very positively to them, largely because they'd never heard of such things in the game and yet it seemed to fit with their experience of non-game narratives and real life.  I'm here to employ these ideas, having worked them out, because I'm a writer, and it's my business to deconstruct motivations for characters, as well as other aspects of messaging related to newspapers, advertisers and investor information of the kind I do.  All messaging has to be understood in depth before it's effective.  The messaging a DM does in D&D obeys the same rules as a company announcing a merger, or a newspaper telling you about a fire, or an advertiser that has new shoes to sell.  But forming the right message, and making it memorable, is not something you do well straight out of high school.  Even writers who have early successes, like J.D. Salinger or Harper Lee, tend to spend much of their lives trying to reproduce a message that's just as clear.

Therefore, if you as a DM have failed to hit on points that I've stumbled across, having so much more time to do the stumbling than you've had, please don't condemn your actions as a consequence.  You didn't know; you didn't have reason to know.  Your mother did not impart this knowledge to you in the womb.  Maybe that's her fault, but I don't think so.

Your approach should be to question what I have to say, doubt it, test it, see if it works for you, and if it does, get busy trying to apply it more often.  Nothing I say has the ring of absolute truth.  It can't.  It comes from a field where I've been wrong about most of this stuff for decades before hitting upon a better way.  It stands to reason that I'll be smarter in 10 years than I am now ... and know then that much of what I say now is wrong.  That's how knowledge works.

If it happens that you have habits, and you'd like to change them, remember that the first step of changing is to accept that you want to change.  This period of wanting can take years to pass, before the actual changing takes place.  That's okay.  If you're lucky like me, and you live to nearly 59, you'll have years.  Don't worry about that.  Concentrate on reminding yourself that you'd like the change to happen and then, one day, without much work, it will.  You'll find you want to do things differently, and you'll cease to think about it.

That's the best advice I can give on this matter.  We can discuss it further in the comments, but we needn't worry about it going forward.  I'll set this post down and go check on my partner to see if she's okay.

Modernism

I caught two videos today that express what I perceive as "modernism."

The first is from Mark Rober, who embraces that cheesy youtube-presenter shit-talk drenched with insincerity sauce, so fair warning ... you may have to swallow back your bile at points.  I don't know why this style remains popular.   Note the creator has far less views than he has subscribers.

The video digs into drone technology not used by the military, though of course it could be, and sells hard all the things it's doing for humanity.  Strikes me as terrifically pragmatic, solving enormous logistics problems coming into existence and having an enormous potential for improving millions of lives.

A post-modernist is sure to be filled with fear, then with concern for the jobs of delivery drivers, then panicked at whisper-silent military possibilities, while building an irrational sentiment for why the whole concept is invasive.  None of that matters.  The concept, which I'm deliberately not explaining, took a relatively small number of people to invent; it takes advantage of pre-existing circumstances not covered by the law in order to establish itself as necessary; and it requires knowledge and education to run.  In other words, like everything that's modernist, its existence doesn't rely upon creating some ridiculous grassroots movement or convincing any ignorant person of any thing.

This is key.  If you want to invent something, and at some point in the creation process what you're inventing has to be approved of by one or more ignorant people, you've either misunderstood your process or you're right now inventing something that will never exist.  Trust me.

That may not have been so pre-internet, when you only had to convince a group of people in one room, within a brief span of time, while controlling the dialogue for as long as necessary to gain approval.  But that ship has sailed.  It's not possible to do that now, because people own cellphones.

The other video is very different, from Bushradical.  Here, Dave is completely sincere and authentic.  He makes no effort to sell his accomplishments, which sell themselves.  He just says what he and his wife have done over the last twenty years, step by step, admiringly.  Note that he has far more views than subscribers.

Dave works.  A lot.  I won't say how here, except to say that I should've worked as hard at writing as he has at what he does.  And this is me saying this.  There's a bit of road not taken for me, as a good part of my childhood was actually being the little boy that shows up in some of the pictures.  From the age of 5, I took part in my father building a cabin, and at various points the way that cabin looked and the way Dave's efforts look are exactly the same.  Gets me right ... here.

At 20, had I any interest, I could have used the money my father had put aside for my university and started building my own place in some outback place along the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta.  How much expertise I had wouldn't have mattered, as my father would have been 48 and more than happy, ecstatic even, to walk be through everything I'd ever need to know.  But silly me, I wanted to be a writer, not a housebuilder, so here I am.

Oh, wait ... I'm actually doing all right, aren't I?  I forgot for a moment there.

The lesson is the same that I've been pitching for years now.  Work.  Which is precisely the message in the first video, both for the company that's highlighted for its mechanical acumen and for the annoying content creator posting it today.  Modernism comes down to work.  People who work a job do so because they need food and rent, and are either trapped in the present or the past ... but people who work for themselves know there's a future.  At the beginning, because it's for themselves, it's always work done without a wage; without the certainty there will ever be a wage.  Yet often enough to make it worthwhile, there often is compensation for years of toil and struggle and, it must be said, derision from those who think it's foolish to work at a dream for nothing.

Shows just how little imagination most people have.

Reset

In the late 1980s, my partner Michelle was mastering a choir in the Anglican church in which we'd been married.  To spend more time with her, and because I have a fair baritone voice, I joined the choir though I'd long since ceased believing in god.  We practiced twice a week and of course we sang during services.  I was 25 or 26 and Michelle was 28.

We got along very well with one choir member, Kathleen, who came from Aberdeen Scotland; she was 64.  We'd have her around for dinner every other month, talk about music and plans, and listen to her talk about things she'd done.  The music discussions were wide-ranging.  Kathleen had performed in numerous choirs in Great Britain and Canada, while Michelle had a degree in music composition and theory.  There were many stories and music ran through many of them.

I don't remember the context, it was so long ago, but somehow the name Annie Lennox got mentioned in relation to music, probably a reference to her singing voice or style.  Kathleen perked right up; she'd known a little girl in Scotland by that name.  She'd never heard of the Eurythmics, so I found my tape of music videos that I'd built up during the 1980s and we found a video we could show her.  I think it was Would I Lie to You.

Kathleen was gobsmacked.  It was the very same 8-9 year old girl she'd known; the one who played the violin so well; the one who was such a sweet child.  I'll never forget how Kathleen's voice cracked just a little bit as she remembered "Little Annie."

We so easily forget that every famous person in the world, every artist and politician, every journalist, every commander, leaves a train of people who still remember what that person was like as a little girl or boy, running around, getting their face dirty, slopping food on their shirt, falling down, being trouble.  It doesn't matter who it is ... once upon a time, that person is remembered for whom they used to be.  As children.  As teenagers who believed in themselves.  As young married couples with plans.  In exactly the way we no longer remember ourselves.

I'm sorry to walk the reader down this path.  I haven't written anything in quite a few days and I felt I should take up something.  I crashed and burned over the weekend, after all those committed statements about work.  It happens.  First it's work and then a sick day, then it's a crisis happening to a family member and the next thing, it's excuses and self-betrayals and six days go by.

Just now, having been thrown from the horse, I'm essaying to get back in the saddle again.  Pun.  Many years ago, I'd be furious at myself ... but really, it's just normal life.  Gotta dust myself off and get started again.  Much more to write.

Bread upon the Waters

The problem with writing something aspirational is that these posts rarely get any feedback ... and that's reasonable, because when someone places themselves in a position of, "Now I'm going to spew wisdom," what can we say?   As Omar said upon sacking the Library of Alexandria in 642 AD,  if the books agreed with the Quran, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed, heretical.  And thus was all the wisdom in the world destroyed ... representing billions of hours of work accomplished by people wanting to make the world a better place.

Any wisdom I have receives the same fate; if the reader agrees, then it doesn't need to be said.  If the reader disagrees, then it doesn't need to be read.  There's blogging in a nutshell.  But part of this blog's core agenda is to write about things I believe, and why I believe them, and how I feel the world can be made a better place.  So if this seems a waste of time for the reader, too bad.  I'll write something aspirational today and then tomorrow, or the day after, I'll take a swing at another series of posts on worldbuilding.

Among the more aggravating of human traits is the continued resistance, especially from artists, against people improving themselves or their lives.  Nearly all of this has to do with perception.  Individuals either talk themselves into believing that the effort won't do any good, or that it's somehow not for them, or that it certainly has to be some kind of scam.

Take, for example, Patreon.  During my time in Montreal, I met the couple who were among my absolute best friends in the 1990s, with whom I collaborated on several artistic works.  Jesse was the director behind 2001's Coil ... and for those who may wonder, I have acquired a copy of the film on disc, given to me by Jesse.  These last two decades, he's continued to write and produce, he's doing very well for himself with projects he's getting paid for without getting official credits and he's every bit the fiery, passionate companion that I knew when we put on plays together and wrote together.  He learned that I have lost none of my passion, either.

Yet while Jesse had heard of Patreon, he knew nothing about it.  I don't understand how that's possible.  Patreon has been ongoing for 10 years now; I've been a part of it for seven and a half.  Patreon has been a strong, steady source of productive income for me.  It's not a scam.  It's not a waste of time.  It's a means to connect and network with others on a level that's never existed for a grassroots artist at any time in history.  And so I found myself, again, in a conversation where I tried to convince a fellow artist to get on board, to embrace this wellspring, to reach out and grab this very easy brass ring ... only to encounter doubt and resistance.  Nor is this the first time.  I know many, many artists.  And in all the time I've been on Patreon, I've convinced none of them.

Which baffles me.

Allow me to explain the secret of doing well in the world.  I won't charge you $60 for the book saying how.  I won't put off the explanation to the end of this post, only for you to discover I haven't said anything.  No, I'll dive right into it, because I care about you.  I care about everyone.  I want you to do well; I want you to find comfort and happiness.  And I think the method to achieve that should be free and available to all.  Because every person who reaches out and takes it will make this a better world.

This comes in two parts.  The first argues that you, Dear Reader, must commit yourself to learning a craft.  Here, I don't mean an art, but simply that you teach yourself how to make something, from scratch.  This could be anything, but the very best sorts of crafts you can acquire are those you can apply in the home ... and by yourself.  Why?  Because then you are dependent on no one else's space, and no one else's commitment.

Let me be clear.  Fixing things is not a reliable craft.  It can do you for awhile; you can sustain yourself on being able to fix things for a long time.  But sooner or later the thing you fix will either be supplanted by something you don't know how to fix, or replaced by something that doesn't need fixing.  The same can be said of any craft that's only a means towards a more core design.  My uncle fell in love with a career in drafting.  In the 1970s, he obtained his certificate and committed himself to a lifetime in which he would happily draw lines and shape things on paper.  Then the 1980s arrived; computer drafting obliterated paper drafting.  The latter simply evaporated.  My uncle couldn't make the leap.  He never understood how to make the things he was drafting; or how drafting was potentially a path to other forms of drawing or design.  He just loved taking spec and applying them to paper.  And when that was pulled out from under him, he found he had nothing, and no where to go.  He never recovered.

A proper craft depends on manipulating something that cannot be supplanted.  A leather-worker may lose work on account of industrial materials ... but these will never have the characteristics of leather.  They will never shape like leather, they will never feel like leather, they will never smell like leather.  Perhaps one day, an industrialised product might be made that is exactly like leather ... but the leather worker is still fine, because the craft is in shaping the material, not making it.

I possess three crafts of this kind.  I can do all three in the home; I rely upon no one else; they will never go away; and as it happens, I've made money from all three.

I am a writer.  Books may go away, this blog platform may go away, but the English language won't and there will always been time for people to spend learning things.  Thus I write, teaching people about what I know, and the manner in which it transfers from me to the reader doesn't matter.  I can commit the written word to voice if need be ... so in truth, I don't even need my hands.

I am a cook.  Food will never go away.  The ability to manage it, master it and feed people food that achieves delight from their taste buds will always be in high demand, even when I'm ninety.  If I were put in prison, sooner or later I'd find my way into the kitchen, and my skills with making even the most unpalatable foods more palatable would assure my security and overall wellbeing.  Putting the cook into the infirmary is not acceptable.  Of course, there might be other cooks.  But I get along with other cooks and I'm always ready to learn from them.

I am a dungeon master.  Now this is odd, nyet?  Will players go away?  Not in my experience.  As with food, if a performance can be given that inspires players to come, and speak excitedly about the game to others, then I will always, always, have players at my table.  This comes from not taking them for granted, but by rewarding them continuously with ideas, humour, intrigue and satisfaction.  Some of these can be achieved by giving the players toys and money, but certainly not all of them.  There's more to being a DM than giving the players what they think they want.  The greatest thing a DM can give a player is to make that player feel smarter, more capable, more successful than they conceived themselves of being.  And since I've always found that players underestimate themselves, this isn't as hard as it sounds.

What do you know?  I don't ask, "what can you do," because "doing" isn't the same as knowing.  If you find yourself in a service job, where you serve people, getting them what they want, finding things on shelves, filling out forms, answering questions, sending tools and transport forward because people need it, these are all things that you can do.  But the "knowing" of these things isn't very much.  Someone can be taught your job, nearly as well as you, in six months.  And some designer can replace your job with a bit of technology, with terrible rapidity.  Plus, jobs that you do rely on companies, which don't care about you, and will cut your hours or your job altogether to suit agendas you have no part in making.  We all know this.  We live with the reality of it, hoping we won't be one of the unlucky ones ... while watching others around us suffer the fate that we know, one day, we'll have to suffer ourselves.

Knowing a craft cuts through that ... not because we can do the craft, but because we know the craft.  That knowledge is at a premium.  I could work restaurants into the ground, watching them close their doors and not worry, because there are always hundreds of restaurants and there are never enough cooks.  Anyone who can demonstrate their knife skills and talents in an hour or two is sure to get plenty of hours and respect; my problem was that, when I was working on some project like a play or a magazine article, I didn't want to work more than 30-35 hours a week.  Kitchen Managers like their best cooks to work 50, 55, and so there was always conflict. 

Moreover, knowing a craft means — and now, more than ever — that you can work for yourself.  That's what Patreon does for us.  It enables people to pay for more than the product we produce; it enables a better business model than exchanging goods and services rendered for income.  It enables us to sell the knowledge itself, bypassing the actual product's manufacture.  You, Dear Reader, would like to know how to dungeon master, yes?  Perhaps you'd like to know how to write, or know how to cook?  And if you felt that someone would take the time and teach you, you'd pay for that, right?  Maybe not a lot; maybe only $3 a month; but then, with knowledge, we can give it to a lot of people at the same time.  I don't need you, specifically, to fill my coffers so that my rent at the end of the month is paid.  I only need a lot of people like you.   And if I couple that with working some job where one of my crafts is also part of my day-to-day, as I am now, then as a craftsman, I'm able to be very comfortable.  I have a chance to get lucky and win trips to Montreal.  I am my own person.  I can't be fired ... because even if the job I have lets me go, I'll find something.  I'll prove my worth to someone.

People in the video above respond to being fired with statements like, "This is what I get for 30 years of service?"  The answer to that is pretty plain.  They received pay for 30 years of service.  And pay without knowledge is a trap.  30 years is slavery, a recipe for making yourself redundant, and useless to anyone except your masters.  When you're let go, you've got nothing ... because you've done nothing to change your stars.  You've not learned to be the master of your own fate, because you've been so comfortable letting someone else be the master.  That is not the path to security.  Your path to security is to learn how to do something ... and to start learning it today.  Sew.  Paint.  Make tiny clay figurines of old men and young boys fishing together.  Learn how to make something beautiful from scratch.  Take a class.  Read.  Practice.  Keep at it.  Find something better and go towards that.  Learn to use your hands.  Learn to shape things.  Learn.

And when you're finished learning, teach.  Because that's the secret of everything, really.  Your value to the rest of society is based upon what you're able to learn, and especially what you learn to do that's either very rare, or possibly completely unique.  New things, after all, come into being.  New songs are written.  Advances are made.  And when they are, the people who brought about the advance get all the laurels.  Somehow, someway, you want to be one of those people.

If you're in your teens and twenties, you've got ungodly amounts of time to go there. If you're as old as I am, or older, and you haven't started yet, you still have time to get able enough that you can teach your grandchildren, and let them carry the torch for you.  And if you've been silly enough not to have children, or so coldly inconsiderate that your children won't speak with you, then find your way to some volunteer organisation that let's you teach what you know to a younger generation.  Because this, my readers, is your path to everything.  Your knowledge is going to die with you, if you don't share it.  And if you are privileged enough to share it, you'll find a state of contentment that's unimaginable.

Now.  I know there are several ex-teachers reading this blog, who have every right to be disheartened by the loss of their chosen profession, and what the world has become, and what the young are like, and a host of other truths that we can't ignore here.  But let me remind those gentle souls that the craft you acquired in your desire to teach was sold, by you, to an institutional master, and not to the children you taught.  You were never paid by the children.  You were paid by your masters.  And it is not your profession, or your love of it, that was compromised, it was the brutality of a system that was never designed to enable learning.  That was the pretense used, to cover up the real design ... a design that you know all too well.

And so ... restore yourselves as teachers.  Find a way to achieve that craft as your own master; investigate Patreon as a means to sell your knowledge.  Choose a medium that works for your needs, that you can employ in your homes.  Teach.  It takes time to find students, but you will.  Because there are always students.  They want to learn, and they're looking for you, right now.  Remake yourself.  You'll want to be ready for them.

The future is going to be very, very cruel towards slaves, much crueller than it has been.  Don't be one.  The internet, and your willingness to learn, will set you free.

My Readers

If I'm to consider why I'm writing, it follows that I should give thought on whom I'm writing to.  What is it that makes a reader of mine?  And, consequently, the sort of person who seeks a rigid exploration of self through a process of aggravation, difficulty and the accumulation of pride ... as these are the games I strive to run.  I ask my players to track their movement in combat, to track how much they're eating and their encumbrance down to a tenth of a pound.  I ask them to accept stark limitations on what they can do, I expect them to maintain a standard of interparty decency and a firm grammatical presentation when explaining their character's actions.  I do this in the spirit of behavioural rules surrounding games like golf, chess, bridge ... and even professional baseball, which dictates exactly where and how a pitcher can stand on a mound before delivering the ball to a batter, whose play is based on an exact imaginary square in the air that the pitch must be "inside" or else counted as a "ball."

Why do my players tolerate this?  And why do I have readers who acknowledge that this is important ... especially when we know quite obviously that many D&D players would find this absurdly anal and very definitely "un-fun."  Having to play according to these ordinances, why is it my players nevertheless laugh quite a lot, and clearly have a very good time, and return to play the instant I ask them?

I think it's relevant to examine why some people drive themselves to do hard things in the first place.  For example, with no expectation of ever winning a competition of any sort, an individual decides they're going to run an official marathon race, 26 miles and 385 yards, in 3 hours and 30 minutes.  This is no where near the record for a marathon, which is currently 2 hours, 1 minute and 39 seconds.  Yet to accomplish the feat of running the distance in 210 minutes, the runner will begin to train for at least a year ... on top of many years of training prior to that in order to run a marathon at all.  This "advanced" training will demand running distances of 35 miles a week, and even more in the weeks before the event takes place.  He or she will need to achieve a "comfortable" rate of 8 minutes per mile, for mile after mile, to meet the task ... and then, during the race, he or she will have to push harder than that.  Harder than ever before.

What for?  What's being gained?  The training is hard.  The race is hard.  And potentially, the goal may not be reached.  The runner may only manage the marathon in 3 hours 40, or 3 hours 35.  Why does he or she not feel devastated?  Why does it make them want to train more, strive harder, achieve that goal the next time?  And why, after reaching 3 hours 30, the runner wants to try for 3 hours 20?  What's going on here?

When we listen to people who "love D&D" talk about how onerous it is to have to account for their equipment and calculate their encumbrance, why is it so many people nod their heads and agree, asserting firmly that calculating encumbrance is a "waste of time" because it's "so time consuming."  We can suppose they don't see the benefit in keeping a record; but my personal experience with players unused to managing encumbrance usually chafe at the lack of material items or how actual calculations slow their characters down in a fight ... much more so than the actual trouble it takes to add and subtract numbers.  Yes, it is a fact that making records of this kind does require a few minutes and often a calculator ... though my players often employ a computer and a spreadsheet, so that the instant they record an item, the total weight is instantly calculated also.  The difficulty is not really the accounting, though this is often the excuse.  The difficulty is the rigid control this places on the character's things and movements.  The limitations.  The making of a part of the game hard that used to be very easy, since we weren't accounting for how fast we moved or how much we had.

Take away these easements, however, and the player quickly feels bound by every choice they have to make in purchasing items, in a way that has nothing to do with how much money they have.  Many, many cool, awesome things they'd like to have along are suddenly too heavy to get.  And since they usually have those things when they play in campaigns that don't record encumbrance, it feels "unnecessary" and "unfair" that they can't automatically have those things now.  It doesn't fit their worldview, such as they've developed it over time.

Think of any activity we don't ordinarily do — say, marathon running.  Imagine that someone else with the power to make us pulls us out of our comfort zone and forces us to head out and do 300, 400, even 500 minutes of running every week.  They start us out by enabling us to walk, but they keep pushing us to run for as much of the time as we're out there moving.  We'd resent that.  We'd resent the time it was stealing from the rest of our lives.  After all, if we wanted to go marathon running, we'd do that.

But if our minds were open, and we were kept at it for a few weeks, we'd notice some changes.  Health, for one thing; we'd feel tired, but more limber getting up in the morning.  We'd notice some of that fat being winnowed away.  Partners and friends would remark on our "looking better" and we'd like that.  Oh, we might say something bitter like, "I ought to look better, given how fucking hard I'm working," but we'd like the comment all the same.

We'd notice other things too.  Three or four weeks in, we'd notice that it's actually easier to spend 90 minutes running.  It isn't actually easier, of course; what's happening is that we're stronger ... but it seems easier from our perspective.  Six to eight weeks in, as we're huddled out to do our forced run, we'd have stopped griping and worrying about it.  What the fuck, we'll do our ninety minutes and then we'll be done.  We're going to spend the time thinking about something else, anyway.  And we are feeling better.  And looking better.  And it's kind of a nice day today.  And we're enjoying the company of the people we run with, who are also looking better and seeming more cheerful.  Twelve weeks in, we're actually looking forward to the run.  We start thinking about how much further we can run in 90 minutes.  We think about how strong we feel, and how much easier it is to run faster.  You know, we really feel changed.  For the better.  Why didn't we do this before?

Most of my readers, I think, are people who ordinarily like hard things having nothing to do with D&D.  They choose occupations and past-times that tax their spirit and require lots of time.  Things that present lots of insurmountable obstacles that can't be gotten around with a short cut.  In fact, I think many of my readers — and I can immediately think of several — have chosen careers and activities that recognise that "short cuts" lead to both injuries and fatalities.  So when someone writes, "Here are three simple ways to get your game world started," they immediately think about co-workers and activists who decided they could "simplify" the way they arranged their gear or launched off into whatever.

I have an ex-military friend who received his ticket to work as an electrician and for 20 years worked in a train yard fixing electrical locomotives.  From his experience, I can say without doubt that train yards are ridiculously dangerous places, especially at night.  I'll give an example, because I can.

An empty flat-car weighs about 80 tons.  In a train yard, it's necessary to store empty cars along lines of track, where they'll wait until they're needed for loading.  An engine is used to push the car so that it rolls to the end of track — but the engine isn't used to push the car the whole distance.  That would be a waste of energy.  So the engine gives the flat car a bump, setting it to move about 8-10 miles an hour, then lets it go.  The car will roll until it encounters an obstacle ... a line of cars or the end of a track.

At night, slow rolling freight cars are a nightly thing.  There's noise all around, from trains moving, machines running, the railroad shop working and so on producing a steady drone in the distance.  A rolling flat car in the dark of night makes no sound, comparatively.  And because it's flat, it can't be seen against the sky.  In fact, it's invisible.  80 tons, 8 miles an hour, invisible, potentially anywhere in the yard at any time.  People die.  Especially new people.  The old hands learn to recognise the very slight sound, the almost imperceptible movement ... and they know never to walk across a track that as if it's empty of cars.  EVER.

I think people who work in these kind of environments, or who occupy their free time with similarly dangerous activities, "get" me.  They get me perfectly.  They understand I'm not trying to simulate real life.  They understand I'm trying to present a game structure that requires patience, forethought, internal examination and an inescapable element of risk that must be accepted as unavoidable.  They like it.  They purposefully move towards activities of that type ... even ones where actual death isn't involved.  Ersatz death is enough.  And if there is a fail, if something does go wrong, they know enough to admit their fault, confess their fault ... but never to dwell on their fault, because dwelling isn't necessary.

We will make mistakes.  We will forget to buy boots, or fail to buy enough food, or overload ourselves to a degree that becomes untenable.  But when that happens, we don't blame the rules, we don't look to change the game ... we appreciate that the game has repercussions that produce unexpected effects.  Like having to jury rig boots until we can buy them.  Or squeezing out another day from the food we have, and searching for alternative sources.  Or being unproudly willing to dump expensive crap on the road and leave it behind in order to FIX THE PROBLEM.

Too often, other readers from other expressions of the game rely on fixes that demand changes to the game, rather than changes to themselves.  They can't get out and run, and change themselves, because from a young age, they never learned how.  They didn't have a father who made them walk miles into the bush in order to fish an obscure river.  They didn't have a mother who made them sit through hundreds of hours of old movies until they learned to see the genius in old movies.  They never joined a scout troop, or helped build a cabin, or put together a science fair project that took months to plan and build.  They didn't learn to build furniture, or use a drill press or a lathe, or set type for printing, or weld metal.  They didn't perform their own written work on stage in a city-wide drama competition.  They never played on a league sports team, not football or baseball or soccer or hockey.  They didn't run track for junior high school.  They didn't compete in a chess tournament or a junior high school trivia contest aired on local television.   They didn't spend seven days canoeing down a river and sleeping in tents on the shore at night.  They didn't learn first how to play cribbage, bridge or poker, and do it often with intransigent, inflexible elders willing to hit impertinent little boys who remarked on "the rules."

I did all these things before I'd ever heard of D&D ... and a lot of other things besides, most of the time because I was forced to.  Sometimes because the opportunity was there and it sounded exciting.  I think my readers have similar childhoods, which they've brought similarly to D&D.

And I think that many of my D&D playing non-readers haven't.

Loss

I'm watching the 2021 film Worth on Netflix, with a woman walking in front of a wall of people who have been lost:

There is no wall for covid deaths.

Moving

In the real world, not on this blog, I put a lot of store in empathy.  I try to respect other people's troubles, including those of strangers, who occasionally feel a strong need to share because I've said something friendly at a cash register or in a queue.

But when I'm dealing with a business owner who's sold me a contract to come move my goods, and calls me late the night before to complain about how his company has booked more moves today than he's comfortable managing, and wants to grill me on how much stuff I want moved ... well, that's just stress I don't need.  However, since I worked my summers during university moving furniture and taking occasional moving jobs, I have a very good sense of how to pack and how long it takes to move me.  Plus I have a lot of respect for movers, and their troubles, having many times shown up at a job to find that nothing is packed, nothing whatsoever.  I understand the owner's concerns.  And it is the last day of the month, after all.

Yet, and I haven't said this to the man — his business troubles are not my business troubles.  His time concerns and ability to keep his commitments are also not my problem.  I'm only concerned with his commitment to ME ... and I don't have a lot of appreciation for anyone in business who doesn't understand this.

Of late, almost dating from the origin of Covid, I've noticed an increase in business-persons moving towards this odd stance where my having the money and their getting it doesn't seem to register.  This came up quite a bit while trying to locate new living space, with landlords making frankly illegal stipulations and requests regarding my proposed contributions to their coffers.  One suggested that I should give them a screenshot of my online bank account page, to "prove" I had the money to pay rent.  I think most of us can see exactly why that's a criminal request — and why someone would have to be a fucking idiot to comply.

But ... as I take a moment to rest from packing, on this day when four hours from now the movers better be here to get me into my nicer place, I've chosen to write this.  I'm actually fairly calm ... given that I have roofers just eight feet over my head re-tarring the roof as I write this.  I am guessing my erstwhile landlord decided better us — who are on our way out — than the new tenants, if he has them (no one has been around to see this apartment).  Who knows.  I'm just glad to be going.

To remind the gentle reader:  I'm off line until Friday, except for my phone.  It's too difficult to write this many words on my phone, however, and like a treant, it's not worth saying something unless I can take a long time to say it.  I'll be able to confirm comments and write short ones, however, so rest assured I'll still hear anyone who speaks.

Oh, I should probably add, vis a vis people who want something they're not entitled to receive: if you're a DM and a player goes on quite a bit about their troubles dealing with the rules ... remember that the rules are there to make it difficult; it's not our responsibility to make things easier for players who find "difficult" an insurpassable obstacle.

Just makes me cry.

Artistry

Being here is half the game.

I don't want to disparage the age we're living in.  I rather like it myself, being one who considers the "good old days" to be a time of creaky, backwards technology and social standards.  Often, I think back on memories of the world when I was pre-teen and such, and wonder how we managed with the terrible content on a black-and-white television, the lack of computers and the painstaking agony of having to record everything using pencil and paper.  I guess we had the 1950s to compare it to.  Admittedly, it did seem very modern at the time.

Still, while there's nothing wrong with today's culture, it nevertheless breeds habits that I find myself evaluating.  Right now, as I drag myself away from Oxygen Not Included and my latest downloads, I must confess I'm often a slave to the immediacy of convenient gratification.  Whereas once upon a time, I had to wait a week to see the next episode of something, or make a visit to a store to buy the complete set of, say, Band of Brothers, at any time today I simply have to conceive of the show, remember I haven't seen it in a decade and, there you are, all in my possession and ready to watch.  I call a company like Skip the Dishes to bring me food, I pause my game on Steam, I check my email to see if anyone loves me, then settle in to watch.  It is a nice world.

But while day after day passes with such marvelous comforts, intellectually and otherwise, I am reminded by the end of each day that hedonism such as this has its limitations.  When I will think back upon this year, five or ten years from now, I won't remember the steaming breaded chicken or the time I last watched Nix and Dick undermine David Schwimmer ... I will think about the posts I wrote on blogger or the other work I put together on my world.  I'll remember what I wrote, because this writing can't be served a la carte.  There's no one who can do it for me; which is why it is this particular comfort, this power to reach out and have others read me, that is truly the best part of living in 2020.  It is the things we do ourselves that is most gratifying.

Following yesterday's post, I felt I owed an explanation to you, my Gentle Readers.  Between episodes, and game play, while making dinner, taking a shower, enjoying a walk outside in the -37 C weather we're having today, I've been thinking about why I didn't quit D&D.  It is easy enough to say, "because I loved it," but that's only an evasion.  It doesn't say anything.  It doesn't explain why.  Or why I've given nearly 41 years to this game, instead of to something else.  Why, when I was done with school, and married, and had a daughter, didn't I think that my free time was gone?  Why didn't I put aside childish things?

To see D&D as a childish thing, I would have had to see writing as a childish thing.  Or acting.  Or that the musicians I knew were wasting their time, along with the poets, the artists, the dancers and the other performers I knew in the 80s and 90s.  I saw no difference between capturing a moment in fictional time through the medium of preparing and presenting a gaming session, and doing it in the shape of a novel, or rehearsing to present fiction on the stage.  And since I did those things in the company of people who were unrestrained about giving their lives to those arts, and prepared to die rather than give it up, it didn't seem strange that I had simply chosen another mode of expression.  True, drama offers the possibility of fame and wealth; and so does writing novels ... though not for most.  And those I knew who thought they were doing it to get rich were almost always the first to quit.  The rest of us kept at because, well, because.

That's still an evasion.  It's easier to give one, however, because sometimes with true love, it's difficult to dissect what's there without making an ugly mess of it.  But I'll try.

Of all the things I loved doing most as a kid ~ and here I mean, going back to when I first became conscious of being a person, when I was five or six ~ I would have to say that expressing myself was highest on the list.  I loved to be heard.  I read voraciously, both fiction and non-fiction; I soaked up films from the television whenever possible; and I asked questions of anyone who would give me an answer that wasn't "because."  [see?  I know an evasion when I hear one]  In turn, this gathering of information piled up in my head and ached to flow out on my tongue ... which it was not permitted to do nearly as often as would have pleased me, because I was kid and growing up in the early 70s when adults still said with a straight, un-ironic face that "children were meant to be seen and not heard."  Talk about why the good old days sucked.

By the time I was twelve, the log jam of having things to say broke and I began to write things down, effusively and all the time.  I didn't fall in love with writing because I loved words or because sentences are beautiful, descriptive images, but because I had a ton of shit to communicate and hey, that's why we invented words.  I'm still communicating, constantly, because I still have a great deal to say.  That is why this blog, and the other one, and the wiki, combine together to make such a prodigious pile [sometimes, some would say, a pile that steams ...].  Because I like to express my thoughts; I like to have my thoughts heard and read.  I like others to know what I'm thinking.  And so that I deserve to be heard, I like my thoughts to be things worth hearing.

D&D was a remarkable, unexpected medium that simply materialized one day, like a bomb dropping out of the sky and destroying my cathedral of thoughts.  The manner in which the game was realized, through talk, and bound by fixed limits, which were fuzzy because of the dice, took hold of a particular set of skills that had already infected my consciousness.  I had always been in love with maps and geography, and here was a game that applied that specific knowledge to worldbuilding.  I was quick-witted and creative, able to speak and think fast on my feet, and here was a game that rewarded those skills with role-play.  I was exhaustively and obsessively well-read in literature, science and history, and here was a game that drew on those subjects like a pump drawing water.  It was like I had been training for a decade so that at 15, I'd be ready to play.  I don't need one hand to count the number of times something similar to that has happened.

Once I got myself sorted, and began to understand the deeper aspects of the game, I flourished as a DM.  I loved the expressive power and complexity of imagination the game enabled.  And once I hit that time in my mid to late 20s that I described in the last post, when people began to fade away, there was no way I was giving that up.  No way.  Even then I was surrounded by people who said it was just a game and that it was childish, but I knew they were wrong.  A children's book can be childish, but that doesn't make every book so.  The way that most people played D&D then, and the way that most play it now, the game IS childish.  But not my game.  Not my world.  I don't believe that my D&D design is any more childish than George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and frankly I think it is far less so ... and no one out there is saying that Martin should have put childish things aside and quit writing.  Entertainment is one of the most important things that humans do for one another; it is a gift.  Just as Band of Brothers was a gift, from those ready to take the time to write it, adapt it, perform it and make it ready for me to see it.

I don't understand those who cannot understand how essential art is to the health and wellbeing of others ... and how that effort can never be "just" anything.  Through D&D, I can express myself, and illicit emotional response from my players on levels that I can hardly dream of doing through direct writing.  Granted, I try the latter constantly; but with D&D, the shaping of thoughts, tension, elucidation and epiphany are far more profound and esoteric than what I've been able to do with words.  People remember moments in a game for years and years; they remember what they did, they remember what they felt.  They remember the experience as though it happened in their "real" lives ... which, of course, it did.  The monster and the treasure may have been fictional, but the breathless anticipation, the pain of dying or the shouts of joy, those were authentically real.

I will not give up an art form because others are too busy to appreciate art.