win and tonic

Jorge’s Choice

His mutt was such a vicious beast that she was less of a dog and more of a set of teeth with a dog attached. None could near her without deep chested rumbles filling their chests in kind. So alarming was this dog’s presence that the concrete slabs before Jorge’s house were a bit whiter than those of his neighbors’.

Jorge was lonely, but not yet lonely enough to do anything about it. He enjoyed soup, collapsible television trays, and the security his dog provided, though not explicitly - when his pet should eventually pass is when he’ll truly begin to appreciate her ambient contributions to his otherwise silent home.

Two bedrooms and two baths, but the bedroom not housing his bed laid empty and bare with white-dusted hardwood floors that appear solid enough to not squawk in protest should one walk across it, but with settled drywall pollenating each stripe to a bright and cheery grey. Dust floated freely before every window of his home, causing those with lesser constitutions to sneeze just from passing by them. Whether the concentration of airborne debris truly was denser in front of each window through some strange greenhouse effect having to do with heat pockets and thermal dynamics, or rather the sight of dust illuminated by sunbeams merely caused visitors to become acutely aware of the dust they were consuming to create a sort of placebo-induced sneeze was unprovable without sophisticated equipment that neither Jorge nor any of his sparse acquaintances possessed.

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The hardest part is riding up the off ramp. I’ve never trusted traffic to treat my back as though it were part of a whole person, suspecting they abstract my back the same way one abstracts a car into a literal car, not the person driving it. So on the left side of the road I ride, making eye contact with those behind their wheels when need be, exchanging enough information to ensure one another’s safety. This arrangement is most conducive when crossing the overpass where the freeway pours onto the main road of my town, where my vantage point as I cross the bridge grants me plenty of time to choreograph my velocity with the cars spilling from the clover exit ramp that swoops for stories below.

I’ve gotten quite good at it. Only three places are on my route that possibly require me to come to complete stop, waiting for a light to cycle so I can cross the street to ride along the unnamed road connecting the Wal-Mart to the Speedway to the Giant Eagle to the hackneyed smoothie drivethru on the end of a stripcenter housing the once-staple but now-dying Blockbuster, of which obviously I have opinions about, obviously because I am a member of my own generation who has seen the birth and death of multiple modern multi-media distribution models, some great, some obviously great, some terribly underinformed in the way a groupthink committee comprised of members of exactly the wrong generation to be in charge of such matters could conjure.

With all three stops completed it takes six songs and half a Gatorade to arrive to work. Endorphins and music and lonesome meditation as I loop around the yet-another-road-widening construction along the main road bookend a noisy day filled with beasts requiring every level of attention they can think of with a respite full of battles against hills and weather and sweat and reflection and appreciation for a job without a commute, meta-reflection on my thankfulness on an “outlet” (of sorts, as outward as reflection can be described as being) for said self reflection.

The narratives built around the songs that I hear are verbose and lush and feel as though they require documenting, but I don’t know to what end. I fantasize about teaching myself to draw just so I can storyboard a romantic dystopian epic filled with dogmen and eyepatches and kung fu and Daft Punk, but it won’t happen. So I’m learning to just enjoy my thoughts without the always-on daemon indexing what I think, curating my thoughts so I can lambast and bombard the internet with my Extremely Important Ideas.

I’ve started reading without a pen again. I do this once every couple of years, making a decision to stop defacing my books with my own thoughts “as if they matter” - as if my highlighted passages will actually make their way onto a blog or a tweet and change someone’s life like The Shins or will somehow be re-examined by the book’s next owner, as if they might have missed the importance of that passage had I not painted it neon pink and green and yellow for them.

I live in a basement these days. I share a bathroom with a two year old. I have gracious friends. Pretending to be a dad while The Dad watches hockey is… blessing isn’t the right word, I’ve moved away from a world where I think of “blessings” but I can’t think of a better word. I think I still want a kid or three, but first I need a dog. Is that weird? That’s probably weird.

Anyway. These are thoughts I’ve had in the past week or so that I’ve recalled without that daemon running. They were easier to retrieve than the Instapapers and “tweet this!” buttons of the world would have you believe, I daresay.

With the boss and her family out of town, only five of the ten employees at my work were present. I am of the three who worked double doubles.

Working second shift gradually shifted my sleeping to accommodate. A slice of time before and after work feels unnatural and unproductive, so I wake up at noon and go to bed at four. I have many uninterrupted hours after work to work on capital-P Projects, which are only cut short by the need to lie quietly in my room in the dark for a few hours. Sleep is strange.

I, naturally, went to bed at four Friday night. And woke up at six. I ached.

When I got home last night I had trouble getting the key in the door. It was well past slap-happy exhaustion: my body and brain were shutting down. I’m definitely not in college anymore.

Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour and woke up once again at the time of a normal person were it a weekday. I got to work and released the dogs, distributed food, then wrangled them again. When it was time for them to be let out to play, I sat down outside on the agility ramp.

Molly Thomas¹, a red golden retriever, assumed her post to my left, nudging under my wrist until my arm was wrapped around her back. Soon another retriever, Hunter, the softer of the skinny-retriever triplets that can’t be differentiated by the co-worker I don’t care for without examining their collars, was under my right arm. Then my left knee was lifted by Belle Baxter the baby Boxer, and my right by another dog I can’t recall - I’d say Molly Strong the Weimeraner who cannot leave or enter the yard without jumping up and receiving a smothering hug, but she wasn’t here today. Before long my weight was no longer supported by me, but by a dozen skinny legs ending in abrupt paws.

And I slept.

I’m not sure for how long. There are no clocks in the outside yards.

But there on that plastic ramp the dogs held me up while I dozed in the muggy morning air.

I came home and took a nap. As naps tend to do, it took the pain in my head from lack of sleep and merely spread it evenly throughout the rest of my body.

I just made a sandwich. I go back for the rest of my shift in a few minutes where I’ll repeat the cycle.

Despite my exhaustion, I’m still excited to see everyone again. Never before have I had a job I was excited to go to every day.

I highly recommend it.

There is a song somewhere in my iTunes library that I want to hear, but I know not its name or artist.

I can describe it. I can tell you the instrumentation. I can even play a part of it. But I can’t hear it. Not all the way. Not for real.

I can tell you that there’s ambient tonal sounds oscillating within an A major 7.

Twelve thousand songs. The ones I’ve heard, the ones not gifted to me by friends by the discography like how piles of books accumulate in a warm and anxious way, I can name within seconds of hearing it. Clicking on a tiny gear and describing some heuristics reveals that songs I haven’t heard amount to a mere two thousand. I have heard and have a copy of ten thousand songs. I have here documentation that I have heard ten thousand songs.

I can’t not listen to music without constantly indexing every part of it. Not the fidelity or the equipment used or anything useful like that, but the colours and emotions and shapes and textures and memories associated with it. Sometimes the lyrics are important to me - more often than not, they are a delivery system for more notes. I care the most about the notes.

This track doesn’t have lyrics. The “ambient” tag bears no fruit, either.

It’s a collection I’ve nurtured since eighth grade, since mp3s were a Thing that you could Have and Take With You. Somewhere, someone has bought a pair of boy-sized jeans from a Goodwill with a perfectly round outline of a stretchmark in the pocket, left by my orange, rubberized portable mp3-CD player. I was the hippest fucking kid on the school bus¹.

Every day for a week, the class bully would ask me before I even sat on the green seat of the bus in the morning if he could listen to Daft Punk. Whenever I let him listen, I wouldn’t get it back until the bus pulled into the school lot. It was the nicest he ever was to me. He was a person, then.

The ambient loop is in the eighth octave. It’s plinky - echoing more than a sustain pedal on a piano would allow. It’s full of yellow sevenths, giving a twang of desperation to the quiet swelling of each nondescript phrase. It’s like breathing.

Sometimes bands in my mind that are discovered at the same time are lumped together as a single entity. Animal Collective was the same band as Annuals for a while. From Good Homes still bleeds over into Matt Pond PA. Radiohead is Helvetica: everywhere, not worth talking about anymore - bringing either up seems to make people bored these days. Doesn’t make them any less important, I suppose.

The guitar part is just three notes in a slow, lazy strum, complimenting the glass-like loop that may be in 7/8. A, E, G#. Green, yellow, and a darker yellow. Together they make green velvet against black milk, the backdrop always fluid, moving, in a hurry but not because it has someplace to go, but merely because it is liquid. Just present and moving. Present and moving.

One hundred fifty years ago if you wanted to hear a song, you had to procure a copy of the sheet music, hire musicians to learn it, and sit in attendance while they played it for you live. Now every song ever is a touch away. I keep using ‘tinysong’ as a verb. It doesn’t work, but my friends know what I mean.

The guitar resolves to the fourth, which isn’t really resolving at all. A, D, F#. Alone it’s plain drywall. Eggshell, or some comparably concise pantone nomenclature for “a type of white”. But when played atop the major seven chord it’s busy, woodgrain, black and darker black and porous and cool to the touch, like the plastic imitation wood used in the CD racks every grownup had in their living room in the 90s. Major-fourth-on-major-first has been my favorite dissonance as of late. Four on one. It shouldn’t be right, but I relish it.

Years from now, while traversing my library for an unrelated musical query, this song will play. Everyone in the room will be forced to be at once ecstatic and calm with me. Rapture will fill my eyes and fingers in this rediscovery, combating the tranquility of the song.

And it will be delicious.

There are two types of videogame: those in which you develop an avatar’s skills, and those in which an avatar develops yours.

Simon Parkin is the only video game reviewer (aside from Ars, natch) that has made it into my RSS feed.

Story games – the Zeldas, Final Fantasies and Metroids – generally fall into the former camp. As you lead these characters on a journey, so they grow and develop, slowly becoming more fully realised versions of themselves.

I can’t remember how I first found him - it had to have been years ago. Usually I’m good at remembering who gave me this webcomic, who introduced me to that band, but I can’t for the life of me imagine who or what handed me this man (which is basically a demonstration of The Internet’s greatest contribution to human society: the ability to give things to people). But I do remember his game-related narratives that interjected his reviews before he got his professional reviewing gigs over at Eurogamer and elsewhere.

Link, Cloud and Samus are given bigger, better weapons and tools with which to touch their worlds, but the effort lies in acquiring those tools, not necessarily mastering them. Conversely, in Trials HD and its ilk, you have just one tool – in this case a man and his motorbike – and the journey is all about learning how to use it.

Useful, entertaining and insightful reviews with playful, concise language. Simon cares about words as much as he cares about games. Go read his stuff.

Having written a book that vilifies self-serious cultural critics, I figured at some point it would be reviewed by a self-serious cultural critic, who would use phrases such as “an aesthetic of quasi-handmade approachability” and quote the Velvet Underground adoringly and decree that anyone who might enjoy my book is a cretin.

— Steve Almond, whose new book was trashed by the New York Times Book Review.

The worldview that “objectively good” exists in an age where the sheer volume of creative output available to consumers means any unpopular art is statistically bound to please at least one person absolutely is absurd. Writing a review of anything without a clear tone stating “This is my opinion of this thing” is not only pretentious and arrogant, but useless and — worst of all — uninformative to the reader of the review.

Take any widely-praised Amazon review of any type of commercial art. How clearly did the writer state their own opinion as being sovereign from anything resembling empirical fact?

Now look at Pitchfork. My opinion is fact, and somehow, more valid than yours.

Again: I’m not suggesting that critics can’t dislike the books they review, and say so. I do it myself. But I’m really tired of reading reviews – in the NYTBR and elsewhere – in which I feel essentially stuck inside some critic’s cant, with no clear view of the author’s world, let alone the broader ideas that ostensibly made the book worth reviewing. Or in which the subject of the review isn’t really the author’s book at all, but the imaginary book the critic not-so-secretly wishes he or she had written instead.

But most importantly,

So, yeah, it’s okay to get pissed, maybe even inevitable. But we must not stop learning as writers. Even our least sympathetic reader has something to offer.

Some of my favourite dialogues are invented ones between myself and a real or imagined person, neither of whom are present duringhand. Last night after a QI mini-marathon I decided that I was going to meet Stephen Fry and try my best not to babble.

I failed.

And it was the best babbling I’ve ever done.

In bed I babbled to Fry about art and music and writing and Making and monogamy and food and technology and the generation gap and I was lucid and excited and eloquent and articulate and at some point I said “Gosh, I’m just babbling now, I’m so sorry,” and Stephen replied “Oh no, not at all - babbling is the best sort of nonsense, I think. The truest form of conversation, and with so much coming out at once a listener is bound to find something interesting to hang onto every now and again,” only the way he said it then was much more charming and inspiring than how I’m recounting it now and I thought to myself, I desperately need to write down some of these thoughts I’ve shared with Imaginary Fry, these first-impressions I tried to impart on him, these summaries of my world views and values and ideals but it was already one in the morning and I decided that if I started to write now then I wouldn’t stop until daybreak and I simply cannot be late to my dayjob any more so instead I rolled over and willed my mind to quiet down so that I could go to sleep.

This morning, I feel I would rather be unemployed than have not written.

I think I’ve figured out what I’d like to do now.