| day one of the superhero exercise. |
[May. 22nd, 2012|03:50 am] |
this is the exercise I pitched last week, where I roll up a single set of superpowers from an obscure early 1980s rpg and rationalize it into seven different characters, one per day. here are PDFs of the Golden Heroes Player's Book and Supervisor's Book, if you want to follow along at home.
(2d6/2)+4 Power Rolls: (2+6/2)+4 = 8
02 Agility
70 Speed
09 Claws
85 Vehicle
27 Flight
06 Armour (it's a British game!)
54 Probability Manipulation
19 Energy Attack
well this is a weird spread. I'm not sure I'll be able to come up with another character using the same powers, or that I want to. I may just roll up seven power sets. I reserve the right to change my mind on this part of the exercise.
the most obvious interpretation, to me, is some form of power armor: the Vehicle encompasses pretty much all the powers. the armor I'm imagining is a Next Generation Warfighter prototype: fast, tough, and agile, with ranged and close-combat weaponry and both air and land capabilities. it's just an alpha prototype, so it's missing some obvious things that you'd want on a unit like this, like strength enhancement, internal life support and NBC protection, but it's a good in a straight-up scrap.
I could probably cram Probability Manipulation (Conscious) into the armor as some sort of weird-ass quantum shift device cooked up by the garage Frankenstein who cranked out this abomination, but I think it works better like this:
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Ernest Laverne Crawford, late of Denton TX, may have dropped out of high school to ride the rails, but he led something of a charmed life nonetheless. Lady Luck tended to smile on Ernest in such a way that there was a couch or a bed every night and a shower and breakfast the next morning in every town, he could always make enough on scratch cards at the gas station to top up his minutes and leave with a case of Coors, he never lost a tooth in a fight, and the cops could never get a complete fingerprint or a clear photo or video. And that came in pretty handy when he would crack the priciest security systems like the keypads were just singing him their combinations clear as a choir on Sunday, so it was only natural that the vampire-looking lady and her dull-eyed bully boys came looking for him and his buddies to get her into the National Guard Armory.
But when it all went pear-shaped and his boys got themselves captured, and the lady turned out to be Lady Daeva, second-in-command of international crime and terror syndicate DAEMON, Ernest's luck looked like it had run out, until deep in the Armory he found what Lady Daeva hand been looking for: some kind of fucked-up Star Wars-looking suit of armor that gave him the edge he needed to get the hell out of Dodge and on the next train anywhere. The suit let him run faster than anything on two legs and most on four, was fast enough to dodge bullets and tough enough to stop any that got through, had some kind of sonic cannon that laid out those soldiers like his mom's brother's haymaker, there was some kind of wicked electric knife in a holster on its thigh, and the dang thing could even fly! And tough as it was, when he powered it down, it went all soft like a football with no air in it, even the jetpack, and he could stuff it into his backpack, or even wear it under a hoodie and sweatpants and only look halfway crazy.
Now this may sound like the start of a villain's story, not a hero's, but all this happened in October of 2011, and that train dropped Ernest off in Oakland, CA: just in time for the crackdown on Occupy. Now, Ernest didn't know much about banks other than how to break into them, but he had met plenty of crusties on his travels, knew plenty of family and near-as-family who'd lost their homes to bad mortgages and bad luck, and he knew for sure that he didn't like cops. So when the cops shot that Marine in the head with a gas canister and started laying into those kids and old folks, he charged up his suit and laid right back into those goddamn pigs. He caught gas canisters in midair and threw them right back with a proper spiral on 'em, and if lead bullets couldn't get through the suit, rubber bullets didn't stand a chance. It was when he grabbed a fallen riot shield and started leading the return charge that he heard the call: BLACK BLOC! BLACK BLOC! BLACK BLOC! And that's when Ernest Laverne Crawford, late of Denton TX, found his calling and his new name: BLACK BLOC, DEFENDER OF THE 99%.
(Visual: XXL black pullover hoodie with sleeves torn off over sinister-looking but scuffed SWAT/military armor. Riot helmet with lower half of Guy Fawkes face stenciled on lower half of visor; USA & Texas flags painted on left armor sleeve; "DON'T TREAD ON ME" insignia stenciled on right armor sleeve; "I AM" stenciled on right glove; "THE 99%" stenciled on left glove; lots of tactical webbing and pouches on armor; "BLACK BLOC" stenciled vertically on outer side of both legs.)
The OPD wants Black Bloc in jail. The SWORD of the Pentagon wants the armor back; meanwhile, the WAND's field studies of Black Bloc have observed quantum fluctuations unrelated to the armor and they want a look at the man wearing it. DAEMON wants the armor and wouldn't mind seeing Ernest eat a bullet or ten thousand in the process of retrieving it. Occupy is as fractured over Black Bloc's presence as could be expected -- some welcome his protection, some decry the interference his presence has on the movement's work, and some just resent the authoritarian silhouette the armor casts.
Black Bloc is strongly ethical and mostly amoral, and doesn't consider himself political at all. He's something of an autodidact with the bulk of his education coming from books lifted from Borders or scored from free book exchanges. He's a good ol' boy but had the worst of his small-town bigotry beaten out of him by life on the rails and the rest of it by reading, observation, and common sense. He doesn't trust authority and finds himself disturbed that people are looking to him for protection and some sort of guidance now. This is also a cause of friction between himself and certain members of Occupy Oakland, who resent the entirely unintentional interference his presence can have on the consensual decision-making process.
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I'm bad at names and don't have a phonebook on hand because it's 2012 dude come on, so this random name generator really hit the spot. I was a little worried I'd have to get cranky when the main page said "based off of census data for America, uses common names only" but when I got results like Diego Jayson Bernard and Stewart Sung, my worries were assuaged.)
Also, I am not an idiot and know that if someone showed up in powered riot gear in defense of an Occupy, the hammer would come down even harder than it already has in the real world on people who use black bloc tactics to protect protesters from cops. This is superhero fiction and thus fairly simplistic; Black Bloc in 2012 is in the same vein as Superman in 1938, a guy who uses powers and abilities far beyond those of regular folks to protect them from gangsters and other spoilers.
Here are the things I made up on the spot that can be used for other characters:
DAEMON is the equivalent of HYDRA, COBRA, or what-have-you: a ruthless criminal/terrorist organization determined not so much to rule the world as suck the marrow from it.
THE PENTAGON -- yes, the overarching administration of the United States Military -- is divided into five factions: the SWORD (terrestrial security), the WAND (occult security), the COIN (originally financial security, now information and energy security), the STAR (sidereal security), and the GRAIL (spiritual security).
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/735598.html. |
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| teenage pagan superheroes |
[May. 21st, 2012|01:22 am] |
so! superheroes, comics, I like comics, yes. comics and books with people with swords on the covers. I was mostly raised by TSR and Marvel. not on: by. it's a minor wonder I turned out as well as I did, but like I told Sergio that one time, you do not start out this cool. oh god, do you not start out this cool. I should really finish the My Life As A Teenage Pagan Superhero saga, then find a hole to crawl into and just fucking die.
summary of my teenage pagan superhero years: at fifteen I fell in with a crowd of overimaginative bbs kids, direct ancestors of the katana-and-fedora internet libertarian crowd. like, these were kids who would go down to the run-off pond by the sewage treatment plant and claim to have "felt an aura of corruption, like a vast shadow" there, and of course you feel an aura of corruption, that's a shitpond so fetid that anyone within fifty yards of it gets a contact jenkem high and the ducks that breed there have been known to attack humans for the contents of their assholes. the last coven to perform an actual ritual there got so shitgas-stoned they claimed demonic possession and mutilated each other in a daisy chain of blood and severed nipples. but god forbid we should ever touch a drop of liquor or catch a whiff of weed.
and while I tried to stay one of the more grounded members of our idiot crew, I was far from immune to the charms of the idea of a (sub)urban fantasy world existing just parallel to our own. I had a fairly tumultuous home life and I was bored with the real world, so I let myself believe in a lot of really dumb crap, or at least didn't call out the people around me on their bullshit and bought into a fair amount of it myself.
sidebar here: I had two clades of nerd friends as a teenager: the punk nerds in MD, where I lived, and the teenage pagan superheroes in Northern VA, and this narrative is kind of transposing them and I apologize for that, because while there was crossover, it was mostly due to me trying to bring my MD friends into that VA world of crazy, and I'm glad I never really managed it. weird and unlikable as I must have gotten, the MD punk nerds kept me grounded enough to curb the excesses that the VA new age nerds could have led me to.
because the hijinx we got up to in VA weren't too terribly different from the shit we got up to in MD -- went for hikes in the suburban parklands and trash-strewn woods between neighborhoods, stayed up all night playing RPGs and watching cult flicks on VHS, declared straight-edgedness4lyfe while drinking other people's cheap beer and liquor, dated and cheated on each other -- the kind of mundane time-burning you're expected to do as a teenager that you look back on in your thirties and wish you'd done more of or could do more of now, I now feel that it's kind of tragic how we felt that dressing it up in occult trappings would make it more meaningful, that it needed meaning in the first place. we did just fine here, without meaning, north of the Deadly Meridian.
I mean, I bought into a lot of bullshit, but I also always wondered why these alleged supernatural events or manifestations never seemed to happen north of Alexandria. if I'd thought to ask the VA pagans, they probably would've told me that DC and Montgomery County were overly developed, with most or all of the necessary wild spaces knocked down and paved over. I think there might be something to this, in that when there's stuff to do and you don't need a car to get there and do it, you're less likely to get so phenomenally bored that you have to crib bits of White Wolf rpgs and sub-par horror paperbacks for your biography in order to seem more interesting. instead you'll just leave your tag in bathroom stalls, stay out til 2am at all-ages shows, see how far/high you can toss balls of used dough stolen from the dumpsters at Dunkin Donuts or leave Hydrox cookies in strange places at stores in the mall. just as tiresomely FREAK THE MUNDANES ZOMG RANDOM, maybe, but at least it's honest.
but this isn't me disavowing my misspent youth. I said above that I was raised by TSR & Marvel but let's not ignore my cousins Fugazi, Ministry, and Operation Ivy, and crazy uncles Antero Alli, Robert Anton Williams, and R.U. Sirius. while the other teenage pagan superheroes explored Wicca and neo-druidism and Native American shamanism, entirely on accident I found myself immersed in Californian technoccult visionary philosophy. I'm only literally just now, as I write this, seeing that Angel Tech and Mondo 2000 were natural next steps at age fifteen for someone who'd devoured the Illuminatus trilogy and the Principia Discordia a year earlier. these were good, solid, forward-looking philosophies for a punk rock empath/urban shaman wannabe to be grounded in while surrounded by people who believed they were psychic vampires, spiritual werewolves, and/or 1/3rd (???) Native American on their grandmother's side. I say "believed" but really it's that they wanted to believe that they were these things, and REALLY wanted other people to believe that they were these things, that they were more than just white kids in white bread suburbs so milkily homogenized that Metallica was as musically edgy as most of them got; so culturally pale and wan that I, with my Jewhawk and steel-toed Sears work boots, was one of their two ambassadors of punk rock.
and this isn't me disavowing my misspent youth, because...okay. look. declaring yourself a shaman at fifteen is the kind of thing you do when you desperately want the other kids to think you're more than you are, but it's also a great way to call attention to yourself from other entities, less gullible and less kind. it's the kind of thing that makes those old old spirits dreaming in the earth open one eye and sleepily chuckle Oh Really? Is That So? Are You Sure That's What You Want? Very Well, Wolfboy Jewboy, But Don't Say I Didn't Warn You, and then roll over in their beds and fall back asleep with cruel, dreamy smiles. and as uncomfortable as I am with the actual word, if a shaman is a person who bridges worlds, who goes into the dark places and brings out new things, who embodies contradictions, who is both one thing and another, for whom the walls between conscious and subconscious are thinner, if not in fact windows or doors, then that's the path I've found myself on, at times less talented at it or more resistant to it than at other times, and while I don't think those old old spirits are anything other than elements of our own subconscious, just because they come from our heads and our hearts is no reason to dismiss them as irrelevant or unreal. if anything, they're ur-relevant.
(my other regret is that I wish I'd been better at school or had better teachers, because it took me far too long to learn that the real world is not boring. awful, cruel, difficult? yes, but not boring. it was years after graduation that I developed an appreciation for history and science deeper than an abstract belief that their continued study is a net good.)
funny how I managed to not talk about comics.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/735432.html. |
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| I am a ridiculous person. |
[May. 19th, 2012|12:34 am] |
slowest weekday at work since the holidays. I should totally write.
after texting her with my filthy, fucked-up thoughts about a woman in the office cafeteria (leopard-print shoes), Aly told me I should write some really filthy, fucked-up porn, and I've actually had a filthy, fucked-up, cyberpunk body-horror porn pitch ready to go for a while, but my dad reads this over on LJ, and he's a gentle soul, so when I do it I guess it'll go behind a cut. and I will do it, but I don't think that'll get posted until I've done something he and my mom can actually read without wishing they could perform a 107th trimester abortion. although if I didn't get quietly poisoned after that crying-while-puking-while-turned-on conversation with Sean and Pam on Facebook a couple years ago ("HI MOM HI DAD THE ARISTOCRATS"), I'm probably safe from the long parental knives.
anyway. hi Mom. hi Dad. this isn't the fucked-up horror porn.
I work for a company that has a full-scale Sysco-stocked Aramark-run cafeteria, like a good-sized college, that serves breakfast, lunch, and early dinner, and since I never went to college to speak of, this was a novel and joyous experience for the first six months of my job. the food isn't always great, but it's cheap and it's plentiful and if the selections of the day are ill-advised, there's a grill counter for cheesesteaks and a salad bar for salmon and spinach and fuck you sometimes I like to eat a little light, okay? I've got a tempermental stomach. don't judge.
and to make it even better, every Thursday, a local BBQ restaurant and a local Greek joint alternate taking over the lunch counter. the BBQ joint brings pulled pork, chicken, and brisket, and the Greek joint does gyros, souvlaki and spanakopita. they're both really good.
this Thursday, a Greek week, was a particularly shitty day, I just wanted to be writing or cleaning and organizing or driving needles into the palm of my hand with a tack hammer or basically doing anything I actually gave a damn about. by the time I got down to the cafeteria, the Greeks had temporarily run out of gyro meat, so a bunch of people were clustered around the counter in the fashion of starved dogs, staring mournfully at the empty space where the gyro trough usually sat like we'd never be fed again. (chicken souvlaki? Greek salad? fuck your eyes.)
my gaze was drawn from my comically-oversized fantasy novel and locked onto this overwhelmingly adorable woman in hip-hugging jeans wiggling from side to side in unselfconscious boredom and hunger -- not unlike a child vaguely needing to pee, but more sexy and less impending terror of performing clean-up duties -- and I found myself doing that thing where you are looking at their butt but you're not looking at their butt, don't be absurd, you're standing there reading a comically-oversized fantasy novel, you've obviously given up on ever fucking again, but you're totally looking at their butt with occasional surreptitious glances at their copper penny hair framing their pixie-like features, and their half-exposed toes in leopard-print heels, and for those endless four minutes I forgot all about the gyro in my desire to stick my face in her ass for half an hour.
and then she got a gyro with everything on it and attacked it like it killed her parents and I had to sit with a convenient Linux sysadmin blocking my line of sight so I wouldn't get caught lustfully watching her lustily eat.
god I can't wait to see her on BBQ day.
(this one was for Aly, who received the text message play-by-play of this instance of degeneracy, and Jamie, for the butt-lookin'.)
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734992.html. |
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| oops |
[May. 17th, 2012|11:27 pm] |
today work was pretty much nonstop horseshit saved only by pictures of fishnet-clad butts showing up on my phone and then I went to dinner with my coworkers where I ate all the food and drank all the sangria and now I'm going to bed feeling like an unacceptable jackass like I always do after being social. so I have nothing for you today.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734754.html. |
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| not write clever today |
[May. 17th, 2012|12:17 am] |
ran really hard into a wall today. not literally, just on the doing-any-goddamn-thing front. did I write? did I clean? did I gym? did I hell.
earlier today, I thought about writing about the things I actually love and why, which quickly degenerated in my head into a grade school essay written on wide-rule paper ("I love Dungeons & Dragons and comic books and puppies and kitties and hedgehogs and food and pretty girls in various states of dress and undress") so while I may tackle a purely positive post at some point, apparently my subconscious isn't ready to not mock me for liking things. that seems like the kind of thing I can chip away at in short bursts of activity while I'm at my job, which is where I'll be from Thursday to Saturday. historically, going to work has a tendency of derailing my projects. I don't know how people manage to serve two masters til their work pays for itself.
I thought about using some writing prompts. so I looked at the Livejournal "question of the day" post prompts which bored me to sickness, and abandoned that for now.
I dug out my copies of Lynda Barry's "What It Is" and "Picture This" and pretended I was going to skip this exercise in favor of reading them; instead I'll read them after the exercise, because reading about creativity instead of actually creating something is avoidance at its finest. I really like those books, though, and you'll probably see me work from them at some point. Lynda Barry is, after all, Queen of the Universe.
like many gamers, I swear by the power of randomness as a prompt for creativity. or I'd like to. my gaming crap has been gathering dust. I love dice and tables and the results I get from them, and letting my imagination fill in the unspoken bits. I could get countless posts out of working with various RPGs and tables, I'm sure. this ongoing project could definitely benefit from some form of gameification if I'm going to get past the "oh god it's ten pm and I haven't written anything and I have work tomorrow" stage.
here's what I'm going to do next week: I have this copy of Games Workshop's quirky early '80s superhero RPG, Golden Heroes. basically a Gamma World variant that was cooked up when GW thought they might be able to score the Marvel license, then quickly made generic (in a weird British superhero comic sort of way) when that deal fell through, you'd roll your character's superpowers on a table, come up with your character concept, and then have to justify the powers you'd rolled to fit them into that concept. if you couldn't justify a given power for the character's concept, you couldn't keep it. the character creation example shows several entirely different characters created from one set of power rolls, most of which don't use all the powers rolled. starting Sunday, I'll use Golden Heroes to create seven superheroes, one per day, from the same set of randomly-rolled powers. I'll even make the rolls using the nearly thirty-year-old dice that came in the box.
so that ought to be some nerdy brain-stretching fun, and if it's productive and entertaining enough, I can see doing some similar rpg-based projects subsequently. I don't want to turn this into an all-gaming all-the-time blog, but it would be foolish not to use the tools and toys I already have. I don't know if this will be all I do next week, but at the very least, it'll make a good warmup.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734595.html. |
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| of course, once you start, it can be difficult to stop. |
[May. 16th, 2012|01:57 am] |
day three, and that needle looks really, really good. I bet I could take one day sort-of off, not even off, really, just take a nap and then start writing when I get up. good thing my bed is covered in stuff from cleaning.
I guess this is me, clearing out a lot of the mental backlog I've had for a while. all those times over the years I said I was going to blog more frequently, this is the stuff I was going to write, refined through the psychic distillery into its brightest, cruelest form.
but that is the point of the exercise, really: to make breaking the addiction into the new addiction. truly, there is no zealot like a convert.
I can't say, well, I'm going to start blogging again, but I want to get started on a Monday, all good things should start on Mondays, I'll have more readers on Monday, everyone firing up their browser and sucking down that first coffee of the week, no, no, fuck no, fuck you, fuck that, no, you have to start now. you have to do it now. I'm learning that I can't ramp things up slowly, I have to start when I get the urge to start, or it just won't happen. case in point, yesterday I said I'm going to write today and I'm going to go to the gym today, that was at nine in the morning, and the next thing I know it's seven in the evening and I'm taking a nap, even though I'm all like "are you serious? taking a nap at seven in the evening? that's not a nap, that's going to bed early, and you haven't written, unless you count that extensive forum post where you invited people to pay to hit and/or make out with you, and you haven't gone to the gym, and by the time you wake up, it won't be too late to go to the gym but you know you still won't."
Mark plans; God laughs.
so I don't love my job; what do I love? I love this. the words spilling from the brain faucet. this is the only thing I've ever truly loved doing and I hate that I love my fear more. from my mind to my hands to your eyes. I'm a creature of text, as I said. this is how I show that I love you.
many times I've found myself in a hole and said, the only way I'm going to get out of this hole is to write my way out of it, and then I've found that the hole isn't so bad, I don't need to escape this, I can make something out of this hole and then the hole won't be a hole anymore, it'll be home. but it doesn't matter what you hang on the walls or how big the TV is, the hole is a hole. get comfortable enough, and they won't even have to dig you a grave. they'll bury you in it if you let them.
people say to me, and I do not fault them for this, "you're as good as X. you should write a novel. you should do stand-up. you should do spoken word." and I totally appreciate that. I don't praise myself a lot (understatement of my year, perhaps), so I'm a sucker for any external praise. but people say that without realizing the work that went into being a Neil Gaiman, a Henry Rollins, a Louis CK, a Cat Valente. Gaiman was a freelance journalist long before Good Omens and Sandman; the only reason anyone wanted to hear Rollins speak before he was Rollins was because he was that dude from Black Flag; CK hustled for a couple decades and had multiple false starts before he truly broke; and from what I've managed to infer, Catherynne Valente wrote herself out of a truly miserable hole. people don't know, or they don't remember, that every path to success is individual; that whatever path is taken must, in fact, be traversed, not bypassed; and that not everyone succeeds.
praise is also poisonous. many professional writers will warn you not to show off works in progress, because the praise you get for your work in progress is, to your sad, love-starved writer's brain, just as good as the praise you'd get for a finished work, and so there's no real sense in continuing the work. I've had more false starts this way...no, I know, it's okay, it happens to lots of writers, but it still makes me feel inadequate.
at a convention where he and Neil Gaiman were guests of honor, Gene Wolfe once said to me -- okay, to be fair, he said this to an audience which I was a part of, but it spoke to me -- (paraphrased) "you can't compare yourself at the beginning of your career to a Neil Gaiman at the height of his powers, because you won't win that fight. you'll just put down the pen and never go back to it. just compare yourself to yourself." which is great advice, though hell if I take it. I compare myself to bad writers all the time. fucking hell, man, if these hacks can make a career out of it, even my garbage is better than their gold, I should be able to crank it out on the regular, make my seed on a couple of shit screenplays and never go back to a regular job again if I don't want to. but it's not enough to be good, you have to actually do the work. this is why the dull, plodding kids got the As just as often as your hardworking genius friends and you squeaked by with Cs by the skin of your teeth and the grace of your guidance counselor.
the truth is, once I get started, writing is the easiest thing in the world for me. I have thoughts, I make them into words, I put those words on paper or on the screen, you read them, at least one of us is pleased. what's hard for me is starting. because what if you're not pleased? what if I'm not? what if I expose too much of myself, and you don't like me anymore? the biggest struggle, recently, has been realizing that I am just too fucking emotionally remote. doritos and comic sans and the like. it may be saleable and sympathetic but by god it's dull. there's words I want to get out, that I've wanted to get out for a while, but I guess the mental sphincter isn't quite loosened up enough yet. I'll get there. I promise.
true confessions time: I wrote most of this earlier on Tuesday, shortly after finishing the last entry, and I think I'm going to bed now. it's not cheating, I swear.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/734436.html. |
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| I do not love my voice. |
[May. 15th, 2012|02:20 am] |
day two of trying to break my addiction to not-writing cold turkey. I guess this is like that second day where you don't drink or smoke, but you look at that bottle or that pack of cigarettes really fucking hard.
I've got a minor case of the over-its at work. not that I'm not enjoying the work, learning things, or enjoying the learning process, I just don't re-enact that one musical number from Annie in my head every morning ("I think I'm gonna like it here!") anymore. and I do feel some crankiness and disillusionment over being part of the great and awful machine that perpetuates two of the worst parts of the internet: the content sweatshop, and the comments section.
obviously I wasn't really made to work for a living. I burn out too fast and I care too much about things that have nothing to do with what I'm being paid to do.
I should explain this not-writing-as-addiction thing. I saw this post on the blog of an artist I respect, talking about her neighbor, a veteran of AA, framing her artist's block as an addiction to not making art. and he said, when I started AA, they made me do ninety meetings in ninety days, and she decided that's what she had to do. and I decided that's what I have to do. this slowly-ramping-up-into-things doesn't work for me. I have to write every day, for ninety days, and post it, so you all can keep me honest. if I scribble an idea on an index card or a sticky note, I'll take a photo of it and post it. I'll post excerpts from my notes file(s), from my game designs, from stories and novel outlines and even fucking forum posts, that's writing, right? I'll do anything short of typing FUCK one thousand times and posting it. new material, every day, for ninety days, and beyond, world without end, god fucking dammit. I want a coin at the end of this.
you see, I am afraid of my own voice. I hate my own voice. I'm not in love with my own voice. not enough to scream LOOK AT ME! LOVE ME! at the top of my lungs, like a performer has to, every day, louder than everyone else, to make a living.
I looked over last year's comedy routine and hated it. it made me sick. I mean, yes, fine, you all liked it and thought it was hilarious, but I look back and it's so fucking disconnected and impersonal. doritos and comic sans, for fuck's sake. I can't go on stage with that, not with Bill Hicks on one shoulder and Patrice O'Neal on the other yelling PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART in both ears. five, ten years from now, people are going to be talking about Patrice O'Neal like they talk about Hicks, and it will be long overdue. Patrice was one problematic motherfucker but goddamn if he didn't play from the heart and I have to respect a man who made Lisa Lampanelli miserable. "I wasted more tears on him than some boyfriends," she said. good, you suck, quit, disappear. I've heard funnier women than you in line for coffee in suburban fucking Maryland. I've heard funnier women than you at the DMV. I've heard funnier women than you at the free clinic. put those glorious bitches on TV.
but I can't in good conscience talk about snacks and typefaces when this world is as sick as it is. I want to say: do you ever feel like everything is a lie and we're living in that era where history repeats itself as farce before it repeats itself as tragedy and you know there has to be a better way to live but you can't quite see the shape of it? me too.
I would say: I work in IT, which is probably self-evident. I've been in IT on and off for over ten years, almost five straight now after bouncing between IT, customer service, and retail. I spent nearly four years on the overnight shift maintaining the shittiest, sleaziest, reddest of red-light web sites, the people who don't even make their own porn, they just scrape images from other people's sites and make money off redirections and ad impressions, the people whose sites show up when you misspell "pussy-gushing vinyl fuck nuns" with two "n"s or one "s" and end up with a recurring $50/month payment funding Chechen insurgents for the rest of your life across three different credit cards.
and I would say: about a year ago I rejoined the daywalkers and got a job with a company you've definitely heard of, where I support the infrastructure that perpetuates the two worst parts of the public web: the content mill, and the comments section. but the food in the cafeteria is cheap and filling and sometimes there's free beer and it's not like I was doing anything else with my life.
and I would say: I used to go in to work at seven at night and go home at seven in the morning and I'd get stuck behind the same pickup every morning with bumper stickers that said "NOBAMA" and "DON'T RE-NIG IN 2012" and "I'LL TAKE MY GUNS AND MY FREEDOM AND YOU CAN KEEP THE CHANGE" and you know what, I'll take the hospitals, schools, and the fire department, and that guy can keep his part-time job at the Citgo and give me a full tank on #12.
and I would say: not that I'm in love with the president. he seems like a better human being than the last one, not to damn with faint praise, but he's still a product of the same system that puts them all in place and gives us the choice between the terrible and the horrible every four years. Coke or Pepsi, Domino's or Pizza Hut, Republican or Democrat? it barely matters. the same policies will be perpetuated. the same people will be assassinated. and they'll all go to dinner at the same expensive restaurants together and have a good laugh about it.
I would say: we had eight years of a hand-puppet of a man whose most distinctive trait was a smug disinterest in the world beyond his nose, put into power by naked judicial fiat, who at the bidding of his masters used a rubberstamp legislature to expand executive power and by now we're so traumatized we don't know what legal government looks like anymore. and now we have one faction of government who have made it their single and solitary goal, at any cost, to delegitimize the other faction, to block it at every turn, to pull that football away from the poor, hapless, bald-headed political party. and then they'll all go to dinner again and have another good laugh about it.
I would say: they have made the business of running a nation into a spectator sport. they've made it into a football game and who wins it, not what happens afterwards. FUCK YEAH MY GUYS WON. congratulations, they raised your taxes without raising taxes on the guys who make a hundred times what you do, and they denied you health care and consumer protections, and the books in your kids' schools are twenty years out of date when they're not "teaching the controversy." FUCK YOU, FAGGOT, WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF SOCIALIST. well as a matter of fact...
but I do not love my voice. not yet.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/733962.html. |
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| I think you think I don't like you... |
[May. 13th, 2012|03:16 pm] |
...and that might be true. there are people I don't like, and I don't make significant effort to hide it from them, though I don't see the point in antagonizing them by bringing it up all the time. if you really don't like someone, and you're not forced to deal with them due to external circumstances, I've found that the best way to deal with them is to just ignore them. and there are a lot of people I don't like. it's safe to say I don't like most people, or more accurately, I'm indifferent to them at best, and more often mistrustful of them.
but more likely is that I do like you. I like you just fine. I like you a lot, even. I enjoy your company and value your perspective and our time spent together. I'm not purposefully avoiding you. well, I'm not purposefully avoiding you because I don't like you.
some people, having had problematic relationships with their blood families, find solace in fandom or The Scene, creating families-of-choice that play the support system role in their lives. I'm glad that's worked for the people who it worked for, but for me, fandom and The Scene are the problematic relatives. I never felt well-served by those communities and I never felt strong loyalty to or from them. people in them, definitely, but not the communities as a whole. I've never bought into anything wholeheartedly enough to receive that sense of belonging. I probably come off as very standoffish because of it.
the fact is that I'm kind of introverted and anxious. a lot. I don't leave the house much, and I don't invite people over because I haven't developed the knack of having people in my living space. I got into a bad habit of hiding from people and the world when I moved back in with my parents in my early 20s, and whereas it might be fairly common now for people to move back in with their families at that age for whatever reason, in the early 2000s it was a mark of failure. it may still be a mark of failure, but that mark seems more common now. always ahead of the curve, that's me. that's part of why I'm so interested in van living, because I figure that I, like most Americans, will be unemployed and unemployable within a decade or so and I'm just trying to get a head start on survival techniques.
so I lost a good portion of what you might consider my social years to unemployment and shame, and by the time I moved out again, I'd gotten used to not Going Out and not really having A Group of Friends, and doing the things I enjoy on my own and on my own time.
which isn't to say that I miss the Good Old Days of Going Out and getting hammered and dancing til dawn, because I don't feel like those days were necessarily so great in retrospect as they may have felt at the time. and I don't necessarily want to go back to clubbing and parties and conventions. I've seen what happens to people who spend their later years trying to re-enact or prolong their youth. it's not pretty, and while I don't judge those people harshly, I'm not comfortable with it and don't feel the need to do it myself.
I am SO incredibly boring these days. I don't really leave my apartment if it isn't for work, books, or food. I work in IT, and my job title has the word "analyst" in it. on weekends I trawl used book stores for eye-catching paperbacks, graphic novels, and vintage roleplaying game manuals. speaking of which, tabletop gaming is one of my favorite hobbies, which has been described as half an hour of fun packed into four hours, with requisite paperwork offering all the joy of double-book accounting, but that's okay, because my anxiety often flares up so badly that I can't really participate in it, so instead I just hoard the books.
much of my anxiety is abject terror of bothering people and intruding on their time and their space. in my mind, my time is flexible; yours is sacrosanct. in my mind, my door is open at all times; yours should be knocked upon politely, and quietly, so quietly as to not be heard, and then you don't have to feel bad for not answering, because I didn't knock loud enough, and I don't have to feel bad for not being answered, because you were obviously too busy to hear, and that's fine, I can dig it, you're probably working on your novel or painting or music or coding project, or taking a crap, or banging, you lucky so-and-so! my point is that you, that is, the you-in-my-head, have a life that has progressed perfectly well without me. that's awesome.
you could always call me, but as soon as phones became more capable of transmitting text and images than speech, I stopped answering most calls. I'm on a phone plan that provides unlimited texts and internet and five hundred call minutes a month, and I've got over five thousand rollover minutes. I'm a creature of text, both consuming and producing it. asynchronous communication is more my speed.
my point, and I do have one, is that I don't hate you. I love you and I miss you and you're often in my thoughts. I hope this finds you well.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/733899.html. |
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| happy goddamn April |
[Apr. 11th, 2012|02:43 am] |
here is March:
I had the honor of being part of John & Steph's wedding party. the ceremony was lovely (and quick!), the food was delicious (and plentiful!), many friends were seen and partied amongst, and a good time was had by all.
spent a week in Islamorada with Claire, Jose, Caitlin, Jon, Midori, and Derek. the three couples took the bedrooms, leaving me to sleep on the couch in Claire's living room. this may sound shitty, but as the living room opens onto the screened-in balcony, I got to sleep in open air pretty much every night, so I'm pretty sure I got the best room in the house. if we do this again next year, I'm planning on dragging the futon mattress out to the balcony and sleeping out there, surrounded by citron candles and slathered in bug repellent (see below).
for the most part, all I did was take outdoor naps, eat rich and novel food, and read. I finished Shadow & Claw, the first half (two-fifths?) of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun cycle, which for all its problematic aspects, is still one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read.
also I petted a manatee.
spent Friday night in Hollywood, FL, which can best be described as Niagara Falls but warm. checking into or out of a hotel makes me feel like I'm wearing grown-up drag and scamming someone. I can't possibly be thirty-four -- I'm fifteen and pulling the most convincing con job ever. but as somewhat sleazy hotels go, the Ramada Downtown Hollywood was one of the nicest I'd ever been in. I didn't have much time to check it out, but the room was clean, the shower functional, everything in the room worked, there was an outdoor bar and pool area and colorful art on the outside walls and a more-than-passable Japanese/Thai joint next door. I could not possibly complain and wouldn't mind spending more than a single night there.
did a little evening exploration, and from my very limited experience I decided that the entire Miami-Ft Lauderdale metroplex is a Saints Row game waiting to happen, and downtown Hollywood is the post-intro area. as I walked around I thought about how Alex or Christian (for example) would find a bar, start drinking, and have new best friends by the end of the night, but by now you know that's not me: if a town has no bookstores, comic shops, or game stores, it doesn't hold much interest for me after I've secured sleeping arrangements and decided where to eat. so I went back to the hotel and read N.K. Jemesin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which was a really good first novel. I'm interested in seeing how the rest of the trilogy turns out, and how she develops as a writer.
spent most of Saturday at the Ft Lauderdale airport. it turns out that you can't check your bag and move on to the gates until a minimum of three hours before your flight, and so I sat in the lobby of the airport for four hours and read Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer. Published by White Wolf's Borealis imprint back in the mid-90s, I've seen copies of this book for years and after Jean recommended Spencer's work to me, I picked up a copy on a recent McKay's run. My expectations weren't astronomically high, but it felt like Stephen King trying to do Clive Barker and while it kept me occupied over seven hours at the airport, I don't feel compelled to hunt down more of Spencer's work. sorry, Jean!
I suffered almost no reflux the entire week I was in Florida, and I've been doing a little better on that front since getting back. I did, however, get eaten alive by some sort of mutant spider-skeeter that left my arms and legs covered with hives that still haven't entirely gone away. either that, or I've developed an allergy to living on this godforsaken planet. true story: self-care is comically low on my list of priorities. I blithely ignore things that I castigate my friends for not going to a doctor or ER for. it turns out that the answer to the classic children's riddle "why did the Argent cross the road?" is "when the pain of his hives made him whimper like a beaten dog in the middle of the night as he scratched them uncontrollably!" Marianne had suggested a Zyrtec & Zantac cocktail, which worked miraculously once I actually forced myself out of bed and down (and across!) the street to the CVS to buy the necessary pills, during which I counted my blessings: living within walking distance of a 24-hour drugstore; not having to choose between OTC allergy & digestion medication and eating decently until my paycheck arrived; the ability to walk the streets of my neighborhood at 4:30am unmolested by cop, criminal, or wannabe; that I could share my thoughts about a thoroughly banal experience with several hundred of my closest internet friends while having it.
and so, leaving out the boring, repetitive, and/or work-related parts, that was March.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/733333.html. |
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| like my job, need a vacation |
[Feb. 29th, 2012|11:01 pm] |
so I like my job, but it's hard to deny that the shifts are a bit crazy. we have the choice of either four ten-hour shifts Sunday through Wednesday, or three thirteen hour shifts (with a free "bonus hour" to make it up to forty) Thursday through Saturday. I'm working the latter. this is the direct opposite of my last job, where I worked one six hour shift (1-7am) on Wednesday, then three twelve hour shifts 7pm to 7am on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday overnights.
let's just make it clear right now that I don't miss the overnights. they played havoc on my health and my social life, and even though I still don't go out very often, "not very often" is more far frequent than "twice a year at best and dinner at my parents' every Sunday." in the past few months, I've been out at night about half a dozen times, a couple of times even on a work night! it's pretty much been glorious each time! there are people out there! my god, there are ladies out there! WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME~~
from late November to mid-January or so I worked ten to twenty hours overtime just about every week. for my skill level, I think I did really well over that span of time, some of which was worked entirely solo, and I'm proud of myself. all that overtime led to seriously fat paychecks and utter burnout. and the burnout is showing, I know that it is. when I burn out, it shows up as illness. first I had to take a mental health day early in the month, but the next week I finally succumbed to what I'm guessing was norovirus. there was intense stomach sickness and a weird lower abdominal pain bad enough that I called in sick to work and drove myself to the ER at four in the morning. they took my blood and gave me an IV and a CT scan wherein nothing was found. the pain lasted another two weeks and change, and actually got worse for a little while, which initially made me think it could be another kidney stone in the making, but now that it's faded I feel safe chalking it up to the agony of vomiting. up til the age of about twenty-one, kids can and do vomit ten times their abdominal volume and then run off to ride their bikes while playing Nintendo. then some time in your thirties you catch a bad stomach bug and the pain of having vomited once lays you up for over a week. to be fair, it was pretty explosive, and I'm way out of shape.
but I've digressed a bit. my point is that I am burnt out and I need to get out more and I definitely need a goddamn vacation. fortunately, I'm doing those things! tomorrow I'm planning on going to the Red Palace on H St after work to watch Pam's last burlesque performance in the DC area, this time for sure as she and Christian are moving to Chicago on March 16th. it sucks (for me, though not for them) that two of my favorite people are leaving DC, but it's awesome that I now have two more incentives to visit Chicago for the first time. Saturday, I'm going up to New Jersey for John's wedding. I've never worn a tuxedo, and I've never been a groomsman -- Saturday, I'll be doing both of those things! I'm excited! and then I'm going to Key West from March 11th to 17th with Claire, Caitlin, and Jon, same people as last year, but joined this time by Claire's boyfriend Jose, along with Midori and her man Derek. I expect another glorious week of lazy, sun-drenched excess is in the offing.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/732967.html. |
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