Confessions of a Beirut Game

[22:18] ditriech: what is this. i dont even
[22:19] WhamBangThud: DEATH PICKLE
[22:19] ditriech: how did you know what i call it?
WhamBangThudsigned off from "gmail.DFFAA63A" at 22:22.

~

Santa Claus isn't real.

Tinkerbell's dead.

H.P. Lovecraft is a lousy writer.

It makes me that sad, dammit. To read this stuff at the age of 27, and recognize everything I loved at 14, 19, 25. The worlds I used to conquer in Rifts, X-Com and Eternal Darkness. The occultist winks in Sandman and The Dark Half and Spawn. The Thing That Should Not Be! The entire career of Stephen King.

The man changed the world of fiction, while writing like a freshman drama student.

This manifests itself in two ways: pacing and tone. For the second, single Lovecraft sentences are great.

All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them - looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hysterical scream.

Get someone alone in a room and say all of that. It's a perfect urine machine. I'm afraid of penguins now. Awesome.

But by the time you get to those sections, you have read the thirty pages in front of them. Which describe buildings, boats, shoes, clouds and cookies, with the same level of menace. You end up skimming in a horror story, which is never good. But it's that or end up under a pile of adjectives.

...for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors?

That describes a policeman, who does not feel well.

...it nevertheless made me shiver to recognize certain ideographs which study had taught me to link with the most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things that had had a kind of mad half-existence before the earth and the other inner worlds of the solar system were made.

That's a guy in his living room. Looking at a photograph. Of a rock.

For reasons I'll get into next entry, this hurts his short pieces more than his long. In the long works, you get Lovecraft's world-building. The short lean on language. Some are so bad you don't even know what happened. Just that something, somewhere was really, really, really, really scary. Like super horrible mean bad. The end.

It's strange Lovecraft's career spanned twenty years. Because this never changes. He writes about very different subjects and locations, at very different lengths, but there's no sense he thinks any story should sound different. He has one tone.

The damage his monotony does to atmosphere is small compared to the damage done to individual words. Especially good ones. Remember those Cyclopean ruins? "Cyclopean" is evocative. It gives you a sense of age, of size, and alienation. It hits that note Lovecraft needs: that something is threatening because it is too big for any human use.

You know what's not Cyclopean? Talc. You know who's not Cyclopean? Henry Kissinger. Also, a Cyclopean scissors couldn't Cyclopeanly cut an un-Cyclopean sweater, even wielded with Cyclopean skill by a Cyclop in a Cyclone.

You know what's not an evocative word any more? Because I just spared you twenty pages of that. Take the point before I grind "alien," "ancient" and "unspeakable" into mush.

The purpose of terror is to situate someone in their comfortable human world, then pull them out of it. To make them a child. To so disorient them that they're not sure any more what a bed is and how much space is under there for monsters.

If you use the same words to describe the normal stuff and the transformed stuff, and I mean the exact same words, you are sabotaged. If a hell-cavern is the same size as an apartment building from chapter one, that is weirdly comforting. It's like Eddie Izzard telling you the Force is "as strong as a small pony." If a monster and a book you remember and a track in the snow are all "unspeakable," then either the monster is a book that has been thrown in the snow or you are a mute. None of this is scary.

~

The other problem, the one that sounds like Fiction 101, is Lovecraft's terrible pacing.

Reading a Lovecraft story is like driving with a man who stops every ten minutes to check his map. Sometimes he pulls off the road and kills the engine, so he can remind you that you are, in fact, going to Kent. You get the sense he is very insecure about being the driver, and you're sick of Kent before you get there.

Your driver is often the protagonist.

... the sun poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope ... Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

Small world! Glad you boned up on all that before you went out to measure ice floes.

This is classic lazy fiction. As I said to Dutch: 

               Bizzo: It's like John Agar movies.
               Everyone is some kind of paleoethnoarcitectupsycogeologist.
               Dutch: ...what?
               Bizzo: The middle-aged white adventurer. Expert in Everything.
               Hands-on-hips-explainer-of-the-universe.
               Velma, in the last minute of Scooby-Doo.
               Except under the mask is something even worse, and it eats Velma's face.
               Dutch: best way to describe it ever
               Bizzo: I'm saving this for the post

When he neglects to Dan Brown the hero, Lovecraft makes other characters do the exposition. A Shadow Over Innsmouth is the story of a young man discovering things he has already been told. By the time someone is trying to get in his hotel room, we know who it is. When he catches a glimpse of something in a church door, we have been shown that object under glass, and told exactly why it is unnerving. Just in case the old man at the bus station and the old lady at the library didn't explain enough before he goes to Innsmouth, when he gets to Innsmouth, the story slams on the brakes to let an all-knowing person explain everything.

Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly ... 

John Galt went to shit in his later years.

So there are several levels of madness in that story: The transformation of the town elders. The horror of the young narrator. Bizzo alone in his room, barking at a stack of paper. Crossing out paragraphs and screaming "DO NOT TELL ME THIS! I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW!"

Actually ... that's a pretty Lovecraftian scene. We had thick fog last week, and a month before that my roommate came in through the window at 3AM and ran off claiming to be a devil. So with a little time travel and a little more BC bud, we could put something together.

Where were we.

I'm baffled by The Nameless City, where the hero's an archeologist and the big reveal is he's digging up a city built by monsters a million years ago, instead of one built by humans 10,000 years ago. The entire action of the plot is the hero uncovering this, until he finally sees proof and loses his mind over the existence of monsters and the unseating of our place in the cosmos.

That happens at word 4,717.

Here are words  534-566:

I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like.

Say you're telling a campfire story. At around "his car broke down" you click the flashlight off to say "by the way, the ghost is going to be his wife." Then babble on for ten minutes until "on her hand ... was his birthday bracelet!" Then you are punched in the throat by a cub scout. Because you fail.

~

A writer needs to trust himself. If a mountain is already foreboding, no one needs it to be ominous. Both author and audience have seen mountains and if not, they have seen the sky and something big in between themself and the sky. If their attention is drawn to it, the sense of being alone and small will grow. On its own.

Lovecraft trusts no one. He interrupts your imagination when it's trying to scare you. He interrupts himself when he's trying to tell a story. He buries his talent like a chef pouring mayonnaise over duck. 

... yet Lovecraft's defined horror for 90 years.

Welcome once again to my favorite weekly post, Always Bet with Black. And, as per usually, we kick things off with a picture from Britty.

"happy will kill you", by Britty

Ah. She's her brother's sister ain't she?

Anyhoo, for reasons known only to him, instead of the old format, young dits has decided to pick all of the bodog.com games. He insists that this will make it easier for you, the reader and consumer.

What he's doing is that he's showing you the spreads they have (pretty much the initial ones) and what he's betting on, using a gambling term known as "units". The units, typically, will vary week to week. But it's basically a confidence rating. That's really all you need to know.

We'll keep track of both his actual money picks and his total picks. Possibly even picks by conference.

Also: we have no idea if Random Numbers is coming back this year, because of the Dutchman being busy with actual things. But we do know that Rabbit Day will be back.

Because it is awesome.

Picks below the jump?

There are very few qualities about myself that I find interesting. Like at all. I find most of my life to be mind-numbingly boring. Mostly because I've lived it. I guess. Or something. Anyhoo, one of the few things that I do find interesting or "cool" about me is my memory. Like I pretty much actually remember everything that has happened to me while sober. Ok, not totally everything. But at least a good 70%. My sister seems to think that I have an Eidetic memory. Which I don't totally believe. But, hey, anything that compares me favorably with Matthew Gray Gubler I'll take.

Anyhoo, this may seem like a great thing. And for the most part, it is. It helps me at work. It helped me even more when I was in sales. Hell, it helps in remembering random stuff, like Wonderbear3000's love for Toto's "Africa". But for the most part, it's a burden.

For example. Let's say I was dating someone. You know, ever^sd. And I forget something. Like the anniversary of our first kiss. Or the first time we made out. Or something random like that. I'd get grief for it. And deservedly so. I'm the one running around telling random people I remember everything.

That's a kinda hypothetical stretch though. That would never happen.

Ok. Let's try this. What if your cousin, who was also one of your best friends died? Like unexpectedly? I mean, sure, most people would remember that. Maybe even most of them would remember the exact date. Or how they heard. Or where they were.

Me on the other hand, I remember all of that. I remember vividly. And I remember it every year on the day it happened as if it was happening all over again. August 20th, by far, is the worst day in my life. Well, it used to be at least. But I'll get back to that last point.

I didn't go to Ron's funeral. I was at school, it started like 3 days later^sd2. And I wasn't coming home for it. Because I prefer remember people like the last time I saw them. And if I went to the funeral, the last time I would've saw him would've been dead. And I don't want to remember him like that.

What I do remember most about Ron, if I had to pick out one specific time. One specific moment is listening to this song with him for like the first, or maybe 50th time. I don't know. I do remember that I just got back from a program at Kenyon like two weeks before, I had to actually go to school at Kenyon like 5 weeks later, and we were just hanging out, driving around the streets of Cleveland. We were listening to "We Are the Streets" and we were stopped outside some random friend of his', and this song came on. It was lightly raining, and for some reason, we started dancing. I remember for some reason someone brought up the line about the Air Force Ones with yellow checks.

It was a great day. Restropectively, one of the best times we spent together, actually.

Anyhoo, "Fuck You" by The LOX has, subsequently, become one of my favorite songs ever. Like to the point in which if I ever run for election, I want it to play when I win. Hell, the term "Fuck you" is probably my favorite thing to say ever. And I'm not sure if the two are connected.

But back to what I was saying earlier. I know that for a while this day and subject, and other days and subjects were days and subjects that I was horrible about. Like overly emotional and otherwise intolerable. But you see, today, 9 years later, I did a wonderfully good and probably stupid thing. And because of this a) I learned that on some things I just need to move on. and b) that I will not have any opportunity to have any fun ever outside of State games besides this blog.

I know I haven't been writing, or doing much of anything w/r/t cofabg, OMWD, "2160 Fulton" and "Attack of the Moving Bush". It seems as though I've been on a little break. Worrying about, you know, my personal life. Whether or not i should look for a new job. Breaks are good. It's not a bad idea to take a break every now and then. I mean, this isn't the easiest thing to do. Write something. Put some thing of yourself into something so public, so all can see. But it's probably something I need to do more often.

So I'm telling you like this. Break's over. I start getting more awesome on Monday. Or thereabouts.

Also: sorry about the youtube. Hopefully, I'll fix the grooveshark thing, and change this later.

Also: there might be some profanity in these lyrics. Just sayin'

Fuck You
The LOX
We are the Streets

Case in point, the past two posts and comments.

~

I couldn't let this go by. 

Slate is hosting a string of articles on Wisenheimer, the memoir by a former prep school debater. The first two essays are between the author, a former Parli geek, and a critic who is a former Policy geek.

If you didn't do this particular thing, you don't realize how large and weird an ecosystem "debate" is. In my badly misspent youth I did Parli(mentary), several different Speech events, which are basically drama competitions (my favorite were Extemp [oraneous] and After Dinner: variants of a contest where you are given a premise on the fly, five minutes to compose an address and eight minutes to give it), I did Model U.N. to some point past "mental illness." I always wanted to try Mock Trial, which is half role play and half prepared debate.

But here's where life gets lonely and pointless. If you google "debate" or "debate champions", you will get the standard (USA) form of debate. Which is Policy or CX (cross-examination). Which are closely regulated, well-funded and focused on ... issues.

At the beginning of each debate season, the scoring body releases this year's topic. Say,  "America should adopt an agressive stance against illegal immigration." For nine months, every team in the country will debate that. They will use the Summer to sit in libraries researching it. They will assemble file boxes. They will assemble 6-inch stacks of index cards, on which are footnotes. They will be scored on how many of these footnotes they can cite in ten minutes. Taking the same stances. For a year.

It's like playing Magic but without art, love or decency. You chain your citations together and the other team chains theirs. Kids think this will get them into Princeton. They hire tutors. As a scholar quoted for Slate says:

The real debate takes place on the notepad, not at the podium ... there is no time to waste on pleasantries like "Good morning"; a more useful introduction is a preview of where the speaker plans to go with the flow. ... Since everyone in the room is taking detailed notes, it's unnecessary to refer to a previous argument as-anything but "B(1)." ... The velocity starts to increase ... the role models for high school contestants speak at ... nearly 270 words a minute.

You don't argue. You don't convince or educate or confuse or charm or impress. You arrange every thing written on the subject in alphabetical order, then stand stiff, look down and blast it from your face. I watch a good CX or Policy debater and don’t see a thoughtful, cunning student. I see someone possessed by the devil. And the devil is autistic. Every aspect of the sport could be improved by rolling your eyes back and chewing Alka-Seltzer. Watch:

I've had to judge these things. Your mind goes weird places. Why is he doing this? It looks like pain. Does he critically have to go to the bathroom? That would be a little fascinating. This kid is locked in one of Dante's punishments. Can he motor out every syllable of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual before he poops himself? Where the hell is he going to apply this? Why am I here? No one wants the DSM IV yelled at their feet. It's bad for your heath. God, the kid is still yammering. Okay! He wins! Would an authority please run onto the stage and put a gold medal around his neck for World's Most Boring Schizophrenic? Maybe he'll stop.

Parli 4 life.

~

Following yesterday's post, it's timely that Salon published this quick breakdown of how public debate is shaped.

(For those too lazy to click: The "WTC Mosque" is the product of one crazy person with a blog, who dug up the "story" months after hearings ended in NYC. It is now in its third week of "debate" by the most prominent people in America)

Not that this hasn't always been the case. Editors, owners or celebrity journalists have always been able to decide what we treat as news. The public gets to choose between a few of them, at best. As with any institution we trust that the press are not too petty, not too crooked, not too crazy, too often. That more than not, they fulfill a useful mission.

This isn't going very well. I look at our mixed-media landscape and marvel at the power it gives, say, me.

What if I decided to ruin your life?

Let's say you're not a famous person already. Or a particularly outrageous person. Or someone who made the misguided, tragic choice to sign a waiver with Michael Moore.

It doesn't matter.

I could have an e-mail of yours. I could have a video of you doing something normal, like speaking at your rotary club. I could see you walking down the street and decide "Buddy, next week, Wolf Blitzer will be asking every Senator what he thinks ... of you."

I take a photo of you on my phone. I follow you to work. I describe you in any way I want. If you work at a state animal shelter, I go of on my anti-PETA rant, pepper it with "domestic terrorism" "fire bombing" and the "larger issue" of so many "public resources" being spent on "animals, instead of people like the (homeless/jobless/working mothers/churches/9/11 families)." I put a subject heading in my e-mail like "America: Going to the Dogs"? I email this ridiculous free-association game I have just played with your face and the front of your office building ... to every blogger I can think of on the planet. 

If I get the attention of even one of hundreds of people who will all be looking for something to talk about that day, they will post on you. From there, your face is a floating focal point for The Issue of Animal Shelters In America. Or Animal Rights in America or even Government Waste in Recession America.

(Hey, remember Volcano Monitoring?)

You can sit there, in some obscure blog read by 50 people, until the interns come searching. The interns for Daily Kos or BigGovernment or Huffington Post or Little Green Footballs ... whomever. They all need to farm for content they can re-package and put on the Main Page. Something that can be specific and made to look outrageous or connect to some broader emotion. The actual event can be weeks, months, or years old. It can be a "debate" that has already been settled and isn't a debate any more.

It doesn't matter.

Eventually, if I have been competent at all in packaging you, you will fill the needs of Tuesday's mid-afternoon editor at Hit & Run - an example of "spending shame" or "boutique government services" or "tax-favored PETA's outsize effect on the culture." They will link to the obscure post which cites my email, wag their finger at you, then move on. Wendesday afternoon cometh.

CNN famously (hilariously) tries to tie all its content into New Media and cite blogs as often as possible. The company's reached this bizarre point in its life-cycle where it tries to stay current by broadcasting issues raised and driven entirely by others. It's ceased to be a caterpillar in any real way, but is still alive as a full time wasp nest. I'm giving this way too much thought.

Fox is proudly Newscorp, in that it believes any story should involve a skinny young white girl reporting on skinny young white girls taking off as much clothing as possible. Blondes preferred. Celebrities preferred. Gay marriage is barely a story until it includes bikini pictures and a pagent star and a sex tape. It's the most heterosexual gay story you'll ever see.

So ... who's going to bite first? Will PETA get Nicole Kidman naked in public, and will that footage need a "news hook" or will Rick Sanchez need two more minutes of air after he's exhausted HuffPo and Sarah Palin's Twitter, for the day? 

Whichever, whenever ... welcome to prime time.

I hope that cell picture I snapped of you is flattering, because it's on top of the right-hand graphic on cable news, with bullet points under it. "Controversial Shelters" - "Animals, Not Firefighters?" - "Dog Tired of Public Waste?"

I have no idea what your name is, but Reason's troller already took care of that by placing the shelter with the town with the picture with your name. This was their quality control. 

Now that the "issue" has been raised on a national news program, every reporter has sanction to fill their afternoon by asking the President, the First Lady, congressional staffers, heads of think tanks ... whomever they want to quote that day ... what they "think of this controversy."

Because of the way Rick Sanchez packaged it, because of the way Reason packaged it, because of the way DoggoneTired.com packaged it, because of the way I packaged it, the default position will probably be to hate you. To "regret your actions" and "regret what you represent" but grudgingly acknowledge your freedom of speech. The guests on Hannity and the local news reporters (now outside your house) will be more blunt.

They all needed you. They're not bad people. The President of the United States did not get up that morning with the intention of calling you "regrettable." It will be a miracle he remembers that part of that press conference. The stories that make up our dialogue have been brought to his level by a machine with no driver. An all-sucking vacuum that is always turned on and always running empty. An hourly, minutely need for Content, serviced by a chain of hungry nervous people who know what something needs to sound like to get noticed and passed further up.

I can clip you to the end of that chain.

The best part is: If it works, I will be more trustworthy. I will have made rain for the little blogger, who became a hot link for everyone else. The machine will look for him, and he will look for me. I can become a brand, open my own site, and be hungry.

...

Time to go live in the woods.

~

I need to unplug for a while, or I'm going to turn into Matt Taibbi; Holding a note of faux-hilarious despair over everything, ever. Writing damn funny paragraphs, but spending an hour each day punching myself in my own smug, detached Masshole face. Loudly inviting people to bring spunk-flavored popcorn and cheese, and come watch. I'll work "since the Roman empire" into that joke somehow, and turds, and the Cincinatti Reds, and smirk with half my mouth as I'm bopping teeth out of the other half. And wearing a stupid hat. Where was I going with this? 

Terror babies.

Our country is in terrible debt. One in ten humans are out of a job. We are spending $50,000,000 a minute to fuel flying killer robots to chase toothless crackheads around the Korengal Valley. If even one of them escapes to throw a rock back at us, we will have lost the war. This is life, and we're sitting down to talk about terror babies. 
 

Let me enjoy this.

First, I thank the comic book convention that is our current Republican Party. They are getting coherent. Isn't it usually hard to follow their panics? They warn us of a future anarchy, where kings are made by stashes of ammo, water and gold bullion in deep suburban basements, a future of super-organized tyranny, with transnational highways and one stable currency, where a man can't even ... wait ... what? I'm not sure if they know that Fascists and Socialists were enemies, but they think the junior senator from Illinois was both. Gayness is unnatural. And infectious. Mexicans are lazy, stupid and on the brink of ruling us. It's hard to focus in this world.

But! Our President is a Terror Baby. Remember? Kenya, Indonesia, forged papers? Forty-year plot to overthrow us by planting a fatherless, mixed race kid in Hawaii? In the 70s?

You know there are Terror Babies, because that's the plot that produced our President. You know he is one, because that shows the efficacy of the Terror Baby plot. This is circular, but by god it's a shape.

What enemies we have. Their children don't leave home or have ideas of their own or anything. They just re-appear in the third acts of the movies in our head: black horses betwixt their thighs,  arming bomb vests, riding toward our living rooms. All because that post-Civil-War Constitution OPENED A HOLE in us, through which their swarthy mothers passed, birth canals aquiver.

Seriously. This is fun.

I can get sad or angry when I realize this is how a lot of my neighbors actually think, but I can't hold onto that rage. When they give us concepts like Manchurian Babies of Islam, I can't resist the game. Sue me. I will giggle at the end.

This morning I shclepped to an early meeting, paid my parking and called a plumber about my rotting kitchen sink. On the other hand, it's Friday the 13th and the headline is Terror Babies. That is unimprovable.