#is he like the animal jam players who would have a wife and kids

[420-what-you-smokin]

Leaked pic of issue #68

#do you think mimic role plays as duo online #is he like the animal jam players who would have a wife and kids #he needs to be studied #mimic the octopus #duo the cat #whisper the wolf #sonic the hedgehog #artists on tumblr #idw sonic #sonic idw #sonic #furry #furry art

[queen-of-my-goofball-army]

Why YOU should give Rush a chance

Okay, so right off the bat, this is not going to be like my other posts on my blog. This is not a post about some show that has captivated my interest or anything at all related to animation. If that's not your cup of Dot rambling coffee, than I would highly recommend you take your L right now and come back for your regularly scheduled programming in a few days.

Are they gone? Okay cool! For those of you that stuck around past my forewarning let me tell you about my newest special interest to join my now growing music love affair with 80's and 90's Rock n Roll. For those of you that don't know, I'm guessing that most of you do not know what Rush even is. If you are not somehow on the autism spectrum or know a lot about music in general than this band will be entirely unknown to you. Rush is a three man progressive rock band born in Canada made up of three incredibly amazing men Gary "Geddy" Lee, his best friend since he was 11 years old Alex Lifeson, and last but most certainly not least, the amazingness that was Rush's drummer and songwriter Neil Peart. Together, the three of them changed the world of progressive rock through Geddy's unique vocal qualities, Alex's incredibly underrated shredding guitar skills, and Neil's immaculate drums and lyrics. I am here to tell you, yes YOU reading this length rambling message in three sections to keep this fair. Each member will get their own sections and I will try my hardest to keep personal bias out of this. I also just watched Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage yesterday with my mom so I will mention some things that we talked about during it to try and sell people.

Geddy Lee:

* Geddy has one of the most unique voices in all of rock music. This will most likely be the thing that turns off the people that do listen to me and wind up listening to a couple of songs. He has had a lot of critics for his higher pitched voice usually yelling lyrics. However, I love his singing voice. It is filled with energy and power to it. His voice has a weight to it that not a whole lot of other people can really nail if they really want to.

* You want to talk about sheer talent? How many of you all know lead singers that are a one and done kind of singer? They can play one instrument and they're done? Well shove them aside because Geddy can play not only bass guitar but a double neck bass, synthesizer, and piano. Yeah I think all you haters can stand aside because this man will always be amazing technically.

* So many of lead singers in my opinion, think that they own the band. Because they get to sing the songs right? That means that they get to make all the important decisions and they can't ever do anything wrong. Well for those of you that know Rush, you will remember the synthesizer era. The era of new wave Rush where Geddy shelved his bass guitars for his synthesizer. This caused a small rift between Lee, Lifeson, and Peart who were not at all fans of the way that the synthesizer was going. While Geddy was having a fun time with it, he shelved the synthesizer almost for good and went back to his roots. I don't know many other lead singers that would put up something that they were legitimately having a good time with just for his bandmates.

* Geddy's just general goofball personality is something that continues to make me chuckle. Since he and Alex have known each other for practically ever (they met when they were 11) and have been there for each other for most of their lives they have very similar energy's.

Alex Lifeson:

* Alex Lifeson is an underrated guitarist. There I said it. I feel like of the three of them (Geddy, Alex, and Neil) Alex gets talked about the least due to the fact that Geddy also plays guitar. While it might be a different brand of guitar some people forget just how genuinely face melting his solos are. I could listen to his riff in Tom Sawyer all day long I swear. I'm still working my way through every Rush album in chronological order (I'm just now finishing A Farewell To Kings an absolutely beautiful album.) But his skills are not one to be downsized and I think he is an amazing, amazing guitar player.

* You want to talk about the group goofball? If Geddy is goofy, you look in the dictionary this man is the pure definition of a hilarious and quirky character. When Rush was FINALLY indicted into the Rock N'Roll hall of fame in 2013, after Neil and Geddy's beautiful and moving speech's about how important this means to them, Alex gets up there and his entire speech is spoken in very animated BLAHs. But what's really funny is that if you watch carefully he is actually trying to tell you a story. It's a story about how they all got there past the critics that tried to stop them along the way.

* I love the relationship between Alex and Geddy especially. They're just both such unique kinds of people but they have similar quirks and traits that are evidence of decades upon decades of friendship. I get massive big bro vibes from watching the three of them play together and it's really touching that they never let the fame go to their heads.

* While watching the documentary, I found myself in awe of just his general personality. He was a jokester and the life of the party, and even if sometimes Neil was exhausted by his presence it was obvious that he loved his bros.

Neil Peart:

* If you are asking me, the heart and soul of Rush, was their drummer Neil Peart. Neil wasn't just their drummer though, he also wrote all of Rush's songs after their first album together. Neil grew up probably the biggest bookworm to ever bookworm. He was a socially awkward kid it seemed since he was always reading as his parents explained in the documentary (more on this laster). This resulted in lyrics that are absolutely gorgeous in any context and sound like literature themselves. One of my favorite Rush songs is their song Rivendale themed to Lord Of The Rings.

* Peart was one of the most technically amazing drummers of all time. I don't think I'm saying new information when I say that. He has been praised for not only his technical prowess but the intensity of how he played as well. He was a force of nature when you put him in front of a drum kit. The drum solos in Rush are not easy. They are technically extremely difficult and always leave me to collect my jaw from the floor.

* Lyrically speaking, his lyrics were so intelligent and beautifully worded that it's hard to focus on them sometimes. I've listened to Fly By Night I can't tell you how many times just within the last few months. They are so unique, so beautiful, just so Rush. I can't think of any other word to describe them other than Rush. Nobody else could have written lyrics like these other than Neil himself. Even though he's gone now (Rest In Power you absolute Mad Lad.) I still feel like his music will resonate with millions of future generations to come. It could be the year 3000 for all I care and people will still be jamming to Tom Swayer, just you watch.

* Lastly about Neil himself, this is of the opinion of my mom and I, and you heard it here first, I think that Neil was aspie. He was the quietest of the three of them, he hated getting spotted by fans while the other two seem to tolerate it, he was constantly stimming with his drumsticks on and off the stage by spinning them around his fingers, he was totally nerdy and antisocial, he loved literature more than anything else growing up and would rather have a book in his hands than go out to a public place with his classmates, and he grieved in a different way than most people do. When his wife and daughter passed away, he hit the road with his motorcycle and most often Geddy and Alex wouldn't hear from him for months at a time. They had cute little nicknames for each other that Neil would always sign the postcards with. It was a different one every single time.

Thanks for listening to me ramble on this day guys! I really appreciate it, I know that this hasn't been your regularly schedule Dot programming but I really appreciate you sticking around! Give Rush a listen to if I've piqued your interest you will not regret it.

#Rush band #geddy lee #neil peart #alex lifeson #music #rambling

[stompsite]

So I Played FFXV

In most of my articles, I start out by presenting a problem. Maybe a lot of gamers hate zombies, and I want to write about a zombie game I love, so I present the problem of the zombie game, explaining in detail why I’m sympathetic to the concerns of people who hate zombie games, before explaining how the zombie game I love gets around that problem.

I do this because we’re rarely wrong about our feelings, but we’re often wrong about why. If I wrote “here’s a good zombie game,” no one would want to read that if they don’t like zombie games. By writing “this is why zombie games bore you and here’s how zombie games can excite you,” I appeal to a broader audience.

This brings me to Final Fantasy XV, a game one of my backers asked me to cover.

Good games writing often happens when an expert explains the ins and outs of a genre they know well to an audience they assume are quite intelligent but aren’t as familiar with the subject as they are. When I wrote about walking sims last year, I sat down and I went “okay, a lot of you are bored with walking sims. Why is that?” My editor’s boss didn’t seem to like it that much, insisting that the walking sim didn’t need any defending (even though The Chinese Room, developers of walking sims, had just shut down, and Tacoma, a walking sim with magazine covers, had sold a mere 10,000 copies). But I think people have strong feelings about things and they want to understand those feelings, so having an expert help them out without talking down to them is wonderful.

A little bit of history.

I may be an expert on video games, but I am most assuredly not an expert on JRPGs.

Unlike most people, I didn’t grow up with video game consoles. I saw a meme posted the other day saying “you can’t argue with me about games unless your first console was a Genesis or NES.” Mine was an Xbox 360, but I’ve been playing computer games for a great deal longer. Since Japan didn’t make many computer games (oh, sure, Final Fantasy VII was developed for Windows 95, but I don’t recall seeing it amidst the Diablo 2, Planescape Torment, and Half-Life boxes at CompUSA back in the day), JRPGs were never really a part of my gaming diet.

It’s not to say that JRPGs weren’t appealing. When my wisdom teeth were pulled, my mom brought our little 13” portable TV into my room and let me watch movies. I stumbled upon UHF channel 53, which broadcast a pirated version of TechTV, which was, at the time, airing Anime Unleashed, a block of awesome anime shows like Last Exile and Crest of the Stars. Most anime I’d seen up to that point was the stuff we got on kid’s shows, like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. Digimon aside, most of it was garbage. Watching Boogiepop Phantom or Serial Experiments Lain during late nights on this stupid little black and white TV was something else entirely.

Since then, I’ve loved good anime aesthetics, so you’d think that JRPGs would be my jam. I thought so too, which is why I started talking to friends about them, but every time I did, my friends would talk about what confusing bullshit they were--especially, at the time, Final Fantasy X. “...but Final Fantasy VIII is better!” they’d tell me, and of course I’d ask them about that, and they’d tell me even more confusing bullshit. Plus, the whole turn-based gameplay thing was a huge turnoff. I got into other games, like Age of Empires and Unreal Tournament. They were more interesting. Games like Max Payne had way better stories than Final Fantasy VIII, that’s for sure.

Once, someone got me into Earthbound on an emulator, and I fell in love with it, until someone kidnapped zippy--I think she has a ‘real’ canon name but I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know--and I couldn’t beat any of the fights because I didn’t understand the concept of grinding. Over the years, I tried other JRPGs, because the premise and the art sounded cool, but I bounced off the gameplay or the presentation time and time again. The closest I got to loving a JRPG was Dragon’s Dogma, and that was more of an open world sandbox game than any kind of RPG.

This brings me to another point.

JRPGs aren’t RPGs.

People usually protest when I make this point. Either I’m wrong or it doesn’t matter, they say, but I think it does matter because I’m a game designer, and understanding the specifics of genre is a really useful skill for a game designer to have. When I look at the JRPG, I see a lot of very specific elements that make them stand apart. If I say “I want to make an RPG,” chances are, I will not make something like a JRPG. If I say “I want to make a JRPG,” I will. The mechanics are distinct and interesting and worth examining on their own; no JRPG in existence could ever stand up to even a half-decent RPG if we judged it by RPG terms. The roleplaying just isn’t there.

Judging JRPGs by their own standards lets us see these wonderful games for what they really are. JRPGs are not RPGs from Japan. They’re not even RPGs. Once, when I made this argument, a guy fought back by arguing that a game wasn’t an RPG unless it had a party (Witcher 3 doesn’t), a bestiary (pretty sure New Vegas hasn’t got one), was turn-based (quick, someone tell Dragon Age!), and had a linear narrative (hahahahahahaha!).

“But you’re playing a role!”

Playing a role means following a script, which is what you do in any game without choice and consequence. Roleplay is a specific kind of improvisational acting that’s about creating and defining your relationship with the world around you. Dragon Age: Origins is a roleplaying game: you can be a dwarf commoner or a human noble or whatever, and your various choices will have major impacts on your relationships. You can define the person that you are. They are tabula rasa.

In every JRPG I’ve ever seen, you are a specific character with a specific personality, and while you may have some choices--Noctis in FFXV can choose to let the crew pull over and take a group photo whenever Prompto asks him too--those choices have little impact on the overall narrative or Noctis’ relationships with the characters around him. Lunafreya will always love him, Gladiolus will always get mad at him when Ignis loses his vision, etc.

Different kinds of games.

Pillars of Eternity, which isn’t a great game, but one I enjoyed well enough, let me set my character’s stats prior to playing the game. I defined my character as a rogue with great mechanical skills and dexterity. In Final Fantasy XV, when you level up… you can’t really control how your character’s stats changed.

None of this is bad! It’s just different, like the difference between a third person shooter and a first person shooter. First person shooting lets you focus on the environment and your interactions with it, but third person shooters tend to focus on your character. They have their own unique strengths. You can’t judge a first person shooter by third person standards and vice versa. The same is true with JRPGs and RPGs. They are different games. And that’s good.

The Game:

When it comes to Final Fantasy XV, this is the foundation I have. I’m vaguely turned off by all the stories I’ve heard, I love the aesthetics of most of them, and the gameplay is something I feel is wholly distinct from other games.

Final Fantasy XV appealed to me because it had real-time action combat instead of being a heavily menu-focused turn-based affair.

So, here’s the deal: you’re Prompto, a prince, who is on his way to meet the object--and really, she is treated like an object in this game--of his arranged marriage, Lunafreya, who’s the princess of a rival kingdom, I guess? Except the wiki says she’s a captive of Niflheim, but she seems to get along well with her brother, who is in charge of the armies of Niflheim, so… like… yeah, I don’t really know what’s going on there.

The wiki also says she’s the “main heroine” of the game, even though she barely has any screen time at all. She has magical powers that cures people of some weird plague that’s making nights last longer, except that the nights are still getting longer and more people are succumbing to the plague, so she’s really bad at her job.

Honestly, she’s just there to look pretty and say things like “Noct, please hurry.” Then she dies. Then one time her ghost shows up and uses force powers to save the crew by removing plot armor that was only put there so she could show up to remove it.

She is not emotionally important to you.

This isn’t like Alan Wake, a game that reveals over time the complex nature of Alan’s relationship and just how wonderful of a person Alice Wake is. In that game, Alan was motivated by guilt, and you, as a player, could connect to him because you got to see all of this unfold. You wanted to help Alan find Alice not because “Alice is Alan’s wife,” but because you saw that these two wonderful, flawed people loved and cared for each other and deserved happiness.

Lunafreya is a pantomime of a love interest, but there’s never any real love there, so there’s no urgency to actually chase her down, no sense of loss when she dies. It’s not all her fault though (I mean, duh, it’s Square’s fault). Noct is equally culpable. He’s just… kinda empty. He’s a shell who occasionally feels things when the script calls for it (ur dad died, be sad, ur gf died, be sad), but who doesn’t feel like a real person. I don’t really care about anything Noct wants. I just kind of do the objectives because they’re what’s next.

I spent my whole life being told that JRPG stories were the best that video games had to offer, and… look, being completely honest here, Final Fantasy XV is the JRPG plot as described to me--incomprehensible, pointless, and horribly paced, doing grandiose things because the developers want to do grandiose things, never earning a second of the awe it expects you to have.

“Yup,” I found myself thinking when I finished it, “this is exactly like every JRPG that has ever been described to me except Earthbound.”

Earthbound is great.

Final Fantasy XV makes the mistake of assuming that because it looks epic, it is epic, but since it earns nothing, it isn’t epic at all. It’s a hodgepodge of ideas. Maybe other JRPGs do a better job, but based on every other JRPG I’ve played, like Xenoblade Chronicles and Suikoden, it’s just not a very compelling game.

So it may surprise you to know that I liked it a great deal.

Brotherhood.

In my film education, we talked a great deal about the idea of the “male as default.” A lot of this is rooted in idiotic Freudian psychology (especially all the Lacan stuff), so it’s as bunk as astrology, even when it sounds good, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here: all media has a perspective, and most media’s perspective assumes the male perspective as the neutral one.

American film does this too: it assumes everything is seen through American eyes. Most Hollywood movies are very, very American-as-default things, but that doesn’t mean they’re American movies. I’m not just talking geography, I’m talking assumptions about customs, camera angles, lighting, and so on. Russian film (European films too, but especially Russian film) tends to focus on specific body parts, using juxtaposition in editing to create specific senses about things. American films tend to favor wider shots, creating those same moods through things like motion and staging.

A film from another country can feel like it came from a different mind than the Hollywood monolith…

...and yet…

...there are very few genuinely American films out there. This is partly because most American films are built for export to other countries, so rather than focusing on specifically American subject matter, they focus on more universal things like drama and romance. Since America is so good at exporting American film, and many other cultures imitate the stylings of American films (because learning from successful things is how you succeed, after all), we end up with a very dominant American culture that has very little to actually say about America. In fact, lots of what America is tends to get lost in the shuffle.

If you’re lucky, you get filmmakers like Terrence Malick, who make films that are really about America and being American, but the significance of this is lost because people look at it and go “why do you make American films? All films are American!” But there is something specific there. Something interesting.

Maleness is the same way. It’s the assumed default in a lot of narratives, but because of this, very little attention is given to it. I once walked into the USAF museum while the XB-70 Valkyrie was in one of the hangars and didn’t see it because it was so big I thought it was the ceiling. Maleness in fiction is like that; it’s rarely examined closely because it’s too busy being big.

Here are two men. They are friends. The end.

We rarely look at how men bond, how they perceive each other, how they fight, how they talk and think because we’re too busy writing stories about the basic, empty characters who travel from point A to point B and the adventures they have along the way.

Oh, sure, sometimes you have people interrogating maleness, but they’re really only doing it to say “look what’s bad about being a man,” because they assume that male-as-default means we already see male-as-good, when really, male-as-default is male-as-nonspecifity. The beauty of maleness is rarely ever explored.

Somehow, despite all its narrative shortcomings, Final Fantasy XV excels at its understanding of maleness.

I think a big part of this is the road trip nature of the game. Sure, they’re ostensibly on the run and simultaneously on their way to a wedding, but that doesn’t prevent The Boys from having a good time. Each boy has a specific personality that is brought out in interesting ways; Ignis cares a stickler for safety and rules, Prompto is energetic and mischievous, Gladiolus is strong and confident and protective of those who are not. Noctis is basically an empty shell, but when he’s interacting with The Boys, there are still good moments to be found.

As you drive through the world, fighting monsters and helping friends, you learn more about these boys and the things they care about. Gladiolus is self-conscious about seeming too caring, but he cares so deeply, especially about his little sister Iris. He recognizes her crush on Noctis and even tricks Noctis into giving her flowers, knowing it would make Iris’ day. Prompto’s lower-class upbringing means he’s tremendously insecure about his relationship with the other boys. They’re not aware of how awkward he feels in the presence of people much wealthier and more important than he is, and when he makes it known, they do everything they can to assure him that he’s their brother and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s something else that I’ve never been able to put into words. It’s a feeling I have occasionally, and one I cherish. When interacting with most men, there’s a degree of camaraderie, like, hey, we’re all on the same team, we’re cheering alongside each other, that kind of thing. There’s a whole second language that men are only capable of employing with other men that’s completely nonverbal, but not all men are comfortable using it with each other right away.

There comes a point in a male relationship where everything just sort of clicks. That guy over there is just a man you know, but that guy over there, you and him are mates and you’d fuckin die for each other if you had to. When you do things together, there’s a sense of rightness and appropriateness to it all. If your best friend asks you to help him carry some groceries in from the car, it’s different than if you help your next door neighbor who you don’t really know all that well.

I’m sure other, better writers have written about this sense of brotherhood. When I’m playing Destiny with a matchmade team and we roll an enemy squad into a mercy rule defeat, it feels good. When my friends and I trigger the mercy rule against the same thing, it’s like, heck yeah, these are the men who mean the most to me in this fuckin world and I am so lucky to have them with me.

Final Fantasy XV does its darndest to put this in the mechanics. The boys res each other during battle. They all have unique combo moves that play off each other. The battle barks are all designed to make you feel like… hell yeah, these are my bros, we kick ass together.

How many games just have two dudes talkin about dude things together? How many games are like “yeah, bro, let’s go running in the sand and whoever outruns the other is the winner!” How many games get that great banter is affectionate? How many games are willing to have a bunch of dudes who love each other and will die for each other whose relationships deteriorate over time but they come back from them stronger than ever?

There are a lot of stories about men in games, but very few stories about being a man.

Final Fantasy XV might be the best of ‘em.

And it’s still… dumb and flawed at times. I think I would’ve liked a more interesting protagonist and central conflict. I think the game is at its best when you’re cruising around a big, open world, humming about chocobos. I think Square had the opportunity to make a huge, incredible game about an adventure and they wasted it on a game that gets progressively linear (in a bad way) over time. I mentally checked out by the end of the game. I didn’t care that some random giant dude showed up, I beat the shit out of him, and then I had to fight a couple more dudes just like him, and then after beating them into submission too… we, uh, killed the guy who was stalking us the whole game? Why would I connect with random giant ghost kings when I spent the entire game playing alongside my brothers? Instead they get knocked out and fall asleep on the floor and I have the ending I was always destined to have.

Man, fuck destiny.

The game is great when it’s being personal, but it sucks when it’s trying to do all this other stuff. There are no affectionate moments between Noctis and Lunafreya. Mister Badguy, whose name I forgot and don’t feel like looking up because fuck that guy, he was boring, has to exposit his backstory (i was gonna be king but then i didn’t get to be king so i decided to have my revenge in like 2000 years’ time! mwahahaha!!! here is my entire personal history!) instead of just being interesting on a dramatic level.

It’s bad when it’s trying to be a grandiose RPG. It’s great when it’s doing something I can’t think of any other game doing before. I think you should play the first 8 or 9 chapters of the game. I think everyone should. That’s where the fun lies.

What about the gameplay?

The gameplay is kind of neat. Some stuff doesn’t feel nearly as good as other modern open-world games (like, uh, driving, which is kinda terrible and inconsistent about when it lets you drive, and interrupts your drive in really annoying ways at night, but the attention given to things like “needing to fill up with gas” is really cool).

Other stuff is clearly channeling How JRPGs Work, which is cool. The way the game gives you XP or deals with magic and abilities feels Very Classically JRPG. But it’s all wrapped up in a real-time action game that’s nowhere near as satisfying as Dragon’s Dogma or Ninja Gaiden or something. I’m not saying it has to be, but holding down a button and watching your character autoattack isn’t very fun. Zipping around with your teleport power is totally awesome though.

Magic is super strong and I probably should’ve used it more, but I was never really in love with crafting it. The leveling grid is kinda cool, but I have no idea how, when I did nearly every quest in the game, someone is supposed to unlock some of those skills. It just doesn’t seem possible considering the game’s content.

Quest design isn’t great; most of it’s just random fetch quests. The open world itself is nice most of the time, especially when you have a chocobo, but because the game’s so invested in making you feel like you’re on a road trip, you end up doing a lot of driving which a more generous fast travel system would have avoided, which means you end up seeing a lot of the same places over and over again, which kinda kills the whole road trip vibe.

And So it Ends.

There’s DLC. I never did that. I kinda soured on the whole epic journey by the end because of how boring the solo stuff was, and the DLC appears to be all solo stuff. Sorry, but the overall narrative and the gameplay just isn’t there. That’s not what makes FFXV good. The camaraderie is. The vibes are. Listening to the sizzle of ignis’ cooking or watching a huge monster fly in from above. There are so many incredible moments in this game. It’s too bad the narrative and the combat couldn’t keep up.

I think FFXV benefits and suffers from being a big 3D real-time game. A lot of classic JRPGs are 2D affairs where you have to communicate everything purely through text boxes. FFXV has the benefit of voice and physical performance, adding a huge layer of nuance and personality to its characters, their wants, and needs. But because it’s a big, bombastic 3D game, it can’t help itself, and wastes time with boring, endless set pieces that look cool but do little else.

Could I recommend it? I dunno.

But it kinda makes me want to try other JRPGs, even though there’s really nothing else like it out there.

[putthison]

Put This On’s 2017 Holiday Gift Guide

Tis the season for fretting over what to get the people. To help with the endeavor, every year, we write about our most recent favorites. So, coming just in time for the holiday season, here’s our 2017 gift guide -- things that would be awesome for anyone in your life. 

Before we get started though, we’d love it if you’d check out stuff from our beloved sponsors. The Hanger Project has some wonderful shoe care products; Proper Cloth sell cozy knitwear (probably hard to gift their MTM shirts without your friend knowing); and Chipp’s grenadines are among the most useful ties anyone can own. Dapper Classic’s socks make for nice stocking stuffers; Huckberry has things for the outdoorsman; and Twillory has both whimsical and basic button-ups. 

Additionally, we have some wonderful gift suggestions in our shop, organized by various price tiers. Throw this corner kick charm on a chain and you have a necklace, or give that clotheshorse in your life this Duke of Windsor themed shoehorn. Our Gentlemen’s Association subscriptions could also be that year-round gift that keeps on giving -- a handrolled and handsewn pocket square, made from fabrics picked out by Jesse, delivered to your friend’s doorstep every month. 

OK, to the gifts!

Muth's Mudjeskas

I grew up in San Francisco, eating special occasion candy from See's and Joseph Schmidt's Chocolates. A few years ago, a gift guide from Sweethome turned me on to Muth's Mudjeskas, sold through Muth's Candies in Louisville, Kentucky. They're caramel-covered marshmallows, but that hardly begins to describe them. They ship well, everyone loves them, and if I am frank, they trounce their California competitor, Scotch Kisses from See's, in every category. This year I may try the chocolate-covered ones. -Jesse

Brass Kaweco Sport Fountain Pen

I’ll admit, I am not a pen guy. My handwriting is almost illegible, and so I've always preferred a keyboard to the manual writing experience. But a few months ago in London, I stumbled upon the Kaweco Sport, an inexpensive German fountain pen. The base models are plastic, but the one I bought is made from brass. It's a compact pen, but the hefty metal and large cap make it feel substantial. It's comfortably less than a hundred bucks, writes beautifully, and is handsome as hell. A real "pen guy" probably has ultra-particular tastes you'll never be able to accommodate, but the Kaweco is a great option for someone who’ll enjoy an upgrade from the world of rollerballs. -Jesse

Glerups Wool Slipper Boots

My wife walked around the house barefoot for decades, unbothered by cold or dirt. My toesies are always frozies, so I never took off my shoes. (I know, I know, but I have wood floors and live in California, where the elements don't follow you indoors). Then my wife’s feet started to hurt and her doctor laid it out for her: you need to wear some support anytime you're walking on hard surfaces. The answer was boiled-wool slippers like these, from Glerups. They keep your feet cozy without overheating, and they have a bizarrely compelling style. Glerups are the option recommended by the product review site The Sweethome, and I trust their judgement. -Jesse

[Pete’s note: I also dig these Tyrolean wool slippers, which have thin leather soles. They're like sweaters for your feet.]

John Hodgman's Vacationland

Hodgman took a hard turn in his new book, Vacationland. His first three books were compendia of imagined facts. They were deeply personal, but they weren't real. Vacationland is a genuine memoir, a story that follows Hodgman through three parts of life: growing up as a prematurely middle-aged child in a ramshackle house in Brookline, Mass; inheriting his family's summer home in Western Mass; and buying a home in his wife's family seat of Maine. It's very funny, but it's also beautifully written, and ultimately becomes a consideration of the pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood. A perfect gift for the dad who has everything. -Jesse

Manufactum Map Case

The map case has always struck me as the perfect man's purse. Unlike a big shoulder bag, it's modest in size, but it still has enough distinctiveness from a lady's bag and enough military heritage to feel like a man could wear it. In other words: it's useful enough for a woman, but PH-balanced for a man. The problem with map cases is that the real deal -- often made for European armies in the 1950s and ‘60s -- are made of vinyl and ultra-low-quality leather. Their form is appealing, but the reality is not. The other day, I got a doorstop of a catalog from the German retailer Manufactum, and I was thrilled to find that they have remade the German map case with real grown-up leather. -Jesse

Felt Hats by Barbara Keal

Years ago, when we were shooting Put This On in London, I met Guy Hills, the proprietor of Dashing Tweeds. Guy is a crackling ball of joyful, boyish energy. He rode around on one of those giant-wheel bicycles, showed us the riverboat behind his house, and told about his tweeds. He also showed us a hat his family had bought him for Christmas. It was a breathtaking concoction from felted wool, a ragged animal crown that reminded me of Where the Wild Things Are. "My friend Barbara made it for me, don't you love it?" And frankly, I did. I'm no furry, no costume-wearer, but it was genuine art. It was breathtaking. So I asked for one for Christmas from my family. It's one of my most treasured possessions. She takes commissions, although they can take a while to make. -Jesse

Ray Barretto’s Acid

Ray Barretto was one of the great bandleaders of Latin music. He was an accomplished jazz player, accompanying acts such as Art Blakey and Lou Donaldson as a conguero. When boogaloo hit in the early ‘60s, he had one of its signature hits, “El Watusi.” By 1968, Barreto was making salsa with the legendary Fania Records. He was music director of the Fania All-Stars, perhaps the greatest salsa band of all time, and making records under his own name. Acid is more than just a bit of trendy psychedelia. It's a genuinely thrilling record, with salsa, boogaloo, Latin rock, and jazz all in a blender. You don't need to know those genres to appreciate them either because, ultimately, it's dance music. It jams. If this one doesn’t thrill you, you're dead inside. -Jesse

Aurora Shoe Company

I was flipping through a Japanese fashion magazine the other day, and was stopped short by these handmade shoes from Aurora Shoe Company. They were in a section featuring the editors' personal favorites and I could see why. They're profoundly dowdy, but immensely charming. The Middle English has full size runs for me (including narrow) and is pretty great, but the one I saw was the West Indian. Sadly, they only carry that one in sizes up to 11 womens, which is a 9 mens. Great if you're a Japanese fashion editor, but less great if you're a giant American oaf. -Jesse

Children’s Books, Who Needs Donuts and Radiant Child

Is there a picture-book-aged kid on your list? I've got three kids myself, and am a real snob. These are two books that meet my standards. Who Needs Donuts is a strange and hilarious story about a boy obsessed with collecting donuts. He learns the true meaning of love. It has the anarchic, deviant quality that animates Maurice Sendak and insane, riotous pictures that you can look at for hours. One of those stories that gets its hooks in deeply and you're not sure how. Radiant Child is a new picture biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe. Steptoe is a gifted artist himself, and his pictures were built from fragments of Basquiat's past, like literal window frames from the places he lived. He also isn't afraid of the deepest emotional resonances of Basquiat's life and work. The book is largely driven by Basquiat's relationship with his mentally ill mother, and the subject is presented beautifully  and movingly. Steptoe's own mother struggled with mental illness, and in reading, an adult can see the ways Basquiat's story is animated by Steptoe's. -Jesse

A Small Vintage Steiff Animal

The world is full of Steiff collectors, the world's greatest manufacturer of stuffed animals. There's a reason, too. Steiffs have immense charm, they're distinctive, and more than a little bit beautiful. They also make great gifts. The older, smaller ones are generally well under a hundred bucks on eBay or from a local antique shop, and you have your choice of a century of creatures. You can go with a classic bear, but I love the more unusual beasts, such as lobsters or ride-on turtles or this tremendous fox, which may be begging for a treat? -Jesse 

(Derek’s note: for the menswear enthusiasts among you, A Kind of Guise routinely makes parkas with Steiff’s signature wools). 

A Plant (and an Accompanying Planter)

I like giving art or decorative objects as gifts (although they can be risky if you don’t know someone’s taste pretty well). Another good gift in this category is a simple houseplant­­—an easy and almost universal present. Houseplants have been undergoing a bit of a renaissance recently, so the availability and variety are broader than they were a few years ago. The snake plant is easy to care for and doesn’t need much light or attention. One of my favorites (still reasonably small—fit for a desk or countertop) is a staghorn fern. Air plants and small succulents can also fit almost anywhere and will require minimal care. If you know someone likes plants and has some space, step up to the monstera, whose distinctly shaped leaves you’ll recognize from Aloha shirts. You can find decent selections online from stores like The Sill, which also offers a 30-day guarantee, your local garden store, or even Ikea. -Pete

Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom

If the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem were in regular rotation on your first generation iPod, you'll appreciate Goodman's oral history of the New York scene in the ‘00s. Goodman interviewed dozens (hundreds?) of musicians, managers, DJs, and journalists and chronicles how rock 'n' roll re-took over the world from limp late-era alternative rock and Limp Bizkit. The stories they tell are enjoyably revealing, overblown, and gossip-y. Sample quote from James Murphy: “This is me dancing. This isn’t the drugs dancing. This is the drugs stopping myself from stopping myself from dancing.” -Pete

A Watch Winder from WOLF

If your friend owns mechanical wristwatches, a watch winder could be the perfect gift. There’s a lot of debate on whether they’re necessary -- a winder may or may not extend the life of a watch -- but they do eliminate the need to wind automatics. That can be nice if your friend owns watches with certain complications (e.g. setting the date, which can be annoying if you haven’t worn a watch in a while). WOLF makes some wonderful winders. Handsomely designed and constructed from reliable parts, these are fully programmable so you can set the number and direction of rotations (a good way to customize the winder to best suit your watches). They’re also a beautiful way to display special timepieces -- something to decorate on your friend’s dresser or bookshelf. -Derek

A Handsome Mach 3 Handle

Gillette’s Mach 3 has spread into almost every medicine cabinet since it was first introduced in the late ‘90s. It’s the safety razor most men, including me, have stuck with since learning how to shave in high school. Stock Gillette handles, however, are pretty ugly -- cheap, plastic, and dinky looking, they’re an eyesore on countertops. You probably can’t get your friend to switch shaving habits, but you can give them a better Mach 3 handle. British brands such as Edwin Jagger sell some handsome ones, although I prefer the more distinctive hand-turned designs found on sites such as eBay and Etsy. They’re typically hand carved from a block of wood, then lacquered with an epoxy to give the surface a shine and water-resistant finish. I like them in buckeye burl woods. Mine, pictured above, was purchased at this shop. They no longer have the handles in burl wood, although you can find them elsewhere. -Derek

American Trench’s Speckled Wool Socks

Everyone hates cold feet, which is why warm socks make for an easy, even if pedestrian, gift (get it? Pede? Feet? Ok). I like these Donegal-style wool socks at American Trench. They’re cozy, designed to be worn with boots, and made at a Pennsylvanian factory from hardy Italian yarns. The flecks of color give some nice visual interest without being overdone. Kinda pricey at $30, but a two pack runs for $45 and you can keep a pair for yourself. Hard to go wrong with any of the colors, although I dig the yellow ones most. -Derek

A Fancy Ass Cheese Knife

Everyone has that one friend that loves to host parties. And thank God, because without them we’d never leave our homes. To show your appreciation for their efforts, give them a fancy cheese knife. It’ll allow them to serve up some delicious appetizers, add something to their party decor, and give you an excuse to duck out of awkward conversations at said gatherings (“Is that, is that cheese? Excuse me”). Chelsea Miller sells some lovely looking knives. She makes them completely herself, from start to finish, at her workshop in Brooklyn. The metals are sourced from recycled farrier rasps; the wood harvested from her family farm in Vermont. They have a wonderfully elegant and rustic style about them, and would be something your friend and others can use for years. -Derek

Billingham Camera Bag

It never fails to impress me how many people are interested in photography nowadays. Unfortunately, most camera bags aren’t terribly great looking -- black ballistic nylon designs with cheap plastic details, they look like the sort of things carried around convention halls. If you have a friend who’s a budding photographer, give him or her a Billingham instead. They’re made in England and look like repurposed traditional fishing bags (Billingham actually started as a fishing bag manufacturer). The interior is padded to protect camera equipment, but the exterior is made from a handsome mix of cotton canvas and leather. You can find Billingham bags new at their webshop or second-hand on sites such as eBay and Etsy. They also used to make camera bags for Banana Republic -- pre-Gap, back when the brand was still a solid safari-themed outfitter. Extra points if you can find one with that heritage. -Derek

#Gifts #Gift Guides #Holiday Gift Guide #Christmas

[unsettlingshortstories]

How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Neil Gaiman (2007)

"Come on," said Vic. "It'll be great."

"No, it won't," I said, although I'd lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.

"It'll be brilliant," said Vic, for the hundredth time. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" He grinned with white teeth.

We both attended an all-boys' school in south London. While it would be a lie to say that we had no experience with girls -- Vic seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister's friends -- it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys. Well, I did, anyway. It's hard to speak for someone else, and I've not seen Vic for thirty years. I'm not sure that I would know what to say to him now if I did.

We were walking the backstreets that used to twine in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station -- a friend had told Vic about a party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not, and I didn't. But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was Vic's guest at his house, so I was trailing along beside him.

"It'll be the same as it always is," I said. "After an hour you'll be off somewhere snogging the prettiest girl at the party, and I'll be in the kitchen listening to somebody's mum going on about politics or poetry or something."

"You just have to talk to them," he said. "I think it's probably that road at the end here." He gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the bottle in it.

"Don't you know?"

"Alison gave me directions and I wrote them on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S'okay. I can find it."

"How?" Hope welled slowly up inside me.

"We walk down the road," he said, as if speaking to an idiot child. "And we look for the party. Easy."

I looked, but saw no party: just narrow houses with rusting cars or bikes in their concreted front gardens; and the dusty glass fronts of newsagents, which smelled of alien spices and sold everything from birthday cards and secondhand comics to the kind of magazines that were so pornographic that they were sold already sealed in plastic bags. I had been there when Vic had slipped one of those magazines beneath his sweater, but the owner caught him on the pavement outside and made him give it back.

We reached the end of the road and turned into a narrow street of terraced houses. Everything looked very still and empty in the Summer's evening. "It's all right for you," I said. "They fancy you. You don't actually have to talk to them." It was true: one urchin grin from Vic and he could have his pick of the room.

"Nah. S'not like that. You've just got to talk."

The times I had kissed my sister's friends I had not spoken to them. They had been around while my sister was off doing something elsewhere, and they had drifted into my orbit, and so I had kissed them. I do not remember any talking. I did not know what to say to girls, and I told him so.

They're just girls," said Vic. "They don't come from another planet."

As we followed the curve of the road around, my hopes that the party would prove unfindable began to fade: a low pulsing noise, music muffled by walls and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It was eight in the evening, not that early if you aren't yet sixteen, and we weren't. Not quite.

I had parents who liked to know where I was, but I don't think Vic's parents cared that much. He was the youngest of five boys. That in itself seemed magical to me: I merely had two sisters, both younger than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely. I had wanted a brother as far back as I could remember. When I turned thirteen, I stopped wishing on falling stars or first stars, but back when I did, a brother was what I had wished for.

We went up the garden path, crazy paving leading us past a hedge and a solitary rosebush to a pebble- dashed facade. We rang the doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not have told you how old she was, which was one of the things about girls I had begun to hate: when you start out as kids you're just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed, and you're all five, or seven, or eleven, together. And then one day there's a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they know all about everything, and they have periods and breasts and makeup and God-only-knew-what-else -- for I certainly didn't. The diagrams in biology textbooks were no substitute for being, in a very real sense, young adults. And the girls of our age were.

Vic and I weren't young adults, and I was beginning to suspect that even when I started needing to shave every day, instead of once every couple of weeks, I would still be way behind.

The girl said, "Hello?"

Vic said, "We're friends of Alison's." We had met Alison, all freckles and orange hair and a wicked smile, in Hamburg, on a German exchange. The exchange organizers had sent some girls with us, from a local girls' school, to balance the sexes. The girls, our age, more or less, were raucous and funny, and had more or less adult boyfriends with cars and jobs and motorbikes and -- in the case of one girl with crooked teeth and a raccoon coat, who spoke to me about it sadly at the end of a party in Hamburg, in, of course, the kitchen -- a wife and kids.

"She isn't here," said the girl at the door. "No Alison."

"Not to worry," said Vic, with an easy grin. "I'm Vic. This is Enn." A beat, and then the girl smiled back at him. Vic had a bottle of white wine in a plastic bag, removed from his parents' kitchen cabinet. "Where should I put this, then?"

She stood out of the way, letting us enter. "There's a kitchen in the back," she said. "Put it on the table there, with the other bottles." She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was beautiful.

"What's your name, then?" said Vic.

She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he meant it.

Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was coming from. There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance, swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.

This was during the early days of punk. On our own record players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people's parties you'd hear ELO or 10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During the German exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on was Neil Young's

Harvest

, and his song "Heart of Gold" had threaded through the trip like a refrain:

I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . .

The music playing in that front room wasn't anything I recognized.

It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I'd been given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a beat, though, and the half- dozen girls in that room were moving gently to it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone.

Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a can of lager. "There's booze back in the kitchen," he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn't hear what they were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in that conversation.

I didn't like beer, not back then. I went off to see if there was something I wanted to drink. On the kitchen table stood a large bottle of Coca-Cola, and I poured myself a plastic tumblerful, and I didn't dare say anything to the pair of girls who were talking in the underlit kitchen. They were animated and utterly lovely. Each of them had very black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes, and their accents were foreign, and each of them was out of my league.

I wandered, Coke in hand.

The house was deeper than it looked, larger and more complex than the two- up two- down model I had imagined. The rooms were underlit -- I doubt there was a bulb of more than 40 watts in the building -- and each room I went into was inhabited: in my memory, inhabited only by girls. I did not go upstairs.

A girl was the only occupant of the conservatory. Her hair was so fair it was white, and long, and straight, and she sat at the glass-topped table, her hands clasped together, staring at the garden outside, and the gathering dusk. She seemed wistful.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" I asked, gesturing with my cup. She shook her head, and then followed it up with a shrug, to indicate that it was all the same to her. I sat down.

Vic walked past the conservatory door. He was talking to Stella, but he looked in at me, sitting at the table, wrapped in shyness and awkwardness, and he opened and closed his hand in a parody of a speaking mouth. Talk. Right.

"Are you from around here?" I asked the girl.

She shook her head. She wore a low-cut silvery top, and I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts.

I said, "What's your name? I'm Enn."

"Wain's Wain," she said, or something that sounded like it. "I'm a second."

"That's uh. That's a different name."

She fixed me with huge, liquid eyes. "It indicates that my progenitor was also Wain, and that I am obliged to report back to her. I may not breed."

"Ah. Well. Bit early for that anyway, isn't it?"

She unclasped her hands, raised them above the table, spread her fingers. "You see?" The little finger on her left hand was crooked, and it bifurcated at the top, splitting into two smaller fingertips. A minor deformity. "When I was finished a decision was needed. Would I be retained, or eliminated? I was fortunate that the decision was with me. Now, I travel, while my more perfect sisters remain at home in stasis. They were firsts. I am a second.

Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all I have seen. All my impressions of this place of yours."

"I don't actually live in Croydon," I said. "I don't come from here." I wondered if she was American. I had no idea what she was talking about.

"As you say," she agreed, "neither of us comes from here." She folded her six- fingered left hand beneath her right, as if tucking it out of sight. "I had expected it to be bigger, and cleaner, and more colorful. But still, it is a jewel."

She yawned, covered her mouth with her right hand, only for a moment, before it was back on the table again. "I grow weary of the journeying, and I wish sometimes that it would end. On a street in Rio at Carnival, I saw them on a bridge, golden and tall and insect-eyed and winged, and elated I almost ran to greet them, before I saw that they were only people in costumes. I said to Hola Colt, 'Why do they try so hard to look like us?' and Hola Colt replied, 'Because they hate themselves, all shades of pink and brown, and so small.' It is what I experience, even me, and I am not grown. It is like a world of children, or of elves." Then she smiled, and said, "It was a good thing they could not any of them see Hola Colt."

"Um," I said, "do you want to dance?"

She shook her head immediately. "It is not permitted," she said. "I can do nothing that might cause damage to property. I am Wain's."

"Would you like something to drink, then?"

"Water," she said.

I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another Coke, and filled a cup with water from the tap. From the kitchen back to the hall, and from there into the conservatory, but now it was quite empty.

I wondered if the girl had gone to the toilet, and if she might change her mind about dancing later. I walked back to the front room and stared in. The place was filling up. There were more girls dancing, and several lads I didn't know, who looked a few years older than me and Vic. The lads and the girls all kept their distance, but Vic was holding Stella's hand as they danced, and when the song ended he put an arm around her, casually, almost proprietorially, to make sure that nobody else cut in.

I wondered if the girl I had been talking to in the conservatory was now upstairs, as she did not appear to be on the ground floor.

I walked into the living room, which was across the hall from the room where the people were dancing, and I sat down on the sofa. There was a girl sitting there already. She had dark hair, cut short and spiky, and a nervous manner.

Talk, I thought. "Um, this mug of water's going spare," I told her, "if you want it?"

She nodded, and reached out her hand and took the mug, extremely carefully, as if she were unused to taking things, as if she could trust neither her vision nor her hands.

"I love being a tourist," she said, and smiled hesitantly. She had a gap between her two front teeth, and she sipped the tap water as if she were an adult sipping a fine wine. "The last tour, we went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the whales. We heard their histories and we shivered in the chill of the outer places, then we swam deepward where the heat churned and comforted us.

I wanted to go back. This time, I wanted it. There was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to world. Do you like it?"

"Like what?"

She gestured vaguely to the room -- the sofa, the armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.

"It's all right, I suppose."

"I told them I did not wish to visit world," she said. "My parent-teacher was unimpressed. 'You will have much to learn,' it told me. I said, 'I could learn more in sun, again. Or in the deeps. Jessa spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.'

"But there was no reasoning with it, and I came to world. Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here, embodied in a decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of calcium. As I incarnated I felt things deep inside me, fluttering and pumping and squishing. It was my first experience with pushing air through the mouth, vibrating the vocal cords on the way, and I used it to tell parent-teacher that I wished that I would die, which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit strategy from world."

There were black worry beads wrapped around her wrist, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. "But knowledge is there, in the meat," she said, "and I am resolved to learn from it."

We were sitting close at the center of the sofa now. I decided I should put an arm around her, but casually. I would extend my arm along the back of the sofa and eventually sort of creep it down, almost imperceptibly, until it was touching her. She said, "The thing with the liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody told me, and I still do not understand. I have touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed and flown with the tachyon swans, and I still do not understand."

She wasn't the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my arm slide down a little, tentatively, so that it made contact with her back, and she did not tell me to take it away.

Vic called to me then, from the doorway. He was standing with his arm around Stella, protectively, waving at me. I tried to let him know, by shaking my head, that I was onto something, but he called my name and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa and walked over to the door. "What?"

"Er. Look. The party," said Vic, apologetically. "It's not the one I thought it was. I've been talking to Stella and I figured it out. Well, she sort of explained it to me. We're at a different party."

"Christ. Are we in trouble? Do we have to go?"

Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed her, gently, on the lips. "You're just happy to have me here, aren't you darlin'?"

"You know I am," she told him.

He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his white smile: roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a little bit wide- boy Prince Charming. "Don't worry. They're all tourists here anyway. It's a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany."

"It is?"

"Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you got to listen to them, too. You understand?"

"I did. I already talked to a couple of them."

"You getting anywhere?"

"I was till you called me over."

"Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to fill you in. Right?"

And he patted my arm and he walked away with Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.

Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy.

Stella was the most lovely of any of them, but she, of course, was Vic's, and they were going upstairs together, and that was just how things would always be.

There were several people now sitting on the sofa, talking to the gap- toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and they all laughed. I would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her again, and it didn't look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had gone, so I wandered out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found myself wondering where the music was coming from. I couldn't see a record player or speakers.

From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.

Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn't see any signs of someone's mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen table, then I poured a half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my plastic cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple of ice cubes and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the drink.

"What's that you're drinking?" A girl's voice.

"It's Pernod," I told her. "It tastes like aniseed balls, only it's alcoholic." I didn't say that I only tried it because I'd heard someone in the crowd ask for a Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.

"Can I have one?" I poured another Pernod, topped it off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets. It's not a hair style you see much now, but you saw it a lot back then.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Triolet," she said.

"Pretty name," I told her, although I wasn't sure that it was. She was pretty, though.

"It's a verse form," she said, proudly. "Like me."

"You're a poem?"

She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps bashfully. Her profile was almost flat -- a perfect Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school theater the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of Antigone's death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry Smith's drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was only fifteen then.

"You're a poem?" I repeated.

She chewed her lower lip. "If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea."

"Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?"

"What's your name?"

"Enn."

"So you are Enn," she said. "And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?"

"But they aren't different things. I mean, they aren't contradictory." It was a word I had read many times but never said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places.

Con

tradict

ory

.

She wore a thin dress made of a white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a pale green, a color that would now make me think of tinted contact lenses; but this was thirty years ago; things were different then. I remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.

Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking nonsense, even if her name wasn't really Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, "We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."

"And then what happened?"

She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. "You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."

I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg pressing against hers.

She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.

"There are places that we are welcomed," said Triolet, "and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?"

"I don't know," I said, still smiling. I could hear the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and boomed in the front room.

She leaned into me then and -- I suppose it was a kiss. . . . I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips, anyway, and then, satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own.

"Would you like to hear it?" she asked, and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain that I needed anything she was willing to give me.

She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the strangest thing about poetry -- you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.

Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don't remember. I know I wanted to.

And then Vic was shaking me violently. "Come on!" he was shouting. "Quickly. Come on!"

In my head I began to come back from a thousand miles away.

"Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on," he said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.

For the first time that evening I recognized one of the songs being played in the front room. A sad saxophone wail followed by a cascade of liquid chords, a man's voice singing cut-up lyrics about the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.

She said, "I am not finished. There is yet more of me."

"Sorry love," said Vic, but he wasn't smiling any longer. "There'll be another time," and he grabbed me by the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I did not resist. I knew from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me if he got it into his head to do so. He wouldn't do it unless he was upset or angry, but he was angry now.

Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.

This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella's face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall remember that.

Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes --

You wouldn't want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.

We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, into the gutter.

He wiped his mouth.

"She wasn't a--" He stopped.

He shook his head.

Then he said, "You know . . . I think there's a thing. When you've gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn't be you anymore? You'd be the person who'd done that? The places you just can't go. . . . I think that happened to me tonight."

I thought I knew what he was saying. "Screw her, you mean?" I said.

He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him -- and lose -- but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a low, gulping noise.

I looked at him curiously, and I realized that he was crying: his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran down his cheeks. Vic was sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little boy.

He walked away from me then, shoulders heaving, and he hurried down the road so he was in front of me and I could no longer see his face. I wondered what had occurred in that upstairs room to make him behave like that, to scare him so, and I could not even begin to guess.

The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat.

[cinlat]

(Tagged by @dingoat)

Rules are:

- Post the rules - Answer the questions given to you by the tagger - Write eleven questions of your own - Tag eleven people

My questions:

1: Cats, dogs, or both?  Personally, I consider myself a dog person. My cat feels differently on the subject and forcefully tries to convert me. If I were locked in a room with dogs and cats, I’d probably go to pet the dogs first. 2: Fave animal that is neither cat nor dog nor both. My natural first response to this question is always the African Wild Dog. However, since that’s technically a dog, I guess I’ll go with an Elephant. 3: What’s the last book you read, and would you recommend it to anyone. I’m one of those annoying people who read multiple books at once. (Goodreads hates me) So, here goes. I just finished the Night Angel series by Brent Weeks. It was Fantastic, and gritty! I’m also reading my sister-in-law’s favorite series (it’s a Sci-fi romance) by Sherrilyn Kenyon called The League. It’s not bad, the stories are angsty and humorous, a fairly light read. The writing quality is a little unpredictable, but I’m still reading them so I clearly don’t hate them. Then, I’m also trying to catch up on the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. I think I’m on book twenty-two. Those are freaking hilarious, and I don’t even care that it’s in first person or that the plots are repetitive because Stephanie Plum is a disaster. 4: Favourite episode of your favourite TV series? Oh, ouch. Favorite TV series? So here’s the thing, I’m kind of a major nerd and watch a lot of documentaries and movies.  5: What Internet Video do you think everyone should see? "THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: A Bad Lip Reading" Because everyone needs this in their life. *Will never be able to sit in a chair without hearing Jack Black’s voice* 6: What’s your favourite season, and why? It used to be winter because of lots furry coats, but then I had kids and now have to worry about strep and flu. Spring brings allergies for my youngest and husband, while fall takes out my oldest. Sooooo, BRING ON SUMMER!! I’ve learned to appreciate triple digit days.  7: TROLLEY PROBLEM! Pull the lever or not? Curse you, Dingoat. Logic dictates that I pull the level, but damn, that would really suck. Ya’know? Next question.  8: You get to change history by allowing one fictional character that has been killed off by its creator to survive. WHO DO YOU SAVE? Easy. Chani from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Think of all the thousands of people who would have lived had Paul not gone insane and wandered into the desert to mourn his love, leaving his twins to be raised by a spurned wife (who was an absolutely amazing character) and his mentally unstable little sister.The Dune Series would be at least five books shorter, if not more. Most of those were written about cleaning up that mess.  9: What memory of yours fills you with pure joy to recollect? The night my husband proposed. Mostly because I offered to take him to the emergency room because I honestly thought he was having a heart attack. :D He wasn’t, by the way. 10: You’re stuck in a car and your music player has jammed- whatever you were last listening to is now your road trip music, on loop, for the next six hours. What is it and how much do you hate the next six hours? Just A Game by MandoPony. I think I’d be alright for at least the first three hours. That song is super upbeat.  11: Do you like camping, and if so, do you have a favourite place to camp out? Anywhere near water. There is nothing quite like drinking coffee and watching ducks paddle around in the perfect silence of early morning.

So--questions. Ummmm...

What would you name your boat if you had one?

How comfortable are you speaking in front of large groups of people?

What’s your biggest screw up in the kitchen?

What is the craziest thing one of your teachers has done?

If your five-year-old self suddenly found themselves inhabiting your current body, what would your five-year-old self do first?

When you are old, what do you think children will ask you to tell stories about?

Where do you get your news?

In the past people were buried with the items they would need in the afterlife, what would you want buried with you so you could use it in the afterlife?

What is the most amazing slow motion video you’ve seen?

What was the most unsettling film you’ve seen?

Which protagonist from a book or movie would make the worst roommate?

So, I usually come to these pretty late in the game when most of the people I’d tag have already done it, so let’s go with--If you’re seeing this and haven’t participated. I’m tagging you.

#Cinlat answers

[livingvampiregod]

@katscratchlite You beautiful jerk.

Rules: 1. post the rules 2. answer the questions given to you by the tagger 3. write 11 questions of your own 4. and tag 11 people

1. You can only kill one. A literal pile of sentient shit or Mike Pence.

- Mike Pence because if it’s inevitable, I don’t have to worry about security and kill the other of my own accord.

2. If you could be a mythical creature, what would you be?

- DRAGON!

3. If you became a mostly all-powerful god what would you do?

Make dragons real.

Make domesticated dragons as pets.

Make life like a fantasy world with magic powers and shiz.

4. What keeps you from tumbling face first into the empty void of existence every morning?

- Staying in bed.

5. What/who inspires you?

- In all honesty I’m inspired by Markiplier and TheRPGMinx... Not only have I watched Mark since the first year he started on YouTube, but I grew up watching him and a lot of my humor comes from him. I make puns on the spot and can do improvisation due to his recorded jokes. Not only that, but Mark often gets to a personal and human level with his viewers. With Minx, or Michelle as her actual name, she often would describe how she is overweight, which I am too. She continued to entertain people on her channel regardless of how it got her down, continuing to do what she loves. It makes me feel better about my own body, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more proud to be myself than when watching Minx. Her humor gets me, her wife is funny, and her puppy is adorable. YouTube has been screwing her over a bit, and I would hate to see one of my role-models go, so I honestly hope she can keep going... Oops didn’t mean to make it so serious, sorry.

6. Everybody loves space. What’s your favorite fucked up fact about space?

- Eventually the sun will engulf our entire planet.

7. Happy birthday you’re rich beyond belief all of a sudden, what do you do with your limitless wealth (besides disregard the obvious inflation you caused)?

- Cosplay, anime figures and posters, probably buy some hentai... I mean you can probably guess everything I’d get.

8. You have superpowers good for you. What’s your kryptonite?

- My crippling anxiety.

9. You’re marrying a lovecraftian god but your pet dog/cat isn’t getting along with their pet abomination. What’s your compromise?

- Wait why am I getting married, who am I marrying-- My dog is just going to have to suck it up and deal with not having 100% of everyones attention.

10. What’s one object that you own that contains the most sentimental value to you?

- MP3 Player. I don’t know why.

11. Any current crushes?

- Yeah, but you don’t get to know.

What do you mean 11 friends? I don’t have friends. Except the one that tagged me. Friends? (People I know exist): @ryuu--senpai (Your mun) @kuroshitsuji-is-the-worst @madame--maddy @metalbadds I can’t think of more. { *Cough @markiplier (Will this work?? Who knows!)* } My questions: 1. What’s your opinion on Grell Sutcliff or 707? (TheMostAmazingCreaturesInExistence.)

2. Marvel or DC? Or Both?

3. Favorite anime series or game?

4. If you had one amazing ability (Not superpower, more like being a really good cook or learning all languages or something) what would it be?

5. I know most of you need more sleep, when did you go to bed last night/this morning?

6. Inspiration?

7. Your jam. (What song do you relate to/love?)

8. Interesting fact about yourself?

9. What would you do for a Klondike bar?

10. Favorite drink? Favorite food? (I’m running out of material here)

11. You’re on a plane to another country, for some reason, but you’ve run out of snacks and the guy next to you is snoring really loud. The kid in front of you is kicking the seat in front of themselves and their parent is doing nothing. The guy getting his seat kicked is drunk and about to crack. On an unrelated note, a dead body crashed into your window and it’s now covered in blood. The snoring guy has some cookies unopened on the tray in front of him. You’re feeling a bit hungry. What’s your next move?

[theliterateape]

Muffled in German Luxury

By Paul Teodo & Tom Myers

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming novel Call Me Z by Paul Teodo and Tom Myers.

I HAD NOTHING TO REPORT, AND NO ONE TO REPORT IT TO. It was barely noon. I lived alone. I hadn’t spoken to my ex in twelve years. My two boys were gone, one in Fiji teaching yoga and meditation, the other living in the city at a job he’d just started. They didn’t need my grief. My dog loved me, but lately I bored him. Most likely when I got home I’d find a pile on the floor to welcome me.

I’d clean out the office later. I found my car in the visitor lot where I always parked. I pressed my fob. Nothing, not a twitch or honk or anything. Again. Nothing. Dead. Just like me. I stabbed the key into the door and twisted the lock open. I slid into the seat. My soggy suit stuck to my chilled skin.

And yes, Rebecca was gone. After four years she left the ring on the nightstand and shut the door. She had pushed for that ring. But we never set the date. Never called me her fiancé. Walked out with a sad look on her face, but not enough sadness to get her to stay. Maybe we weren’t a good fit either. I don’t think it was the drinking. I kept that from her pretty good. And the few times I didn’t she joined in. Her reasons were just as clear as Greta’s. “We’re going nowhere. We don’t communicate. You’re far away and we have no future.” Stuff I knew was more true than not. So instead of fighting for us, I let us drift away.

A triple Dewar’s White Label with a splash of water would go good right now, but I almost had a year. The last time I had that drink I woke up in Mexico, lying on a cot embracing a bearded goat. Turns out I’m not a farm animal kind of guy.  So I wouldn’t let Rebecca’s rejection and the evisceration by Greta with all its accompanying humiliation drive me to the bottle.

I could hear Tommy telling me, “Cunning, baffling, powerful.” He talked like that. He worried too much. He was my sponsor.  

I should call him. I always felt better when I did. He’d chew my ass. But I was sixty, not a kid. And I just got fired.

I started the car. Cold air blasted my legs. I was jumpy, rubbing my hands together, waiting for the warmth. Some idiot was barking on sports talk radio. I didn’t need his big mouth yelling at me. He was trying to make everything sound important or profound, but like he was from the neighborhood. He probably was a media-wise shill from an Ivy League school knocking down a couple hundred K a year selling Viagra to guys who didn’t have anything better to do in the middle of the day. Now I was one of them. How long before I started calling in?

I’ll call Tommy instead. He’d give me his crap, and I’d listen, then feel better, and then he’d throw in, “Let’s go to a meeting.” A meeting was his answer for everything. Sometimes, you know, it’s not. Sometimes, you have to hit the problem between the eyes. He’d always say, “Pause, pray, proceed.” Sometimes, it was just too much. I threw on Puccini’ instead. Tosca. Depressing as hell, full of torture, murder, and suicide, but the music was beautiful.

I backed up my Audi. The white Crown Vic patrol car I signed a requisition for just a few months ago edged closer. For Christ sake, what did Greta think? I was going to go nuts? Randy, the old guy, sat behind the wheel, Brylcreemed hair and weird handlebar mustache. Junior, his sidekick, a steroid pumped, over-caffeinated, blonde kid coiled next to him, ready to jump out of the car. Both carefully watching to make sure I left without incident. Security. Highlands’ finest.

I threw it into gear. Randy and Junior in pursuit. What the hell, give them something to do, I’d liven up their day, and make them earn their money. I drove slowly around the campus heading towards Greta’s office. Would they just follow me or flip on their lights? Training would indicate caution, but no lights. I shouldn’t be doing this. One was old, near retirement, and the other’s juice-strained mind was totally unpredictable. As I exited the campus they looked relieved, staring between the wipers on the Crown Vic. With a nod they each saluted, acknowledging my final departure. I was touched by their deference and disappointed in my behavior.

My phone buzzed. It was stuck inside my wet pants. I yanked it out, ripping my pocket. I flipped it open. “Boss, Joe. What the hell happened?”

“Just wasn’t working out, Joe.”

“You get canned?”

“Did you talk to Jenna?” Joe and Jenna got along. He said he had a daughter that reminded him of her. Gullible and kind of quiet. She and her three kids lived with Joe and his wife. The kids were all under seven. Joe joked that he’d take any overtime he could get just to stay away from the nut-house.

I took a deep breath. Why make it worse for Joe? I was his guy and his misplaced loyalty could screw up his job. He only had three years left to retirement.  “Mutual understanding, Joe. Not my kinda place and Greta agreed. I’ll land on my feet, and things will keep going at The Highlands.”

Joe cleared his throat hard and coughed. He quit smoking years ago but he was still paying for his vice.

“Okay boss, wish you well. Keep in touch. You always had my back.”

“Joe.”

“Yeah?“

“Get that temp down in the OR for our good friend.”

He hacked again. I could see his neck turning red. “Fuck him, boss. And fuck his cold dead wife.”

“Take care, buddy.”

“Keep in touch.”

Nobody keeps in touch.

“I will.”

✶

I DROVE AROUND AIMLESSLY, THE SCOTCH CREEPING BACK INTO MY HEAD. I was done with Puccini. I put “Sona Andati,” the death aria from LaBoheme, into the CD player, trying to distract myself. It didn’t work. I shut it off before I looked for an oven to stick my head in. No real taverns in this town. I needed to call Tommy before I settled on a cocktail lounge attached to a sushi bar. It was noon and the streets were jammed with stylized fashionistas in hybrid SUVs driving their car-seated darlings who’d been born in our Taj Mahal Birthing Center to ballet, voice, or parent-toddler yoga. Having taken advantage of our Women’s Self Improvement Center, they wore their expensive yoga pants with great pride, bejeweled hands wrapped around a caramel low-fat macchiato, designer water bottle at the ready.

I couldn’t drive and dial. Even with this damn flip phone. I pulled into the parking lot of a dog groomer. An eight inch miniature something or other, tethered to a blue spring-loaded leash with a black satin harness, led its mistress towards an Audi A-8.

I pecked at the buttons like a hooded hawk. I could never remember his number. I had it stored in my phone but any attempt at technology made me sweat. First attempt got me a bakery, the next a Chinese woman, and the third an old guy who wanted to talk and didn’t care if it was the wrong number. Finally Tommy picked up. ”State your business.” His usual greeting.

“Tommy.”

“What’s up?”

“You got a minute?”

“You drinkin’?” Every time. Every single time.

“No.”

“Good.”

“It’s not just about drinking.”

“It is with us. We drink. We got no chance. So it’s all about drinking or not drinking. What’s up?”

I felt like throwing the phone out the window. Aiming at the miniature mutt whose shrill bark penetrated like a police whistle.

“What’s that?”

“Dog. Sort of. One of those squawkers.”

“Sounds like it’s being tortured.”

“I wish.” Its mistress lifted the horrible creature into her Audi. It spun in circles on the back seat. She closed the door on its high pitched yap, muffling it in German luxury.

“What happened? Did you shoot it?”

“I got fired.”

“Good. You didn’t belong there. I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.”

Asshole. He didn’t even take a breath.

“Okay meet me at the 2 p.m. meeting at the firehouse.”

“No.”

“Really, what you got better to do?”

“No meeting.”

“I’ll meet you at Nina’s Coffee Shop at two.”

“That’s in the city.”

“That’s where you belong.”

Tommy clicked off his phone never giving me a chance to respond to his invite. It wasn’t an invite, it was an order. That’s how he operated. I hated it, and it was good for me. I was soaked. I should change. But if I went home and put on dry clothes I’d never make it by two. It was miles of busted up black top, potholes, trucks, smoke, and congestion. Two hours travel time, minimum. What the hell. I felt like a bum, just getting fired, might as well look like one. I’d fit in fine at Nina’s.

People snaking along this God-forsaken, cruelly misnamed expressway looked like zombies propped up behind the wheel in their seats. How the fuck did they do this every day?

For once the weather-guessers had been right. It had gotten colder and the drizzle turned to sleet. My teeth chattered. I banged on the vent, no evidence of warmth appeared. And my swollen prostate needed a place to piss.

I drove east. The gorilla inside me calling Tommy every vile name it could conjure. Traffic was surprisingly clear when I caught the 355 extension towards the Stevenson. You never let yourself think that in Chicago.  The hell started as the ramp merged. First with the orange signs. Construction. Down to one lane. Forty-five miles-per-hour speed limit. And nobody, not one goddamn person around. Not a hard hat or yellow vest.  Everything blocked off and not a soul carrying out construction.

A bearded, leather-jacketed asshole on a Harley, replete in red bandanna, shades and cigar swept by on the left claiming that all-important extra six feet of travel time, forcing me to jam on my brakes, skid and miss him by only inches. He raised his leather-gloved middle finger as I regained control.

Only thirty miles left.

We crawled through the deserted construction zone never topping fifteen miles-per-hour. My windows fogged. My suit grew musty. Forty minutes later traffic cleared slightly and we reached the breakneck speed of twenty-five miles-per-hour. People snaking along this God-forsaken, cruelly misnamed expressway looked like zombies propped up behind the wheel in their seats. How the fuck did they do this every day?

Eventually the construction cleared, I gunned it and shot between two semis belching smoke. As I passed the Harley, he saluted again. I didn’t wave goodbye. Then a jolt rattled the right side of my car, the vibration like an electrical shock through my hands. Pothole. Shit. The front end continued to shake. The steering wheel danced like it had a mind of its own and was happy with what just happened.

Pull off? Here, in the middle of semi-hell? The shoulders on this road were invitations for death. All I could do was slow down, and proceed. At best I’d wobble into Nina’s with a bent rim and malfunctioning suspension.

I exited at California near the Cook County Jail and immediately came to a stop behind a dirty green articulated bus. Four miles left. Inside the car was now a steam room. Droplets of foul smelling sweat dampened my seat. My disfigured vehicle no longer moved in a straight line, I relaxed my hands on the steering wheel, and tried to catch my breath. I unhinged my jaw which had been locked shut for the past ninety minutes. Just miles from my destination, I was trapped behind the world’s slowest moving vehicle and flanked by a continuous parade of broken cars dragging bumpers, tailpipes, and trailers overflowing with decrepit furniture, soon to be delivered to a home instead of the dumpster where it belonged. I loved this city despite its infamous traffic.

Thank you, Tommy, yeah, this is exactly what I needed.

The bus was a permanent fixture. It wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe it was housing for the homeless. It was definitely a stretch to call it transportation.

I saw an opening, snapped the steering wheel to the left and shot around the bus. The car responded angrily shaking and shimmying as if the front wheels were pointed in different directions.

Proud of myself, I looked in the rear view mirror to see how much distance I had put between me and the bus. My eyes were distracted by blue swirling lights following me. I didn’t need this crap. “Pull over, sir.” The cop’s loudspeaker blared. At least he gave me due respect. It’d been a long time since I’d been called sir by anyone.

I needed a drink. In a real tavern with a sticky stinking bar, dirt on the floor, and people who served you by just nodding their head. I could pull over, slide in, and drift away for days talking with construction workers, the homeless, and hangers on. Or I could be left alone. Those places knew how to leave you the fuck alone.

I momentarily thought of making a run for it. But with a wobbly front end, a foggy windshield, and congested streets I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. I put the bar on hold and adhered to the cop’s order. I slowly guided my damaged car into a lot that serviced a small strip mall containing a currency exchange, a cigarette store, and a beauty salon featuring nails, weaves, and extensions.  A crowd of about a dozen young punks dressed in black, saggy pants defying gravity, some with braided hair, but mostly bald, shuffled about, music blaring, passing joints and bottles in brown paper bags.

Now I was grateful that the squad followed me in.

A freckle-faced redheaded cop exited his vehicle, hand at his side gripping his pistol. The crowd taunting, pointing back and forth between the two of us. The cop’s eyes constantly shifted between me and the group. I rolled down my window “License, registration, and insurance,” he said, eyes on the kids. “Slowly,” he emphasized as I rummaged through my glove box.

Methodically, I pulled the documents from the box and placed each, one by one, into the redhead’s hand. He didn’t belong here, nor did I. His eyes kept a constant scan on the parking lot. The music pounded louder. The wind chilled my still damp body through the open window. “Wait here.” He turned and walked back to his car.

Fucking Tommy. He drags me forty miles from home to a parking lot full of gangbangers. What the hell was I doing?

The young cop returned after running my stuff. He handed me an orange and white citation.  “You can show up in court, or…” both our backs stiffened as the blaring music somehow grew more threatening, “or pay direct. Your choice.”

“Thanks.” I said. My window swiftly rising, providing a false sense of security.

He began to leave. He turned, “and your front end is out of whack. If you’re gonna be driving around here, you need a car that works.”

No shit. I acknowledged his advice with a wave through my closed window.

I studied the ticket. Improper lane use. $125. Do not send cash. Lucky me.

I eased slowly through the lot to return to the street.  The kids didn’t move. My car wobbled even more. “Better get that fixed.” One of them laughed and kicked at the front end. I hit the gas and sped out of the lot.

Finally I pulled up to Nina’s. Soaked from the elements and my own fear. I exited my damaged vehicle spotting Tommy through the dirty window sitting alone at a table, his starched white collar peeking from under his gray hooded sweat shirt, his foot tapping to the beat of Wilson Pickett. He was fidgeting with the menu, his gnarled hands scarred from years in the ring.

I rushed in, the bell above the door jingling, my prostate screaming for a bathroom. I made a bee-line for the toilet. He looked up. “Any trouble getting here?”

#sobriety #Sobriety #South Side #Fiction #Chicago Fiction