The Diamond Island

I’ve got a dream for a clue, a hall pass that’s feeling close to the due date, and a whole lot of personal drama driving me crazy. Ordinary life and its chores are hard enough without battle cruisers patrolling the streets for human heads.

Spontaneously, I get out some of my illustration materials and tools. I continue work on one of my personal enrichment projects. I have four blank certificates of accomplishment on ditto paper from the fourth grade that I’ve been copying and adapting onto poster board. So far I’ve only done the first one.

I like giving artistic creations to people, where time and energy allow. These modified certificates are something different and neat I can give people to pump them up. It’s nice to get a bonus round every now and then.

In no time at all, I’ve got my second certificate done, and I’m satisfied to have a new goodie at my disposal. I wonder where the motivation to do this came from, since I haven’t been at full power for a few months now. I imagine it must have come as a token of kindness, as after all that’s what it’s supposed to be used for. What might I have done that was noteworthy, I wonder?

I recall my dream, and how I saved Important Woman from the snipers. Maybe the motivation comes from her as a form of recognition. Perhaps that’s where a lot of artistic inspiration comes from. It’s granted us through our dreams, and the figures of our dreams are the messengers. Sometimes we remember the dream where that inspiration springs, and sometimes we don’t. I think this sort of thing must be going on all the time, asleep or not.

K makes me a nice, delicious, hot cup of tea from her special recipe. She can tell I need a boost. A rooibus peach/blueberry bliss combo with fresh crushed blackberries and a big spoonful of honey in the raw (that unprocessed stuff with the pollen on top). It must work, because not only do I recover health points, but I have a Mr. Spock moment.

If I assume this inner dialogue is always going on, then I have to admit I’m not always participating overtly and that it’s not always about me. Things could be going on that are moving this search forward that I’m not aware of, and perhaps all I need to do is wait for my turn to do something. That, to me, seems to be the crux of the matter – the need for patience and for the various other storylines to catch up – whatever they may be. My brain is a secondary organ after all!

Nobody wants to discover they are a supporting character. Such an admission wounds one’s pride. I’ve put out the message, and I’m just being egotistic in thinking there’s more to it than that.

Suddenly, a light bulb in the chandelier above burns out with a flash and a snap. I take that as an agreement.

My big hope to meet the UFO girl rests on a crummy sound file attached to the Internet probability antenna. All I get in the way of clues is a dream.

In the dream I’m in a museum/international center. There’s this important woman moving from one location to another. She’s got about a dozen bodyguards about her for protection, plus a personal assistant and two administrative assistants. There’s a small amount of pedestrians milling about. Nobody recognizes the woman and her entourage. They just give her searching glances as they go about their business. I’m there too, part of the crowd and probably there for the art, but for some reason I get the feeling everyone knows who I am.

A bunch of snipers appear on the second floor balconies and aim for the woman. I jump to her side and somehow by waving my arms and moving in front of her at strategically important moments the snipers are only able to hit the bodyguards, and a few of the passers-by. I pull out this weird plastic submachine gun and blow away a few of the snipers. The rest take cover and I try to get the woman and her shrinking entourage to a waiting car.

The woman takes a grazing shot to the head, and I have to stop shooting so I can carry her the rest of the way to the car. The bodyguards are totally useless, and I know somehow that I’m the only one who can do the job and keep her alive. I have to put her down, shoot at the snipers some more to make them dive for cover, and open the car door. The driver, the personal assistant, and the two administrative assistants just stand there gawking at me, ducking bullets and doing nothing helpful.

I get the woman into the car and we all leave the scene of carnage behind. I perform emergency first aid, and for a moment it’s close, but I stabilize the woman. I notice the driver making the telltale suspicious glance at us. I pick up on something fishy about the personal assistant’s behavior, and the way the two administrative assistants look guilty. I realize they’re all working for the snipers and the woman’s been totally betrayed.

The driver gets wise to my suspicions. He locks the doors and puts up the privacy window. I know he’s driving us into a trap, so I start smashing the privacy window between us with a battering ram glass breaker I happen to be carrying around. Before I can shoot the driver he books and leaves us behind. I take over the car and drive away, just in time to dodge a rocket attack lock-on.

Keeping an eye on the remaining traitors, who do nothing because anyone with a battering ram in their pocket is clearly out of their mind, I drive to an underground parking lot. Waiting for me is a limousine being driven by Lurch from the Addams Family. In the back seat is a sexy nurse with mad doctor skills. I park the car and make the three assistants back off and turn around. I warn them that if they try to see where we go, or look at our license plate, I’ll blow them away.

I carry the woman to the back seat and the nurse takes over. I know she’ll be okay now. I cover the three traitors from the window of the limo with my plastic gun. Lurch shakes his head and makes his distinctive “I don’t believe this” groan before he gets in the car and drives us away. We drive off through downtown to a secret hideaway.

The cats wake me up with demands for food, and I return to the real world with a clue that makes no sense to me. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left on my haunted house pass, but I’m getting the growing feeling that my library books are coming due soon, and the ghosts there collect late fees in something other than cash, check or charge.

As I’ve mentioned before here, I don’t much care for the movies that are released in theaters. I believe the entertainment industry is incapable of making good movies except by accident. It’s the medieval printing press formula of spitballing. That is, mass production of a large number of products in the hope that something will stick and make enough money to make up for the tremendous losses of everything else that bombed.

You see it books, television shows, video games, and popular music. A whole lot of garbage, and a few lucky shots. Yet the industry, with its medieval guild system of cutting off free markets via the control of distribution, refuses to diversify for its own financial survival. All I see is consolidation into large, inefficient corporations that struggle to make the margins. It seems like in the news the only game to play is buyouts.

Without the propaganda machine known as the entertainment public relations industry whipping up public interest, the struggling entertainment industry (again, that term, which suggests craft, but conjures up images of sweatshop smokestacks) might be in worse shape. The mantra is always that it takes “the big boys” to make quality, and since they take all the risks, they deserve all the profits.

Well, hey, if that’s true, how come I’m not entertained? Where’s the “quality” I keep hearing about? All one has to do is read the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code, listen to ten seconds of Britney Spears’ “Gimmie More”, or watch a minute of any show on the SciFi Channel to know this doesn’t pass the laugh test.

The decline comes not just from a longstanding contempt for the public and what it wants, or the exploitation of artists and craftsmen desperate to make a buck, but also from an emerging sense by a new generation of people trained in the computer. These young people are growing up with tools not available even ten years ago that are cooperative, creatively open, and allow you to do work that used to take entire studios of people to produce.

It’s entirely possible now, for example, for a group of people to put together an original, entertaining show, if not better than a mainstream one, using a computer. Sound, video, special effects, and the portability, along with a massive distributor called the Internet, you can do it. You can even set up a website and charge for it if you want, or just post it on YouTube for people to enjoy simply for the love of sharing. It’s all about creating, passing it along, and getting involved.

The iron hand of oligarchy may yet crush this sentiment of the unwashed masses as they evolve towards freedom from coercion. It wouldn’t be the first time. If you look back through the centuries at the history of newspapers, pamphlets, and hootenannies, you’ll see how the owners seized control of popular culture. But as always, one can never tell how things will turn out, it’s anyone’s guess.

But I digress.

I saw a movie called “300”, which is a story about a battle between a small group of Spartans (the good guys) and a gargantuan army of Persians (the bad guys). The battle decides whether the last stand of the good guys inspires their allies to band together and have a chance at remaining free, or they fail and the leader of the Persian army conquers everyone (this is bad). That’s the movie in a nutshell, and it’s been lauded as a macho man story of serious butt kicking and decried as a historically inaccurate appeal to patriotism.

I think both sides are completely wrong. It’s just a really, really bad movie that people are throwing their own projections upon, either because they feel powerless and want to watch some pump up, or they expect disappointment in today’s movies and this one grants them the opportunity to complain.

To the people expecting “quality”, “historical accuracy”, or even things like “realism” or “authenticity”, you are deluding yourselves. This is a fantasy, adapted from a trade paperback taking liberties with history to start with. All you have to do is look at the cinematography, with it’s green-screen generated landscapes and phony-baloney colors stolen from every music video filter of the nineties, to know this is an internal story, not an external one.

The characters move and speak like figures from a daydream or an idle fancy. The outrageous wolves with glowing eyes or rhinos decked out in battle armor are exaggerated monsters of the unconscious with no relation to real world animals. The crazy maneuvers during the fight scenes have nothing to do with physics and everything to do with how adolescents play with action figures.

I’m not knocking this approach. I’m just saying you can’t expect such an overt disregard for reality to hold up under anything more than a loose, subjective viewing. You can say such a shallow presentation neither nourishes the soul hungry for art nor makes for fascinating intellectual analysis, and I’d agree. See that industry treadmill spewing out offal? Yes, it’s gross, and it’s useful to consider the ways in which it falls short (ahh, that sulphurous, rotten egg smell of a group of men pushing an armored elephant right off a cliff). After all that, it’s time to start talking about alternatives.

To the people who think there’s a lot of kicking of butts, I think you need a reality check from Patton: “Now I want you to remember that no *#&!#%$ ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb *#&!#%$ die for his country.”

Sure, there’s a lot of awesome battle moves going on, the Spartans inflict huge losses against an outlandish array of revved up opponents, and they all die fighting. That’s not kicking butt, that’s losing with a flourish.

Yes, their heroic sacrifice inspires the wimp allies to stand up to the invaders, but we never see if that final battle leads to victory. Without final victory, you lose. Yes, you can say we know what happened in history, but remember this is a fantasy. If it isn’t on screen, we can’t imply anything. It’s a complete let down.

You want butt kicking? After a long movie of fighting down to the bitter end, the superhero leader of the good guys gets a chance to spear the bad guy leader — and clips the bad guys ear. He missed (if the guy’s not dead, you failed). Since the movie is a shallow fantasy, the symbolic effect of such an act in real history means nothing (but having a Man Who Would Be King scene would negate the movie’s premise and ending).

This pathetic miss occurs in an interesting context. There’s an earlier scene in which a lesser character performs an amazing feat of throwing ability.  His spear lands dead on against a huge, armored rhino at least a hundred feet away, exactly enough to kill the creature so that it slides to a stop inches from the guy.

And it’s strongly implied that this lesser character’s weakness of “needing his father’s approval” is what leads to his horrible death. The movie’s implied moral statement is “anything that makes you weak makes you worthless”. Things like feelings other than murderous rage, not being a Spartan, and having a disability.

The leader of the Spartans, who embodies the butt kicking principle to the utmost, should at least be able to duplicate the dead loser’s killing shot from what, twenty feet? Right? This is for the win, leader dies, army falls apart.

Failure = 100%

I don’t watch “butt kicking” movies to watch the heroes lose. I watch to see the good guys inflict major hate and discontent. That’s what my subconscious primitive is paying to see.

I’m riding high on a tide of musical euphoria. My new, favorite band is suddenly the hottest, coolest thing around. I see them in TIME magazine while I’m waiting for a haircut at my family barbershop. Their videos are playing on MTV a lot. Friends at college are blasting tunes from the Joshua Tree at night while we all hang out and just nod our heads to the riffs of the Edge playing his stuff. My girlfriend at the time gets a copy and we play it in her car while we’re driving around. There are states of mind that even to this day, songs like “Running to Stand Still” and “Mothers of the Disappeared” can conjure in me, taking me back to feelings and memories that resonate deep in my pond.

Along comes “Rattle and Hum”. This is an album that garnered some critical backlash, and rightly so to a certain extent. U2 was seen as trying to ingratiate themselves with other great musical performers, and perhaps acting too big for their britches. Bono’s soap boxing comments on the album during certain songs come to mind. This is where I started to hear complaints about Bono’s sanctimonious attitude, which at the time I felt was correct, but a lot of times I felt the people expressing those opinions were also motivated by jealousy. I saw the album as simply another U2 live album, about which I had a theory I believed at the time.

Looking back, it was pure delusion, but at the time I honestly believed that U2 came out with a “live” album between all their normal, regular albums. They used the “live” albums as an in-between artistic arch-stone. After Boy, October and War you had the live album Under A Blood Red Sky. Then They did the awesomely spiritual Unforgettable Fire. After that came Wide Awake In America, another live album. Followed by the supremely stunning masterpiece of Joshua Tree. So Rattle and Hum was just the next, natural “rest stop” album. The next album would, of course, be even more amazing by all logical standards.

So I ignored a lot of the criticism of Rattle and Hum, because in a sense I thought it was an in between project. If they were acting high and mighty, I felt U2 had a certain right to. What rock star wouldn’t want to take their rightful place with all the other legends, now that they’d hit the big time? At least that is how I looked at it. And I thought a lot of the music on Rattle and Hum was pretty good. I’ve never liked covers, so I didn’t care for songs like “Helter Skelter” – I have yet to hear anyone equal the Beatle’s original. But with songs like “All I Want Is You” and “Silver and Gold” sending me to the happy place, it was all I needed to tide me over.

I went through a lot of changes in the years I waited for the next album. I was struggling with my life’s purpose, romantic and academic failures, and I was developing the foundations of the person I would become. A rough time for me, you could say. Into this came Achtung Baby, the dark U2 album. At first, it was so different from anything U2 had ever done I was stunned. There’s a point in some great albums where you keep listening and the magic shoots you into space. You realize you’ve redeemed some unknown part of your soul from ignorance. It’s tough, though, because that moment is the same as the heartbreaker albums that you listen to, hoping the pieces will click together. And instead you give up and never listen to that album again.

With Achtung Baby, I discovered sonic secret doors and multiple meanings in every listen (and still do, to this day, though not as often). Being in the depths of despair, this album got me through some troubled periods just because it was so exhilarating to hurt and listen to music that hurt with you, or twisted with you through the grinder. There would be other “dark albums” in my life, but none so mysterious and elusive, loud and cool, or right to the core as this one would end up being for me. It’s very likely the album played a part in helping me graduate from college.

I’ll concede that Joshua Tree is the better album, but I’ll choose Achtung Baby every time. It’s associated with personal moments and inner depths in a way that can never be repeated or experienced again. It’s unique to me and I never get tired of listening to it. People who have experienced this kind of bonding with an album are fortunate (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) to have lived life like this, even for a short time. You could tell me Achtung Baby stinks, is overrated, and lacking talent and I couldn’t agree or disagree with you. When it’s this personal, there’s no right or wrong answer.

This album sustained me for a long time. Before I knew it, the time had come for the next “in-between” album. Zooropa came into my life during a moment of transition that was particularly tough for me. I found the occurrence a meaningful one because I considered this an interim album, even though it wasn’t “live”. It worried me that it was an actual regular album, but as a lot of the material came out of the dense creativity of the previous one, I looked at it as the standard “in-between” fare. A good one, mind you, as I enjoyed just about every song, and considered my experience of the album a spiritual one. If the “rest stop” album was this good, the next regular album would be even better than the last. Could even such an album exist? What would it be like? For now, I reveled in Zooropa and it sustained me through the beginnings of a dark trial in my life.

The funny thing is, I still hadn’t seen U2 in concert. And I still hadn’t bought and listened to October. There were gaps in my fandom, for various reasons having to do with limited mobility and funds. My maturity level had not developed in certain areas, but that is a tale for another time. For now, I was riding a U2 high.

I had no clue how apocalyptic the next album would be, nor how far my projections would come down.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch I’m nursing my shocked and battered brainstem. I have to work on putting the latest UFO girl investigations a little more, as I had to go to some rough places to gather my evidence. The Klingon patrols seem more aggressive of late, and everywhere I look, the radioactive mutants are shooting sparks at any evidence of human consciousness.

So what I gots is a measely linkdump for this rainy, supercharged non-firey Beltaine kind of day. Rather than focus on May Day labor struggles and history-of-beatdown stuff, I felt I’d be better off meditating on the fun. Always good is an insanity-point inducing musical number from an old classic, a visual journey into humanization, mockery of the drones as stupid as it is possible for a person to be, and reminders that people do stuff for creativity and relax-enjoy free of coercion.

• The landlord’s daughter from the Wicker Man
• Cloud from the anime collection Robot Carnival
• Spot the Loony from Monty Python
• An enjoyable May Day Parade in Minneapolis

Just the other day in the news, I read that the Joshua Tree that was featured in the photo used for the cover of U2’s “The Joshua Tree” fell over and gave up the ghost. I found the item a meaningful coincidence that came my way. For a long time now, U2 has been wobbling downhill musically. To read the tree fall over is a sign from the beyond that my favorite rock group has passed on creatively.

Like the Rolling Stones, REM, and a lot of other big dude groups that have signed huge contracts to keep the meal ticket going, U2 has stopped making good music and is coasting on the sounds that made them famous. I’ve felt that way for a long while now, and it’s been a hard blow to take, to know that the group you identified with as a young man have sold out and lost the ability to make music that sends you to the next level.

Shortly after I read about the demise of the tree, I read a pretty good analysis by a comedian that sums up how I’ve grown to loathe the U2 stance. One day you wake up and realize you can’t look at the artists you looked up to anymore. That’s when you read the stories that reveal your heroes were always that way. You just didn’t know because they had control of the publicity, and they were so good you didn’t notice. Bob Dylan’s “My back pages” plays in the back of my mind on that one.

It just makes me mad. U2’s music was a defining part of my life for a long time. They were the first rock and roll band I found on my own time, that I searched out and bonded with using my own interest. There are other bands that I grew up with: Devo, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Grace Jones, and Bob Marley. U2 was mine, and not my folks.

It started in homeroom class during my freshman year. There was this girl doodling “U2” scrawls on her notebook, and I asked her what that was about. She told me they were her fave group and that she thought they would become hugely famous one day. I took that in and forgot about it for a while.

The next time I heard about them was later that year, with the release of “New Year’s Day”, which I thought was a pretty cool song. There were a lot of one hit wonders during the eighties that still bring me back to certain thought-processes even today. I can remember myself in the backseat of my folk’s car, listening to that song and thinking it had all the right sounds to make me like myself and what I was doing.

Later on, I heard a song called “Bad” that was performed live. This was during the Live Aid era, which I didn’t really get into, but the singer sounded familiar, and I liked listening to the song on the radio when it played. I thought it was really cool.

Enter 1987. I’m on the bus, and this dude who never liked me, for some reason we start to talk more. One day his attitude changes and I get the feeling he’s gone through some kind of personal change. He asks me if I’ve ever listened to U2, and I say not really. He loans me his copy of “War”, and says I’ll like it.

I listen to it that night, and it makes a huge impression on me. I listen to it over and over all night. I don’t get any sleep that night (and it’s a school night), I just keep listening and marveling at how the music seems to get me in the right place. I’ve found my favorite band, and it’s my favorite band.

The next day I give it back to my bus buddy, and say it was awesome. He nods and says he knew I would like it. I tell him I stayed up all night and listened to it, and I have to get my own copy. The school day is tough without sleep, but all I can think of is getting my own copy and hunting down any other albums U2 might have.

I pester my folks and eventually end up with copies of “War”, “The Unforgettable Fire”, “Under a Blood Red Sky”, and then “Boy”. I can’t get enough of the stuff, and U2 music becomes my newfound friend. It’s passionate, larger than life, and atmospheric in the way it gets into every crevice of my soul.

A lot of my friends don’t share my interest, and I encounter more than a few people who sneer at my devotion to such a “bunch of posing losers”, but I don’t care. I like the music, it speaks to me in this time and place. My musical interest doesn’t stick with U2, but it marks my first serious exploration, and from there I investigate other sounds. Sometimes I find good stuff, and sometimes I strike out. I can always fall back on old faithful.

I get posters, and I even want to be Bono. It’s an idolization, and that leads nowhere ultimately. For now, I have a short duration personal savior in the form of some famous dude who appears to embody what I don’t recognize in myself.

Right about this time, “The Joshua Tree” gets released. I remember listening to a Christian radio station, where the DJ went over each song on the album, and gave what I thought was a pretty good, non-denominational analysis of each song. The album is unbelievable because it seems to me so different from the stuff I’ve been listening to. I graduate from high school and get ready to go to college during the summer that my new favorite group hits the big jackpot and become rock and roll legends. It’s a good time to be a fan.

I acquire “The Joshua Tree”, and it just seems like I’m accumulating an arsenal of good music to send me to the happy place wherever I go. This is in the days of walkmans the size of tricorders that took four double A batteries and came with a strap for hot, over the shoulder action. Later on, I’d borrow a dorm mate’s copy of “Wide Awake In America” and go nuts listening to it. Just about anything U2 did I could listen to and identify with easily. Yeah, I’m hooked. Little did I know just how great it would get for me.

• Bye bye, Joshua Tree
• The sock is not impressed
• The first wave of goods
• I get serious about my interest

Okay, so I’m fiddling with my old Star Trek walkie-talkie communicator from 1976. Anything to get a bead on that UFO girl’s program. I can’t call in the request line if I’m not getting the program. And I’ve got a hall pass that expires when it’ll be least convenient if I don’t get the lead out.

I go through my tape collection for inspiration. There’s this one tape I have from way back in the day when I was listening to meditative exercises. The idea was the tape would guide me through some new age ritual to improve my life. I would read from a book of rituals and record my own voice so I could follow the directions at a later time after having first “trained” myself. The tape is noteworthy because somehow I managed to not only record my voice, but some radio station playing somewhere. The tape has this sixties music radio track going on in the background while I’m going on about relaxing and going to my happy place.

The relevance is that as I contemplate this odd tape of mine, the UFO girl show must be a similar kind of thing. A transmission capable of being recorded second-hand and listened to afterwards. All I’ve got to do is find a way to transmit the request so that it gets on UFO girl’s programming.

The Star Trek walkie-talkie isn’t working, even with a new double-a battery. So I pull out my ghetto blaster and hit record. I move the tape recording onto my computer courtesy of a good connection and the recording power of Audacity. I spice up the audio with some crummy sound effects so UFO girl will know I’m not just any old mutant or plain joe. I gots a request! I figure putting it out there on the internets, as a copy of a tape recording advanced technology will get me hooked up in no time.

Hey UFO girl, play some Skynard.

If you have any existence at all in the roleplaying game subculture, you heard about the recent passing on of one of its iconic figures.  In a nutshell, Gary Gygax was one of the people responsible for bringing the Dungeons and Dragons game into the mainstream consciousness.  There are many roleplaying gamers who feel they owe the existence of their hobby to the efforts of this man.  The passing on of the Mr. Gygax marks a generational shift in the hobby and a time for it’s middle-aged players to reflect on the past.

I was ten years old when I first heard about the game.  It seemed like one of those strange, goofy things nerds do and I paid no attention to it.  My folks often went to hobby stores to get materials for their art projects.  The kind of local hobby stores that would later be replaced by big chains like Michael’s.  These sorts of places were the only stores you could find Dungeons and Dragons materials at first.  Later on, they started to crop up in book sections of department stores and in places that sold model kits.

While my folks did their shopping, I’d examine the shrink-wrapped modules and read the rulebooks.  I’d stare at the lead figures and strangely shaped dice behind glass counters and wonder what the game was about.  The illustrations always looked so exciting.  Who wouldn’t want to go adventuring in a fantasy world and kill monsters, win treasure, and save the town?

I decided to get my folks to buy one of the rulebooks and see if I could make anything out of the game.  I got my hands on the now rare edition of the Deities and Demigods book, which was a sourcebook of material for different kinds of divine pantheons you could use in the game, not a part of the rules at all.  I never got a handle on the difference between “Basic” and “Advanced” Dungeons and Dragons, and the rules for Hit points, Hit dice, and Saving Throws all sounded like a foreign language to me.

I got my folks to buy me Steading of the Hill Giant Chief next, in the hopes the game might be made clearer.  I’d gotten my hands on an adventure module, which showed me the kind of places a Dungeons and Dragons player might adventure.  There seemed to be a lot of monsters to kill and a lot of treasure to be had.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t play anything yet.

Eventually, I figured out I needed a “Basic” set sold in a box to obtain the bare minimum to play.  My folks didn’t want to shell out money for a “Player’s Handbook”, “Dungeon Master’s Guide” and “Monster Manual” just yet.  These things were all comparatively expensive at the time, and parents hardly can be expected to bankroll a product line for something this obscure and hard to understand.

The basic set came courtesy of my aunt at Christmas time, which included an introductory adventure module, a set of dice, and a basic rulebook.  I got my folks to buy me some lead figures – a barbarian swinging an axe, four tiny batwinged demon creatures, a pack of six giant spiders, and a large winged demon with a curved sword.  Were they what I needed to play?  How should I know, it just seemed like everyone needed lead figures to play somehow.

It took me a long time to learn how to play.  I was eleven by this point, and I would sometimes play “pretend” Dungeons and Dragons with my friends at school during recess, using information I’d read in the material as inspiration.  I certainly didn’t know what I was doing.  A group of my school friends tried to start a regular meeting at the local library to play every weekend, but that was scraped.  My cousins were playing.  A neighborhood boy down the street was buying materials and trying to figure out how to play.  Everywhere I looked there were pockets of people adopting the game and talking about it.

Nobody I knew seemed able to actually play without cheating.  It was popular to make powerful characters up in the game and just loot the adventure modules.  I remember me and a friend spent an entire night going over the Deities and Demigods book, saying we killed powerful gods and took their stuff to divide up amongst ourselves.  I’d take Zeus’s shield, and he’d get Apollo’s bow.  The goddesses we just took captive for our imaginary harems, though we hadn’t even hit puberty yet.

I wouldn’t start playing the game with someone else seriously until high school.  That marks for me the development from fantasy wish-fulfillment to actual hobby gameplay.  I’d spent countless hours making up dungeons with monsters and treasures.  I had a subscription to Dragon magazine and so knew all the latest rules changes and alternatives.  I had even picked up other games that were starting to join the available list of playable hobbies.

I changed from a kid that spent a lot of time outdoors to a mostly indoors, introverted kid.  I spent less time drawing and more time writing and re-writing my fantasy worlds.  Video games were becoming huge around this time, which further contributed to my psychological change.  Going through puberty, I changed the way I entertained myself and the focus of my life energies went down a completely different path.  The results of that transformation would resonate through me for many years to come.

Eventually, I abandoned Dungeons and Dragons for another game.  The development of my intense study and play of roleplaying games has borne strange fruits and taken me through some rather dark dungeons of the psyche.  The human beings who find themselves engaged in this hobby are of an interest that speaks of both a damning statement on humanity, and unexpected hope for the future of the planet.  It’s still too soon to call.  The accusations of “deviltry” by some sections of the population are not entirely without merit, though it is wise to remember people can become possessed by anything.

It’s hard to imagine where I’d have ended up as a person without the influence of Dungeons and Dragons on my life.  The hobby has been a major part of my personal development, so if it hadn’t been there, I don’t know what could have replaced it.  I’ve been a part of a geek subculture that has grown to become a participant in the mainstream entertainment industry.

I’m moving into middle age and it’s midlife crisis realignment.  Perhaps as a result, I’ll find out about the part of me I didn’t develop by going down this path.  I won’t be abandoning my interest in roleplaying games, but I don’t need them as much as I used to.  I’ve been rolling dice for thirty years now.

There’s definitely a psychological change going on with me with regards to gameplay.  So I find the passing on of Mister Gygax as a synchronistic event.  It’s personally meaningful in that it means the foundations of my interest in the hobby have undergone a change and are passing on.  That frees up a lot of life energy for new pursuits and allows new interests to take hold of me.  I’m curious to see what the next year will bring.

• The Deities and Demigods book
• Hill Giant action
• The basic rulebook
• An introductory module at last
• Advanced module of death

My quest for UFO girl has been going nowhere.  Other than the one initial sighting report, I’ve been coming up zeroes.  The one-eight-hundred line has been a complete bust.  Not surprising really, as where does one look consciously for what is dwelling in the dark shadows of human consciousness?

Since I’ve been trying to think and nothing’s happening, I had to call up my old friend the Dark Goddess and see if she might not have an angle.  Had to leave a message, which was no surprise.  She can be hard to get a hold of.

I go through my piles of papers, as I’m looking for material I can use for my posts.  I really need to throw some of these boxes away.  I’ve been fishing in the seas of the unconscious for a long time and it’s a little daunting to see all this flotsam collected for purposes that I might not see fulfilled in my lifetime.

A newspaper comes out of the pile, with a note in invisible ink attached to it.  I use my decoder, and it’s a message from the Dark Goddess.  I freak out a little, as it’s not out of the question that she didn’t get back to me because she’d already done so.  I imagine she was sitting by the phone, listening to me leave my message and giggling to herself.

So, message tells me I should check the newspaper out because it’s got a clue.  I read the newspaper, and it’s a program schedule from my college days, for the local college radio station I did shows for.  Back when I was a DJ.  The title of the schedule is “Beyond the gottamned living end”.  Here are some excerpts from my show blocks:

Friday 11:00 – 12:00 Reverend Paul – Wacky Fun, Room tooty.
To help crazy inbred maggots

Friday 5:00 – 7:00 Extra Confession With The Reverend – Crazy Uncool
To appease the Chaos Gods.  Only this station supplies them with the rock and roll that will fill their hunger.

Saturday 12:00 – 1:30 More Redemption With Reverend Paul – Mega Mother
Hard core, heavy metal, Punk, Thrash, Death, and will take your requests.  Motorhead, Ozzie and Meatmen to help you digest.  When asked to comment on this year, Reverend Paul said, “Let’s just hit the toilets and start flushing.”

Maybe UFO girl has a radio or television program, where she transmits across the airwaves her show of doom.  Okay, then all I have to do is get me a device capable of picking up her show and tune in.  Maybe I can call in on the request line and get her to make a landing.  My mirage friend still needs a date, after all.  And my hall pass expires at some point.  Gulp, zoinks Scoob!

You need some light to see your shadow, though too much will make it disappear.  Too little light and all becomes darkness, and you can’t tell the shadow from the night.  Become disassociated from your shadow, and it might take off on its own.  Getting it back would require you to sew it back on, like in Peter Pan.  I’m thinking the shadow might feel safer coming out to play with the lights out.

I get the creeps so bad I experience a minor hallucination.  That’s when I feel the clutch of the dark and terrible figure responsible for all my night fears and anxiety.  I’m in the presence of a stupid, nasty figure of despicable character and rotten luck.

His first words are incriminations. Why did I take so long in coming? Don’t I know how lonely and miserable he’s been, skulking about waiting for me to pay my respects?

What’s the matter, I ask this bird-brained grail king of poor taste?

If I hadn’t been so bleeping self-important, he wouldn’t have had to resort to giving me the “phantasmagoria” treatment to get my attention.  He wants me to help him get a date with UFO girl.

Say that again?

My host starts telling me about this extraterrestrial “broad” he’s got a grotesque fascination for, and he wants me to help him find her so he can score.  He’s acquired an unhealthy collection of sighting information and pictures from the internets, and a used book store he skulks about in on Sundays, because he thinks “babes with books” are hawt.

I can’t believe I’m in the basement talking to myself in the dark with an imaginary psychic entity, but there it is.  This is turning out to be a weird night.

I catch a whiff of a cold earthy smell and am reminded of my garden (which is in winter pre-spring prep mode right now).  My host notices my interest and I listen to him expound about his one human passion, the growing of plants and the enjoyment of their cultivation.  This is an interest we have in common, and I tell him so.

He rudely scoffs at my amateurish “interest”, calling my efforts pathetic and feeble.  Well, he’s right.  So I ask him what might make me less worthless.  My host says its a waste of time to train the incompetent, but watching me gawk like a rube at his astounding knowledge might be amusing.

I get a brief mental tour of his night garden.  He shows me the process he uses to encourage plants to grow, in which one uses touch and voice to transmit a common spirit.  The stuff he shows me kind of freaks me out, and I can’t get it out of my head.

I promise to grow something night-related, specifically a moonflower, or two, for my host. I think it’s only appropriate that there be some physical representation between us that manifests our conversation.

He recalls an audio tape I made ten years back, of music that expressed a desire to know the devilish side of my personality. I’d forgotten all about The Crumb Star.  My host thought it was a jangling mix of mostly horrible music, but at least I made an attempt at talking to him.

My thought is that I need to contact the Dark Goddess and ask if she has any clues about where to find this UFO girl.  This sort of thing seems to be her sort of specialty.

With that clue, my host says I’ll find what I need when I return to the normal world.  I don’t know what he means, but I’m perfectly pleased to be of service.  I open my eyes and I turn the light back on.

I take it that for now I have the shadow’s permission.  I can walk the depths of the unconscious with reasonable confidence.   There’s still a haunted house party to arrange.

For now, I got me a hall pass.