Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 28 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

It was right around 7:30 PST on that first Sunday evening in May: I had procrastinated all weekend and had to start thinking about tomorrow’s lesson plans, but was on Facebook reading and commenting on my friends’ Status Updates instead.  The kids had been put to bed, but were making their nightly trips to the living room to complain of tummy aches and insomnia.  And our next door neighbor and my wife were at the front door exchanging stories from each other’s weekends as the dog jumped about in gleeful excitement.[2]

As I told the kids a second or third time that they’d better get back in bed before I count to three,[3] and I tried to listen in on the hushed conversation at the door, I began searching all the typical news sites – CNN, LA Times, Google News – for any information other than the simple fact that President Obama was scheduled to make an unscheduled announcement at 7:30 PST (10:30 EST).  There was speculation in response to the initial Facebook inquiry that Osama bin Ladin had been killed, but I could find nothing to confirm or deny this theory.  And this one post was the only mention of it that I saw on Facebook.  No one else, not even my more politically conscious friends, had posted anything about it.  I really, really wanted to turn on the TV to see what was going on – it was already fifteen minutes past the 7:30 announcement time – but the kids were still coming out of their room at regular intervals and my wife was still at the door.

My wife soon wrapped up her conversation with our neighbor and we double-teamed the kids[4] to get them back in bed.  I mentioned the President’s imminent announcement to her, so we flipped on the television and tuned in to the first available news station, probably MSNBC or CNN.[5]  The words “BREAKING NEWS” were in bold, white letters against a red banner just above the ticker at the bottom of the screen.  The talking head on the screen – not anyone I recognized; after all it was the Sunday night swing shift of a New York-based cable news broadcast – told us nothing we didn’t already know: the President had called, but had not yet given, an unexpected news conference to make an important announcement, which – according to several unconfirmed reports – was most likely that Osama bin Ladin had been killed.

As the 8:00 hour approached, we turned to one of the network channels in hopes that the news conference would happen soon and that we could then watch that night’s episode of one of our favorite reality shows.  Instead what followed was nearly an hour of stalling by the news anchor[6] who asked variations of the same four or five questions to three or four guest “experts” who were stationed at the White House, Pentagon, and other strategic locations in Washington.  The next hour was filled with speculation of what exactly the President would say, confirmation from unheard-of Congressmen and other government officials of basically irrelevant bits of information, expert analysis of the minuscule amounts of confirmed information and of the speculation by the other experts being interviewed, and repeats of the speculation and unconfirmed information for those just tuning in.[7]  But in the end, we knew little more than we did when we first turned on the television: the President was about to make an important announcement at any moment, that announcement was most likely that after nearly ten years of hunting him down, Osama bin Ladin had been killed by US military forces, and that the delay was likely due to the necessary preparations to make this a worldwide, and not just a nationwide, announcement.

Finally at about 8:40 PST (nearly midnight on in Washington), over an hour after the unscheduled news conference was supposed to begin, the news anchor had to cut off the analysis by the foreign affairs expert as the camera feed at the White House went live and President Barack Obama strolled confidently down a red carpet toward the podium and microphone.  At the start of his nine-and-a-half minute address, Obama confirmed what we were all waiting to hear: Osama bin Ladin, the mastermind behind the Horror[8] of 9/11, and been killed by American soldiers.  Few details were given; the information he presented about the intelligence leading to the raid and the actual covert operation – apparently the Pakistani government did not even know we had entered their country to take out the target – was all on a very high level of vague abstraction.  He praised the efforts and diligence of the intelligence agencies and military forces who, after nearly a decade on bin Ladin’s trail, finally brought the most wanted man in the world to justice.  He gave his heart-felt condolences to the families of those affected by the Horror and reminded the nation and the world that their pain and suffering has not been forgotten.  And finally, he reminded Americans that the death of this one man who had declared war on this country by using our own airliners as weapons against us did not mean that the War on Terror was over, and that we must continue to be vigilant in the protection of our people and our home.  Then, as quickly as he walked up to the podium to make the announcement, the President turned around and walked back down that red carpet and out of the camera’s sight, with a little more swagger than on his approach.

The end of the announcement brought back the network news anchor, who offered a summary of the speech we had just finished watching, speculation into exactly how the operation in Pakistan went down, and live footage of gathering crowds of Americans who took to the streets of Washington – and presumably just about every city in the country – to celebrate the death of our worst enemy.  In these video clips, celebrants waved flags, gave hugs and high-fives, and could be heard chanting “USA!  USA!”[9]

At the top of the hour, regularly scheduled programming resumed.  As we watched our show, my wife had Facebook open and recounted the responses that began to pour in.  One friend wrote about neighbors who were driving up and down the street honking horns and yelling out of the windows of the car.  Others posted and reposted patriotic axioms.  Some of our church friends were quick to post reminders of the “appropriate” Christian response; that we ought to feel satisfaction in justice, but not rejoice in revenge.  Several friends showed their newly reborn patriotism by changing their profile pictures to pictures of our flag or bald eagles.[10]  What better way to say “God bless America” than with illegally copied and uploaded photos and trite patriotic quotes that are fewer than 400 characters?

That night, as my wife and I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come, an odd mix of emotions began to settle over me as we talked about this historic event.  I think we had both breathed an internal sigh of relief as we felt a bit of closure.  The Horror had changed our nation and our lives forever, and that night’s announcement gave a sense that one chapter in this narrative was finally over.  Honestly, I was skeptical that this day would never come, that this announcement would never be made.  Nearly a decade had passed since that September morning, and it appeared – at least to the public eye – that the trail had grown cold and that bin Ladin was more likely to die from old age than from a Special Forces’ bullet.  So I expressed a bit of pride in our armed forces and in their tenacity and determination that had brought this day to pass.

But these passing events also brought a rather unsettled feeling for both of us.  With this news came a flood of questions: What does this mean for our future? Are we actually one step closer to real victory in our War on Terror?  Is our country truly safer now than twenty-four hours ago?  Or will this merely inspire a new wave of attacks, perhaps on a much smaller, but just as effective scale? What’s to stop some pissed off Al-Qaeda sympathizer from getting up the next morning and putting on a suicide bomber’s vest under his sport coat as he heads off to work and exacts his own form of revenge?  Did Al-Qaeda have contingency plans set for when or if this day would ever arrive?  What dastardly plots would fill the headlines in the days and weeks to come?  Under the surface of pride and closure lay an uncertainty that would sit heavy as we dozed off to sleep.

By the next morning, the jubilant patriotism had turned to sarcasm and cynicism.  Last night’s statements and Status Updates of support for our troops and our Commander-in-Chief on Facebook had turned into bin Ladin jokes, things like “Waiting for [Donald]Trump to ask for the death certificate,” “I guess bin Ladin shouldn’t have tweeted ‘just chillin’ with the homies at my compound in Pakistan,”[11] and “bin Ladin: all-time hide-n-seek champion, 10 years.”

Later that next day, and into the following week, our collective cynical side began rearing its head.  Questions about the President’s timing and other circumstances surrounding this announcement filled the airwaves and cyberspace.  Was Obama trying to capitalize on this event for his own political gain and to help bolster his reelection bid in eighteen months?[12]  Did the fact that we found and killed the Horror’s mastermind somehow justify the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used to obtain the leads that led to his death?  Was the GOP simply bitter that a Democrat was the one to make the announcement?  It seems we can’t simply revel in the fact that the good guys won one this time; we have to wonder about motives and question the intentions of our elected officials.

It certainly didn’t take long for the true post-modern-Gen-X American spirit to come out, one that celebrates our victories and will keep us strong even through our darkest days.

After topping off the gas tank, I was headed down the freeway toward Skylight Books in Hollywood.  Some forty-five minutes later I found the store, circled the block after seeing Vermont Avenue lined with parking meters, and found an unmetered open curb about a half mile away.  I grabbed my TPK and notebook, and walked back toward Skylight.  Walking past several sidewalk cafes, I turned into the most incredible indie bookstore I’ve ever set foot in.  I was – I thought – a few minutes early, so I decided to browse around a bit.  Something about the dark, rustic wooden bookshelves up against plaster and brick walls made any book on them at least four times cooler than it would be on the shelves of a big chain bookstore.

A few minutes after 2:00, I walked over to the information desk to ask about the event.  I didn’t see the type of pre-release-party preparations one would expect to see right before the start of such an event.  Was I in the right place?  At the right time?  I hesitantly inquired about when and where the party would be happening.  The woman sitting there had a rather perplexed look on her face as she told me that I was in the right place, but that the event was not until 5:00.  I was three hours early.  Apparently I was misinformed by the Facebook announcement I had received several weeks ago.  The woman at the info desk gave a sympathetic smile as she told me there was a movie theater next door.  I thanked her and walked outside to think over this turn of events and to make a few phone calls.[3]

My original plan was to attend the party that I thought was scheduled from 2:00 – 5:00, and then meet an old friend for dinner afterward.  But now… should I hang around for three hours and still go to the event?  It would be a long wait, but having spent over four dollars per gallon to fill up my car, I didn’t want to just turn around and drive home.  And with the event starting at 5:00, that would mean a much later dinner than I had planned.  My already tired muscles were starting to stiffen up from helping load and unload a 22-foot moving truck just a few hours before.  I ducked into the quasi-alley a few doors down from the bookstore and came up with a plan: I would hang out in Hollywood until the party, but call my friend to see about postponing our dinner plans until later in the week.[4]   I called my wife to let her know, then texted my friend to let him know that the plans had changed.  He was very understanding.

Entering the store for a second time, I felt a great deal of shame over having a second job at a big chain bookstore.[5]   But if I kept my head down and avoided eye contact with the clerks, perhaps no one would catch on.  I walked up and down the narrow aisles absorbing the quirky, artsy ambience of the place.  A journal notebook with “HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE” in block letters on the front cover was the first item to catch my eye.  I later noticed that they had properly shelved Stephen King’s On Writing in the “Writing Reference” section.[6]   There was a collection of poems by one of my favorite poets, Steve Kowit, which I have found only online.  Near the poetry shelf, lying stretched out in the window sill was Franny the cat, the store’s mascot.  I had to deduct a few “cool points” when I saw the complete Twilight series and several Ellen Hopkins novels on the Young Adult shelf, but those points were regained when I found the Freaks & Geeks Complete Scripts Volume 2 on another shelf.

At least an hour passed as I examined each title on each shelf, then I left the store a second time to see what else Vermont Ave. had to show me.  About three blocks away, past several posh boutiques and swanky sidewalk cafes was a Starbucks.  A cold drink and an air-conditioned lobby seemed appealing, given the heat of the afternoon.  Inside I ordered a venti iced tea, found the one empty chair, and settled in to read The Pale King.   The time passed rather quickly as I distractedly read about ten pages of chapter two.[7] At 4:45, I left my comfy chair and headed back to Skylight.

In the time since I left, the staff had decorated the store for the party.  Behind the “stage” area, which consisted of a metal podium and a microphone, was a very cool streamer made of assorted tax forms and giant King of Clubs playing cards.  One table had an assortment of Wallace books along with staff-picked “if-you-like-Wallace-you-might-like-these-books-too” books; another table was graced with bottles of wine, cheese and crackers, and other delicious snacks.  Several folding chairs were set out, and a small crowd had already gathered.  I grabbed a chair toward the back and anxiously waited for the festivities to begin.

One of the clerks stepped up to the microphone and, after the necessary sound check, welcomed the crowd of about twelve to Skylight Books to celebrate the release of The Pale King.  She previewed the festivities for us, which would include a recorded reading from Brief Interviews by Dave himself, followed by an open mic time when celebrants could read their favorite passages from his works.  Also in her introduction were at least three invitations to enjoy the refreshments set out on the table.

After the welcome and introduction, she played the seven-minute recording of Wallace reading “Death is not the End.” [Click here to listen to the recording]  This story had slid to the back of my memory, overshadowed by some of the more widely discussed stories contained in BI.  It seemed an odd choice at first, but then it all started to make sense and listening to it turned into a rather poignant and moving experience.  The story really isn’t a story at all, but rather the description of a washed-up former Poet Laureate sitting poolside drinking iced tea and flipping pages of a magazine.  What struck me first was the overly monotone tone of Dave’s voice as he read.  I wouldn’t call him the most dynamic or emotional reader or speaker, but his tone was – for lack of a better word – boring as he was reading the non-story of the boring non-life of a formerly great writer.

It was in pondering the title within the immediate context that I was moved emotionally.  The word “unfinished” in the description of The Pale King looms ominously as a reminder of tragic end to Dave’s life.  I don’t know of a Fantod out there that doesn’t consider this book a gift, but it is bittersweet in the receiving.  We were all gathered to celebrate the gift he left for us.  But he wasn’t able to finish the work he started, so we will never see the novel in its completed form, as he intended it to be.

But, as the title of this beautifully selected story reminds us, his death was not the end.  Not for his work.  Not for his legacy.  Although his death left a hole in the hearts of many and a void in our literary landscape, his death was not the end.  His death came – in the minds of so many – far too early, but at least he never an end like the washed-up Poet of his story.  And besides, he left behind a number of gifts: David Lipsky’s 300+ page transcript of his five-day interview of Wallace during the Infinite Jest tour, his senior philosophy thesis, and now The Pale King.  Even in the midst of our sorrow, we have cause to celebrate.  His death was not the end.

After a moment’s pause, E—[8] stepped up to the microphone and read the stinkin’ hilarious segment from Infinite Jest, “Mario Incandenza’s First and Only Even Remotely Romantic Experience, Thus Far.”  I have not read much of IJ, and don’t know where this scene fits into the overarching narrative, but the lively, joyous reading made me really want to give the book another try.[9]

E— was followed by C—, who read a snippet from Everything and More, Wallace’s non-fiction work about the history of infinity.  The book sits on my shelf, but if there is one book in Dave’s bibliography that scares me more than Infinite Jest, this one would be it.  Anything by Wallace requires utmost concentration to unwrap and unravel, and that is when he writes about things I do understand.  But I haven’t taken a math class in fifteen years – and it was only College Algebra – and I got a C for the semester.  So I’d imagine that 90% of Everything and More will just go straight over my head.  But what I did hear in C—‘s reading was Dave’s very distinctive voice.  I didn’t understand a word of it, but I could tell from the start that he had written it.[10]

Next was B—, who read a short passage – the exact part escapes my memory – from Brief Interviews and then shared with us an original poem.  Then J— read a darkly affecting segment from the “Octet” chapter from the same book.  Both captured that raw depiction of humanity that is the signature of Dave’s fiction writing.

While they read, I thumbed through a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again to find something to share with the group.  After the applause for J—, I walked up to the podium to read the first few pages of the title essay.  This had been my introduction to Wallace.  By the end of my first reading of that chapter, I was hooked.  This being my first DFW event, I wanted to share with the others in the room the words that won me over.  I struggled and stammered my way through the text, exceeding my two-minute time limit.  After placing it back on the display table, I returned to my seat with the feeling of officially being initiated into the Fantod community.  I have been reading and writing about Wallace’s works for almost two years now, and I have been a semi-active participant on the Wallace-l discussion board for over a year, but this moment felt like a true rite of passage.

The emcee took the mic after I sat back down.  She capped off the open mic time with a reading from The Pale King, then gave another invitation to enjoy the refreshments on the table as we hung out and enjoyed each other’s company.  There were a few minutes of awkwardness as we strangers introduced ourselves.  But we soon found common ground in the books we have read and loved.  Given the reason for our celebration, the topic of our conversation quickly turned to our Man.  Our favorites of his stories and essays.  Our common friends on Wallace-l[11] and the experiences we’ve shared.  And the few who had the privilege of meeting or corresponding with Dave shared stories of his kindness and graciousness.[12]   We stood around talking for almost half an hour, sharing and laughing and celebrating the writer and his words that have left an indelible mark on each of us.

[1] I never saw an actual thermometer that Saturday, but it must have been close to 90° by noontime.  I spent the morning helping my in-laws pack and unpack a moving truck as they were moving out of their house of 34 years and downsizing into a mobile home.  They normally have a pretty accurate indoor/outdoor thermometer in their dining room, but of course this was in a box labeled “dining room” that was, at the time, who-knows-where.  All I know is that I sweated more that morning than I had in months and that each of us on the moving crew complained at least fourteen times about how my father-in-law picked the hottest day of the calendar year for the big move.  My best estimation is the actual temperature was somewhere around “pretty damn hot.”[back]

[2] I realized that it is probably considered uncouth to bring a book purchased elsewhere into a bookstore, and that there would be plenty of copies at the store, probably ones that could be borrowed to follow along should someone be reading from it.  But I wanted to have my copy with me.[back]

[3] Even though I was in the heart of Los Angeles – the proverbial birthplace of obnoxious cell-phone-talkers – I could tell that pulling my phone out in the middle of this store would draw the look of death from booksellers and patrons alike.  This was way too cool of a bookstore to even think of committing such a sin.[back]

[4] It was the start of my Spring Break, so my schedule was pretty flexible for the next seven days.[back]

[5] And my Rewards Membership card in my wallet felt like a fifty-pound in my back pocket.  I would have taken it out and set it ablaze as a grand display of repentance, but I like my 40% discount on books and beverages from the café.[back]

[6] It seems obvious, but my big chain bookstore employer puts it with the rest of his books in the horror section.  Why?  After nine months on the job, I still don’t know.[back]

[7] Admittedly, a crowded Starbucks lobby is not the ideal place to read The Pale King, or any other work by DFW.  His is not casual reading that can be done in distraction-heavy settings; reading almost anything by him requires too much focus and attention.  With each turn of the page, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to reread every word my eyes were passing over.[back]

[8] I will refer to those I met by initial rather than by name.  I do this in part because I don’t want to be accused of misrepresenting anybody’s words or actions.  I also do it because I don’t remember (and didn’t write down) everyone’s name.[back]

[9] I began Infinite Jest about 18 months ago before I even had any aspirations of starting my Letters to DFW blog.  But my reading was halted about fifty pages in when I started having some health problems.  I had to drop almost all extra-curriculars and focus on getting healthy again.[back]

[10] Which made me a little less apprehensive about reading it in the near future.[back]

[11] We all spoke of our shared jealousy of those who were able to make the pilgrimage to Austin, Texas, to enjoy this momentous occasion with other fans at the Harry Ransom Center that houses the Wallace archive.[back]

[12] One woman shared the story of helping to arrange a speaking engagement for DFW at a local venue and having the chance to meet him and talk to him briefly.  She spoke of sending him a book – I don’t remember if she mentioned a title – and a thank you card.  He then sent back a thank you card for the thank you card, with notes about his favorite parts of the book she sent to him.  Is it any wonder so many people want him considered for sainthood?[back]

http://letterstodfw.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/there-must-be-a-12-step-program-for-this/

I thought you all would appreciate this.

Ryan

Fortunately, tight spots are a speciality in these parts.

The Bataan Death March from the Jeep to the building offered similar back-bumpered aphorisms: If It Flies, It Dies.  When You Only Have Seconds, the Cops Will Be There in Minutes.  This Vehicle Protected by the Second Amendment.  You Can Keep The “Change”: McCain Palin ’08.

Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.

Surely I’m not the only one wondering what I’m doing here.

The class was held inside the back warehouse of the rural power company, conducted over a backdrop of road signs and coils of cable.  We pulled Church-bingo style folding chairs off a cart and squeezed in to the semicircle formed by a hundred other chairs, all occupied with others from our region interested in obtaining a hunting license, the prerequisite for which was attendance and completion of this, a state-sponsored and volunteer-led weeklong hunting safety course.

I’m new in town and only here part of the time, and as such, haven’t yet managed to chisel away at the insularity.   I reek of city, evidently, and as I’ve since learned, country people have singular olfactory talents.  I don’t know how; I’m as filth-drenched as the best of them, and even more tattered, but they can spot me.

It’s the brain thing that shows up not unlike stigmata, or a ruddy breastpocketed letter A, or a lightning-bolted forehead:  I’m the sucker in the room whose attendance was spawned from a mental red alert thanks to the coupling of the words “free” and “class” in a flyer at the village supermarket.  They’re here for the promise of flesh between their teeth.

A disclaimer: I have no personal interest in hunting.  I don’t even eat meat (though not for sanctimonious reasons, so rest assured mine isn’t the voice of a PETA-inspired candid camera games of gotcha.  Let’s leave it at “you eat what you want and I’ll do the same”), and am the sadly self-admitted sort of animal person who coos at goats and rains from the eyes at the sight of limping birds.

But it seems a civic duty to know what’s legitimate running-around-armed-in-the-woods behavior and what’s not.  One doesn’t have to participate in an activity to be curious about it.  Which is closer to the real reason I’m here, a reason that doesn’t wave its hands in front of the old noodle until it has gone all the way down Retrospect Way. I’m fresh off a passel of catastrophe reading, book after book of environmental disaster and economic collapse, and it’s evidently started to weigh on me: if it should ever come to pass that I’m shooting raccoons to feed myself, I wanted to be licensed to do so.    Because, of course, when calamities collide and we’re left making raccoon stew for basic subsistence, the only enforceable civil servants will be the game wardens, checking stamps on one’s license.

Give me a break: I’m vegetarian and taking a class to get a hunting license; logic needn’t apply.

But let’s drift back to the class: the semicircle’s chairs are occupied by a surprisingly diverse group of people, when judged along broad strokes of gender and age.  An ardent boy of six-or-so is barely contained in his front-row seat, continually up and admiring the collection of long guns on display at a front table.  The backs of the chairs immediately in front of me are embellished with pink thongs that barely protrude through, attached to freshly graduated nyphettes, in their early twenties accompanying men much older, but about whom much more can hardly be said, because any reasonable mind (of any sexual orientation) positioned in bird’s eye view of pink thongs stays with the pink thongs.

The man in charge, introducing himself as Eric, has made one singular point obvious, if not by his brilliant orange vest, then by his proud and exclusive handling of the terrifying-sized arsenal at the front table.  Before beginning the class, before even introducing himself, he explains the one rule of the assembly:

“Whenever I say “What’s the Name of the Game?” no matter what’s going on, no matter who’s talking, no matter if I’m in the middle of a sentence, you’re to stand up in your place and shout, as loud as you can, “Muzzle Control!”  Let’s try it.”

He tries it.  I remain seated, obdurately, which goes unnoticed (thankfully).

For those unfamiliar with the patois: “muzzle control” refers here to the concept of never pointing your gun at anything you’re not willing to fill with lead.  Which sounds obvious, until you go hunting with the likes of Dick Cheney or actually try to handle a gun.  You might try it with a stick: pick one up and pretend it’s a gun– go ahead, nobody’s around to politically judge you.  Then walk around with it, put it down and pick it back up, pretend to load it, or clean it.  It can be difficult not to inadvertently let its barrel point right at the dog, the radiator, or the ceiling upstairs and the people dwelling in the apartment above it.  As such, the whole “muzzle control” principle is drilled-in early and often, and is generally accepted as the most important rule in any firearms safety training.  Which is why reducing it to a cheer seems offensive, if not fatal.

Again he shouts: What’s the Name of the Game?

I remain seated.

He assures us, for the first of what will be many times this week, that if we just follow his lead, we will all score 100% on the test to be administered at the end of the week, and we will all be certified to hunt this state’s woods just in time for deer season.

“Now, who here keeps a loaded weapon in their house?”  A few scattered and enthusiastic hands shoot up, before Eric’s resulting scowl sends them to discover sudden itches, stretches, and other more reticent gesticulations.  “There is absolutely no need to keep a loaded weapon in the home.”  For once, I’m starting to think this guy and I might be of like minds about something, a sensation so welcome that I have to reach up and stop my pupils from dilating to a place far beyond my head.  But he continues:  “here’s why you don’t keep loaded guns in the home.  Let’s say you leave your firearm lying around loaded.  And let’s say your wife, or your girlfriend, or your mother, comes in to do some cleaning, and pulls out her dust cloth to dust off your gun for you.  What might happen, if she’s doing a good job dusting your loaded gun, really getting into the finer spots, and reaches into the trigger guard?”

There are moments whose better endings, when mentally replayed, seem obvious to script, moments whose actual existence is an embarrassment on reflection.  Instead of standing up as a resident loudmouthed gender equality advocate speaking on behalf of half the room’s population, I was, shamefully, caught in the headlights.  Gutted and field dressed in disbelief that this attitude could still be present, much less vocalized, much less vocalized by an authority and representative of the state.  There were probably not a few lachrymal events due to the surprise, and probably no small amount of fidgeting, and not much else is remembered of that night, other than the ways in which I might’ve handled it better.

At the next evening’s class, which I attended only out of pure petulance, the gun table was fully loaded and covered with a new arsenal.  Eric began right away, spending thirty minutes presenting a piece from his collection and asking the group to guess what sort of action the gun possessed.  Again for those for whom this language is foreign: the “action” is the mechanism by which rounds are loaded into a chamber.  It’s either the Terminator or Rambo movies where a movable part is on the barrel of the gun is shoved back and forth to chamber a round, and instead of holding the firearm still and pushing/depressing a pump, Terminator/Rambo holds the movable part and shakes the gun in a cinematic display of bravado?  This is a “pump” action.  The kind where you break the barrel at a 90-ish degree angle with the stock of the gun and the shell pops out (and if you’re me, hits you in the forehead 75% of the time?)  This is a break action.  There’s a bolt action, with a little bolt which, when turned and slid back, extracts a spent shell and allows you to load a new one (n.b. snipers in the old war movies, if memory serves), before turning and sliding again.  Eric’s display includes lever actions as well, and a few that resemble those found in battered old mafia photos from 1940s Chicago.

There are others.  Handguns have revolvers and semi-automatic guns have other mechanisms.  Tanks have whatever tanks have.   But deer aren’t hunted with tanks, so Eric went on and on, with the same wormy six-year-old in the front row jumping out of his seat and his skin to answer (and get a closer look at) every piece presented.  I wasn’t sure why being able to identify a specific type of action on a foreign firearm was important to being able to safely kill a deer, but given that I don’t plan to kill a deer, it’s not a problem I had to solve.  The best scenario I could imagine was something like this: I’m walking through the forest in the off-season.  The Bad Guys here are engaging in some poaching-type activity (by rote, see, since it’s the off-season), and I’m going to be Rambo, or the Terminator, or better, Ellen Ripley.  So the bad poacher empties his load into the woods, and I have to somersault, caterwauling off a tree branch and landing with a foot to his head in a go-to-jail blow to his consciousness.  Now, I can’t do this unless I know what his hands are up to during the re-chambering process, which I’ll only know if I can identify the action on his gun,  So it may not help me with the deer hunting I’ll never do, but my good Samaritan side has to know this stuff.  Fine by me.  I’ll learn it with the six-year-old, but without his enthusiasm.  Unfortunately, none of the firearms on display are poison dart guns, so this kid keeps at it.

This, as it happens, is how every night’s first half of time is killed.  There’s a different spread of weapons presented every day, and it’s not unlike spending a week with a professional chef and ingredients of your fridge; god knows how he thought to spice things up using the same hunk of moldy cheddar that’s been in there for six months, but it’s different every day, and by the end of the week, I know what to look for to spot a bolt or a pump, and my visions of saving the world from evil poachers now involve a full gymnastic swing on the tree branch followed by a full-twisting dismount before delivering the knockout kick (identifying the action so effortlessly buys me the time for such physical ostentacity).

The second half of each evening’s class is Movie Time.  If you took a driver’s education class in the US in the 1980s or 1990s, you likely were subjected to one of life’s most sadistic of cinematic experiences.  The firearms safety analogue isn’t much different.  In one example, a pair of adolescent pals (boys, of course) enters the woods to shoot cans with their father’s rifle, which they’ve of course appropriated without his knowledge.  We all know how it ends (and for those who don’t, one kid never returns from the woods Unleaded, as it were.  Never.), but we, Eric’s class, are meant to shout out at will the behavior that gets them into trouble:  they should never travel into the woods without adults knowing what they’re doing!  When walking through the woods, the carrier should always keep the Muzzle Controlled!  One shouldn’t have his finger (yes, his) inside the trigger guard, until ready to fire!  Just Say No (rather, if one is not comfortable with one’s situation, graceful backing down can be done (without feelings of emasculation))!    Just because it sounds like a turkey, it doesn’t mean it is a turkey!

The next night, a different movie but the same:  One shouldn’t drink beer while hunting!  One should respect a property owner’s “posted” signs!  One shouldn’t go hunting in a group so large that one cannot possibly maintain a line-of-sight on a target without also being within line-of-sight of fellow hunters (the Cheney problem?)  Ad ridiculaneum!

We suffer through a week of this, and it’s a week whose daily trips to the class are immediately followed by trips to the warmly obliterative bar, and you only have to make it from Monday to Friday for a state-sanctioned test to be administered, and for the entire ordeal to be behind you for life.  And, as is wont to happen, Friday does come, eventually.  And with it, test day.

The test, we’re told, is multiple choice.

The innately, almost uncannily adept test-taker in me, at this news, knows that this will be about as challenging as operating a new toothbrush.  But the subsequent enumeration resulted in what was hopefully not too audible of a wince:

“I’m going to administer this test a little different than what you’re used to.  I’m not going to be biased against those who don’t do well in testing situations.  Or those who can’t read.  There are a hundred questions on the test, and a hundred of you.  Now, we’re going to go around the circle, row by row.  I’ll read the questions and possible answers, and when it’s your turn, you tell me the answer.  And if you’re wrong, the class will correct you.  We’ll do this together, as a team.  That’s how hunting is done safely: when the group works together.  Do you understand?”

A sample question (recalled, admittedly, from memory, and maybe ever-so-slightly exaggerated for the sake of anecdote): “Your gun is jammed up and you’re not sure why.  Do you: A) first open the action to see if a cartridge dislodges, B) Shake it, or C) look down the barrel?”

And on it went, snaking through the rows amongst the literate and the not-so-literate.  On the rare occasion an incorrect answer was supplied, the group collectively groaned in the Amateur Night at the Apollo style, prompting immediate corrections until, as predicted, every last person in the room had one hundred correctly placed circles on one hundred choice answers.  And with that, we were told to keep our exam papers for future reference.  Participants under the voting age were given one final task: to deliver themselves to the local rock quarry the next morning and prove themselves capable of safely shooting a .22 caliber rifle without forgetting The Name of the Game.  Those of us who’d seen a few election cycles were promptly plied with Certificates of Completion and sent on our respective ways.  Bumper stickers were not distributed along with Certificates, a final blow.

Re-entering the world as license-ready hunters and huntresses, it was hard to miss the sight of the garbage can just teeming over with freshly discarded exam papers.  “Future reference” as exhibited here would have to be had in the continued hosanna for Muzzle Control.  But when Wild Boca season comes around, I’ll be ready.

___________________________________________________________

Miette Elm purrs through the world’s finest works of short fiction as creator and host of Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast (www.miettecast.com). With a distinctive lilt whose origins are best described as the result of continental drift, Miette began narrating books as a way to get under the hood of great writing to see how it’s made.

Sometimes, she’s also a writer.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 9 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 3 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 135kb.

The busiest day of the year was July 30th with 148 views. The most popular post that day was What is “Supposedly Fun Things…”?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were thehowlingfantods.com, facebook.com, letterstodfw.wordpress.com, mail.yahoo.com, and mail.live.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for disneyland tickets, supposedly fun things, old disneyland tickets, disneyland ride tickets, and disneyland coupon book.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

What is “Supposedly Fun Things…”? June 2010

The Man is Everywhere: I Was a Disneyland Grad Nite Chaperone June 2010

Encounters at the End of Main Street July 2010

A Morning with the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets: Some Thoughts on Nostalgia and Family July 2010
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No Matter Where you Go, There You Are August 2010
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Getting used to speaking frankly with a roomful of dark-skinned students about Standard Written English and the conspicuous disadvantages of growing up with dark skin in the inner cities of the world’s wealthiest English-speaking nation proved way more taxing than asking them to stop droppin’ their gs from the ends of words like speaking and getting. It helps to at least be brown. Which is part of the reason I found myself in New Jersey in the first place.

I moved East to pursue what faculty advisers assured me was a terminal degree, and started teaching at Sussex County College the same year. A friend and peer in my MFA program recommended me to the Chair of Humanities at Sussex, an intimidating Brazilian man with a title bound by impressive honorifics and crazy diacritics, who hired me to teach English at the sub-100 level. (These are classes taught by people who expect to be called Professor but possess only a BA in English or an MA at best, and are in many cases much, much younger than some of the students themselves.) Remedial English courses at SCC service large populations of black and Portuguese-speaking students (and I hesitate not to hyphenate black, because variations of BVE are more commonly spoken and a greater language barrier in class than your standard learners of ESL), students whose secondary educations in no way prepared them for the demands of academic inquiry.

 Plus trying to convince students who tag “Find the Tools You Need to Succeed at Sussex” banners on campus with slogans meant to imply various configurations of sexual congress that, while job interviewers and future employers expect correct punctuation, close attention to language is valuable for reasons beyond the strictly utilitarian. That they not only need these skills (for which they’ve paid me indirectly through the school’s system of bureaucratic disbursement) to get a job and make money, but should want to learn how to use language to express themselves fully as US and world citizens in ways other people will recognize. This rhetoric breaks down the nearer you orbit the ellipsoidal center of any Humanities Department, as administrative duties and fiduciary matters accrete persuasive  mass. For these and other reasons convincing especially to Deans and Chancellors, curricula at SCC gear more toward vocational, and very seldom liberal, educations. I hadn’t realized SCC was typical in this respect, if only because I didn’t understand the model.

 Turns out that 9 out of 10 community college educations are strictly vocational, and SCC was no exception. So I was expected to provide a kind of education I did not myself receive. My first entree into the professional sphere was far more poorly determined. (I graduated from a small school in downstate Illinois with a strong liberal arts emphasis and former Methodist affiliation. Dual degrees in ENG and ECON got me a job writing copy for Lynch Hangam & Sway, a Web design agency in far, far west Chicagoland. [As the agency’s Online Marketing Manager I managed the marketing needs of big-name clients like Kids Inc. and State Farm Insurance. I worked mostly with acronyms. Email and SEM, SEO plus basic HTML. Lots of absentminded QWERTY contemplation. My own corner office plus full name and OMM on a sign for reserved parking. The kind of workplace people dream of or see only in movies.] This was of course before I went back to school to start teaching. Which in retrospect means I left an incredibly low-stress, rather well-paying albeit not always rewarding 9 to 5 for a stipend and $500/credit hour, and tried to survive in one of the most expensive cities in the continental US.) I got the job at SCC when an adjunct just abandoned his class. Which sadly isn’t surprising (adjuncts gone AWOL, that is).

 Adjunct professors, by definition, can’t claim the kind of professional affiliation Full or Associate or Assistant professors can. We can’t really claim to profess anything at all. We can, at best, lecture part-time or instruct as an adjunct, i.e., teach to supplement whatever other income’s coming into the family household. Most I’ve found have a spouse and large debt; most of us end up in about the kind of financial straits you’d expect someone employed only every 15 weeks on a contractual basis. Which could make adjunct instruction sound less like part-time employment and more like some exciting, acroamatic world of fluid identities and very few Truths, of which I like to imagine Jean Reno a part, dispensing street-savvy tutelage to a young Natalie Portman at the rate of $500/credit hour. Of course, it’s never so glamorous, or gritty. But when I returned to the Chicagoland environs from which I relocated in the first place, I learned the closed-circuitry of HR departments in higher education the hard way.

 I’d all but signed a contract to teach two courses of what Dick Daley College (yes, the City names even schools after him) calls Developmental or remedial English, exactly the kind of courses I taught in NJ during grad school. But when my interviewers returned from a visit upstairs to clarify some administrative fine print, they informed me that, unfortunately, a new district-wide policy prohibited the hiring of applicants with an MFA. So my terminal degree actually prevented me from getting a job for which I’m otherwise qualified.  But of course I didn’t go to grad school expecting to find work.

 At least not at first (i.e., I didn’t expect to get a job right out of grad school and didn’t attend expecting any great increase in future job prospects). But after several revisions of the ol’ CV, plus way too many cold calls and let downs, I landed a gig teaching pre-credit courses at one of Chicago’s City Colleges.

 Part of the City Colleges’ hiring process includes a daylong orientation in different classrooms with identical desks and all the newly hired faculty kind of squeezing into the undersized seats, trying their best to look pleasant. C. 8:00 a.m. we meet with full-time faculty from our respective Departments to discuss departmental procedures, expectations, etc. Everyone in my cohort clutches white styrofoam cups with DD in orange and pink on their sides, the cups’. Dunkin’ Donuts is inexplicably popular here. Likewise misplaced apostrophes and a burger chain called Steak ‘n Shake (which extends only so far east as PA, I understand). No Wawas anywhere.

 The Chair of the Department of Communications Media and Theatrical Arts, of which pre-credit courses are inexplicably part, explains the school’s SOP when students show up late or upset or potentially armed. All of us adjuncts pretend to smile but manage at best only weak bruxist winces. Lots of covert expulsion of bodily gasses. Early AM light blasts the cinder block walls painted a pale shade of beige. An oddly aromatic, citrusy BO, also. The lot of us yawn asynchronously, but not from weariness or boredom. The Chair reviews basically verbatim the Adjunct’s Handbook and directs us to complete a “brief” online survey, before adjourning nearly four and one half hours later, for lunch.

 DD-induced tachycardia buzzes everyone through lunch (an Amerikaans feest at one of Uptown’s finest Ghanian grilles), except now everyone’s sleepy from yekeyeke or kelewele and the better part of a day’s worth of orientation and lectures. We have one last session entitled “Administrative Policies And Governing Practices of Administrative Governance, & You”, according to the half-page handout I have to read twice to believe. Why they’d reserve the driest and most hypnogogic talks until the lot of us are just about asleep anyway escapes me.

 The panel on APAGPAG do their best to make eye contact and keep our interest, but most of it’s midlevel admins reiterating info I thought we’d acquired during the web-based survey we were supposed to have already completed. No one seems to acknowledge this. The Dean of Instruction, a portly black man with no neck and a navy blue Bears tie that secures head to torso, has the same Ontarian accent (via S. Minnesota) as Vince Vaughn. It’s uncanny. The Dean sounds just like Match from Back to the Future as he introduces the school’s top IT guy, Mr. Vernon MacDonald. Whereas everyone else sort of slinks up in front and tries to breeze through their speech, Mr. MacDonald wheels out an A/V cart with overlarge IBM laptop from c. Bush Sr.’s presidency plus overhead projector. He flashes a grin unmistakably coprophagous. He’s in a tight-fitting button-down a denim shade of blue and fast approaching gerontological discounts on things like bus fare and movies. He unspools the cart’s power cord and plugs in the computer. He introduces himself as “Vern”. Apparently the Dean of Instruction doesn’t know Vern very well.

 Vern boots up the CPU and lets the projector’s lamp burn as he delivers verbally info that was, again, already reviewed in this morning’s brief online slideshow. It occurs to me that maybe nobody else actually completed that portion of this morning’s activities per our instruction. The projector’s beam catches mostly the blank square of screen in the middle of the room’s largest wall, but also illumines one half of The Dean’s raisinette face, contorted in the halogen beam. The Dean raises a hand and squints in the direction of Vern, who’s got his back to the panel and squats down in front of the AV cart’s power supply. Vern has the kind of male pattern baldness you see a lot of in certain Chicagoland regions with high concentrations of Orthodox Jews. Skokie, IL, e.g.

 The CPU and projector exchange information and project a digital copy of the school’s approved logo. The school’s full name materializes in a low-res resolve to the tune of some midi track probably pre-bundled with Vern’s PC’s HD. It becomes immediately apparent that Vern’s PowerPoint is the kind with corny sound fx and animated Clip Art that HS teachers tell you absolutely to avoid. None of the admins even blink. They’ve seen this before, probably already a couple times today. Sounds best described as ZIP! and PING! in cartoon italics emphasize the movement of poorly clipped bitmaps. The backgrounds change with every slide. Newly hired adjuncts to my left and right try their best to look not disinterested. The whole spectacle is immaculate. I’m two rows behind Vern and can see pink (the presentation) on the laptop’s LCD screen, but like lavender on the overhead. Likewise, the oranges look yellow, the reds rather orange, the whole color wheel’s off by a radial. Vern delivers a speech so well rehearsed, he uses no notes, nor even a glance at his own presentation. Which maybe explains his oblivious presentation of the speech.

 “Your syllabus must contain the word syllabus.” Vern projects enlarged PDF versions of course documents onto the screen, schedules and sample syllabi, copies of which we in the audience possess. I notice several misspellings and syntactical errors, things you’d expect people asked to supply sample schedules and syllabi to correct. Vern reviews alternatives to the most common file formats, and pronounces every letter of the acronym by which most people refer to Graphics Interchange Format. I can’t tell whether he does so for our sake, or says it like that on the regular. The sloppy sample syllabi give me both hope, and pause. Hope, because even experienced instructors lapse from time to time, and so maybe the Chair will exercise some administrative leniency when it comes time for my own personal one-on-one observation. And pause, for exactly those reasons.

 “Because you haven’t lifted the curtain yet,” Vern says, referring metaphorically to restricted files. An animated curtain accompanies the long-voweled sound of canned audience reaction. He’s obviously put a lot of work into this. I don’t know whether to feel offended because it feels like Vern here treats us like children or superior because Vern’s earnest explanations strike me as too step-by-step and simple, which means my employer’s veteran IT expert is less an expert on information technology than one of their novitiate employees, and really, then, the more childlike. Superfluous lags the veteran onstage, or something.

 E.g., Vern goes out of his way to explain a red asterisk that signifies a required field. This is info I take for granted as obvious. (I learned at Lynch Hangam that basic to your standard free-answer web form are fields which require completion and a few bits of code that check to make sure that every required field has a value. The coders and programmers and even design guys were real helpful in getting me used to the unfamiliar environs of LH&S. [The “Lynch” of Lynch Hangam refers to my mother’s youngest brother, a late ‘70s graduate of an East Coast Art School, VP and co-founder of one of the Web’s very first start-ups, dedicated Apple customer (post-Jobs and con Jobs), one titular third of Lynch Hangam & Sway, and my first full-time employer. Also my landlord plus housemate, but more on that later.] I ended up learning more at LH&S about the tech sector and business in general than from any of my undergrad ECON classes.) I don’t know how much any of my fellow new faculty hires learn from Vern’s presentation.

 The cart’s Harmon Kardon speakers make the obnoxious Microsoft sound for what Dave Wallace would’ve called a Windows boner. Not because Vern’s clicked something incorrectly or entered a bogus command; this is part of his PowerPoint simulation of a program called GreenSlate, something part- and full-time instructors alike use to facilitate online learning. One of GreenSlate’s more user-friendly functions is the ability to post documents for student consumption. It looks as though Vern has assembled screenshots from like fifteen discrete steps in the process and created a slide for each step. The demonstrative screenshots vary imperceptibly from slide to slide, since it’s mostly just menu and item selection, but the backgrounds change every time. Maybe he’s an IT expert after all: he’s managed to make a web tool for teaching remarkably more tedious. Plus, since he apparently prefers PCs to Apple, Vern must’ve learned how to operate the Print Screen function that has so far eluded my computational comprehension. So kudos to him.

 Nine or ten slides into the GreenSlate portion of Vern’s presentation, an Asian instructor (that is, an instructor who looks Asian or Asian-American; I have no idea what he teaches) cuts Vern off mid-sentence to correct something he’s said about something I surprise myself by not possessing the capacity to care less about. The sudden outburst startles one of the senescent instructors, about 3/4 of his way to REM sleep in front of me. The Asian man is mad gesticulative and doesn’t seem to hear a single thing Vern says. The Asian instructor’s English isn’t great, and I can’t say I understand what the fuss is about. Vern exhibits visible difficulty trying his best not to condescend. Nobody intervenes, which I think is weird. The spat ends with the men exchanging the ocular equivalent of mutual mephitic feelings.

 I scribble furiously in the margins of my orientation materials. I feel increasingly more decidedly pissed about being forced to sit through this old school IT guy’s shitty PowerPoint slideshow. It’s so shitty and old-school because the City Colleges don’t pay shit -can’t afford to pay- for some young tech guru fresh out of undergrad. The talented information technologists all gravitate to high-paying mobile programming positions in the private sector. Lucky ones find work in California or government. The luckiest end up in business for themselves. (My uncle started Lynch Hangem & Sway with a couple buddies from art school before the Web was even anything. The Internet had been around for decades however, and LH&S foresaw its emergent utility [literally; like electricity or cell service, something people need to use]. But what began as a small-scale operation in an office the size of a broom closet became a highly sought-after design boutique with offices on three coasts, 30+ employees and a five-story imitation Spanish hacienda on land the size of a small Baltic state. [After college I moved into the basement, or “Z Wing” of Casa Linchamiento, and in so doing avoided the old tech sector cliché of living in my mother’s basement {by moving into my mother’s brother’s}.])

 The words aye carumba pop up beside an unlicensed image of M. Groening’s B. Simpson.

One of the more vocal adjuncts interrupts Vern to open the floor to debate over preferred file formats. Proponents of Portable Document Format propound the deficiencies of Microsoft Documents. The availability of Acrobat’s Reader arises as an issue. The debate consists really of maybe two or three people speaking solely to themselves. There’s no clear consensus as to what exactly works best. Vern gets kind of excited and accidentally kicks the projector’s power cord’s plug from the cart’s power strip’s socket, killing the image overhead. Everyone acts at least mildly amused and Vern hams it up with a “whoops”. And this so clearly excites him, the audience and attention. I can’t imagine what it must be like when full- and part-time instructors invite Vern to deliver mid-semester time-consuming in-class demonstrations to hordes of disinterested undergrads, mostly young people light years beyond Vern’s IT expertise. It’s gotta be nice, or at least preferable, to present to a room of people conscientious enough to ignore, and even silence, their cell phones.

 Even so, I have to believe most of us in attendance today must feel a little foolish; here we are hired by people who trust us with the next generation’s educations, but don’t trust us to upload an image or access the school’s intranet. Or maybe the Chancellor and Deans really value their adjuncts, and so risk insulting our technological savvy in order to ensure everyone’s on the same page. Either way, it seems like they expect us to pay attention to someone who thinks he knows what he’s talking about, but doesn’t.

 And this is what it must be like: to listen to someone who thinks he’s a writer try to convince you that reading and writing are even worthwhile. I’ve not thought about my own classes this way, what I look like up there, careening around and scribbling notes on the board, speaking too quickly, trying my best to entertain their attention and also maybe teach something. Like deliver a lecture on sentence construction, direct class discussion, or attempt repeatedly to explain that grammar and spelling aren’t just boring sets of pre- and proscriptions, but systems of units that possess the ideas of action. That words can mean something. That I think it’s interesting that entertain means “to hold within,” and educate “to lead out.” That teaching is a contradiction. That I mean to inspire but not to blow smoke up their asses. To catch them before they choose to devote themselves to one thing in particular. I realize I’ve been unselfconsciously recording the room’s idiosyncrasies and now see this story emerge. Which means maybe Vern managed to make something mundane just interesting, despite his best efforts. That perhaps Vern’s presentation wasn’t so mundane in the first place.

 And Vern kicks the cord out again.

 I glance over at two new English hires I recognize from this morning’s departmental orientation. A woman who introduced herself as Julie from Boston looks really attentive and makes tiny affirmative nods, but doesn’t take notes and exhibits a sartorial savvy absent from everyone else in the room, yours truly of course excluded. A guy named Garry but who pronounced it like Gary explained earlier it’s a Gaelic thing. He sits and looks like he thinks about nothing, and does so very convincingly.

 The Asian man, who I hope to God teaches science or math, keeps speaking out about students’ persistent disinterest and lack of initiative and just general overall dereliction, without really any regard for students’ respective life situations, at which point the Vince Vaughn imitator interrupts and goes out of his way to reiterate the school’s stated concern for the unique situations and lives of its students. I imagine the Asian mathematician getting kicked out of some prestigious East Coast school for wildly inappropriate conduct. But then, that’s not fair.

 I realize the cheesy sfx ended maybe five slides ago, and that it’s not Vince Vaughn at all, but Billy Zane in Back to the Future.

 Vern ends his slideshow with vintage end titles and a flickering fin. He solicits a few questions and I realize just how many of the new hires speak ESL. Non-rhotic accents and non-standard emphases betray Southeast Asian and West African origins. Also, the weird tangy smell that sometimes accompanies a meeting of anxious people seems to have stuck around. Vern answers most of the Qs during the Q&A with crossed arms and variations on a theme of unawares. The room awakens, everyone stirs at least slightly. Way back in the back, a man in the northeast corner of the room sports an eye patch without any observable irony. He’s seated at the end of both his row and his column, with the patch facing the room. He’s the only thing touched by the last natural light. Overhead fluorescents relight the room and absorb the man and his patch from the light low and orange in early autumn’s evening.

_________________________________________________

Diego Baez is way busier than he thought he’d be.  He considers hip-hop mobsters at readrapright.tumblr.com.

In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus describes hell as a place of great suffering, of weeping and gnashing of teeth; a place of eternal torment and darkness.  In his one-act play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre describes hell as place of great suffering; not brought on by darkness or flames but by one’s fellow sufferers, epitomized by Garcin’s exclamation of “Hell is other people!”  My version of hell[1] is potential juror holding room at the Ventura County Courthouse filled with a couple hundred of my fellow citizens and very limited WiFi access.

I first received my jury duty summons in late May, which had me scheduled for duty the last week of June.  Since this would require me to miss a day of teaching summer school – for which I would not be paid – I sent in a request to postpone my service until the end of July, after summer school and family vacations were over.  A few weeks later, I received notification that I was to arrive at the Ventura County Hall of Justice promptly at 0800h on Tuesday, July 27.[2]

Unable to either create a flex-capacitor or fly around the earth really, really fast like Superman to speed up time and just skip over Tuesday, July 27, I tried to face the day with all the dignity and grace I could muster.[3] Having served jury duty once before, I tried to see the positive side of it; after all I got a whole day to read and write virtually undisturbed.  But even that thought couldn’t change my attitude nor take away the dread and trepidation with which I entered that day.

The events of Tuesday, July 27 are – more or less – as follows:

0600h. The alarm clock rudely interrupts my REM cycle and my right arm flails about in search of the alarm clock on my nightstand, finally turning it off after far too many annoying beeps.  Rubbing the sleep from my eyes and muttering a few swear words under my breath, I go into the bathroom to shower and ready myself for the day.

0710h. I kiss my sleepy wife goodbye, then grab my laptop case and head out to my car.  Upon starting the engine, I plug my iPod into my car stereo and listen to – for the first time after downloading it the night before – David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech[4] as I drive the nearly thirty miles along US Highway 101 to the Ventura County courthouse.

0800h. After parking my car in what I hope is the right parking lot,[5] I find the entrance to the Hall of Justice and join the line for the security check.  Unlike similar lines I have stood in at airports, this one moves very smoothly and I am soon emptying the contents of my pockets into what looks like a rather large dog food bowl that will go through the x-ray machine along with my laptop bag.  I have in my pockets the following items, which each time I reenter the building must be placed once again in the large dog food bowl and run through the x-ray machine:

1 Wallet containing driver’s license, insurance cards, credit cards, important business cards, rewards membership cards for a variety of local retailers, and sixty-one dollars in cash.

1 Set of car and house keys.

1 3^rd generation 8GB iPod Nano loaded with approximately 1100 songs, ten podcasts from The Onion News Network, two music videos, one audiobook (the aforementioned This is Water), and one Sesame Street video.[6]

1 LG CF360 Red cell phone.

1 Dose Maxalt-LT (hermetically sealed, legally prescribed migraine abortive medication).[7]

Approximately eighty-six cents in change.

0810h. After gathering my belongings from the dog food bowl at the end of the x-ray conveyor belt and stuffing them back into my pockets, I make my way into the holding room,[8] a large room of about 5000 square feet,[9] most of which is filled with row upon row of theater-style seating (rows of seats with shared arm rests between them).  There is a large counter up front behind which the two court clerks sit and check in the prospective jurors.  The back third of the room is filled with round tables instead of theater seats, and along the back wall – floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows – is a long table with numerous electrical outlets, obviously set up for people to plug in their laptop computers.  Outside those large windows is a beautiful grassy courtyard, at the center of which is a large, tiled, non-working fountain.  Even with overcast skies, it is a lovely view.  There are also two adjoining “business rooms” with small cubicles for use by laptop-toting PJ’s.

I join the queue in the center aisle to “check in” and in a few short minutes I am filling out my potential juror questionnaire that asks questions about my employment status and whether I am paid by my employer for time served for jury duty.[10] After filling out and returning my survey and taking my “Juror” badge which is to remain clipped to my shirt the entire day, I scope out the scene to find my home for the next eight hours.  Fortunately I arrived on the early side and there is still an open cubicle in one of the business rooms.  I get comfortable in my chair, plug in and turn on my laptop, and settle in for what is sure to be one of the most boring days of my life.

0830h. A female voice comes over the speaker to give us our prospective juror orientation.  Being in the business room, I am unable to see the source of the Voice.  The Voice is a female voice, which I imagine comes from a woman in perhaps her late thirties or early forties.  I imagine her to have dark, wavy hair, neatly done up but not what one would describe as “stylish.”  I imagine her with a medium build – in good shape, but having the figure of a woman who has probably had a couple of kids and whose metabolism slowed a bit in her mid-thirties – and in casual business attire, one of those pants and blouse outfits that never seems to go out of style.[11]

She begins the orientation by apologizing for the fact that she has to do the job normally done by one of the court judges.  But the confident tone in her voice and her obviously rehearsed attempts at humor quickly make apparent that she has given this orientation many a time.  She begins her spiel by emphasizing how important our job, and even our mere presence, is to the judicial system.  Apparently the fact that there is a room full of hundreds of PJ’s just waiting to be called to serve on a jury panel is enough pressure for many of the lawyers and litigants to settle their cases before they have to go to trial.[12] In other words, the chances of most of us ending up on a panel are very slim, but our mere presence is so very important to “the process.”  As if this is supposed to help us feel that our time is not being wasted, but is serving a very important purpose.[13]

The Voice tells us where to go and what to expect if we are called to be on a jury panel.  She described it – rather aptly, I must say – as going to an interview for a job you don’t want.  The Voice points out the white board in the front of the main room that displays the number of pending cases for the day.  There are sixty-nine cases on the five judges’ dockets, which is apparently a relatively light load.[14] This too is meant to boost morale, but what it really means is that, given the percentage of cases that actually go to trial, only a very small number of us will actually be placed onto panels.  The rest of us will walk out of that holding room at the end of the day knowing we will never get those eight hours back.

Lastly, the Voice attends to a few housekeeping items like telling us what areas of the government building are on- and off-limits; basically, we must remain within earshot of the speakers used to call jurors into the holding room so that the names of PJ’s who are selected for a panel can be read.  She tells us where to find the WiFi access codes and explains that with this many people using the same server we are bound to experience slow service.  Finally, the Voice tells us about the breaks we will receive at 1030h and 1500h, and that our lunch break is from 1130h to 1300h.[15]

0845h. The Voice is finished, so I get a lay of the land and size up my business room roommates.  To my left is what appears to be an art student.  He has Photoshop open on him computer and has this really cool drawing tablet hooked up to it so that his sketches go directly to the screen.  I must admit it is a pretty bitchen[16] set-up, about the coolest piece of computer hardware I’ve seen in quite awhile.  To top it off, I can quickly see he is a really good artist as well.  Behind me and to the right is a middle-aged lady who begins playing some fantasy-world online role-playing game, complete with headset microphone.[17]

I quickly settle in to my first project of the morning of reading and formatting Matt Williams’ essay “A Morning with the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets” before I publish it to Supposedly Fun Things… My reading is interrupted several times by RPG Lady as she makes requests or gives commands to the avatars on her computer screen through her headset.  One of her outbursts catches the attention of Art Student on my left, who comments to me that her game is taking up so much of the courthouse’s server’s bandwidth that hehas to wait forever for a picture to download onto his screen.

1000h. The Voice comes over the speaker to announce that it is time for our morning break.  I save the changes to Matt’s essay (I have finished reading and preparing it for publication at this point) and walk over to the coffee shop.  I am met by a long line at the coffee counter.  When my turn comes, I order my coffee shop standard: a decaf white chocolate mocha and a blueberry scone.  I pay the girl at the register the five dollars that I owe[18] and step aside to wait for my order.  Soon my order is ready, I double-check that my coffee is in fact decaffeinated, and I make my way back to the holding room via the security checkpoint just inside the door.[19]

1015h. I arrive back to my spot in the business room.  I have a few sips of coffee – which is unexpectedly good – have my first taste of the scone.  Much to my chagrin, the $2.25 blueberry scone – the same price I typically pay at Starbucks or other real coffee shop – is made with imitation blueberries.  The taste and texture were good, but would it kill them to make the thing with real blueberries?  I’m just sayin’.

Having finished my first writing project of the day before the break, I move on to my second one, my Letter for my Letters to DFW blog in response to the short story “The Depressed Person” from Brief Interviews.

1100h. A rather professionally dressed young man behind me and to my left approaches Art Student and solicits his services to draw some sketches for some sort of poster that he (i.e. the professionally dressed young man) needs for some sort of event he is hosting.  Art Student shows PDYM some sketches from his notebook, and they discuss the details of the kinds of characters PDYM wants on the poster.  Art Student begins a few rough pencil sketches in his notebook to see if he can get the right “look” for the job.

I continue writing my essay while this is going on, but easily get distracted by the business dealings happening just to my left.  Meanwhile, RPG Lady, perhaps forgetting that she shares this small space with about ten other people, gets louder in her cyber-conversations.

1115h. The Voice comes over the speaker and announces for all potential jurors to return to the holding room.  After a few minutes, the Voice explains that these first jury panels have a rather peculiar assignment: they are to report to the county’s other courthouse in Simi Valley[20] at 1300h, the end of the designated lunch break.  The one caveat being that there is a chance the cases they are assigned to may be settled before lunch, therefore these PJ’s may get to go home early.  RPG Lady gets very excited at this news since she lives in Simi Valley.[21] However, her excitement turns quickly to disappointment when she does not make the cut.  I don’t make the cut either, about which I have rather ambivalent feelings.  On the one hand, the thought of being on a jury panel scares me, but on the other hand the chance of leaving early – no matter how slight it is – is very appealing.

1130h. The Voice dismisses us for our lunch break.  I am not all that hungry, seeing as how I just recently finished my midmorning snack of coffee and scone.  So instead of heading straight for the cafeteria lines – which are sure to be long at this time – I go out to the courtyard with the nonworking fountain to make a few phone calls.

1150h. I make my way to the cafeteria to find something different from the usual lunch counter with hair-netted women standing on the opposite side of sneeze-guard glass, wearing plastic gloves and wielding ladles and industrial-sized serving spoons that one expects to see in a cafeteria.  This café has five or six stations, each one serving a different style of cuisine: Chinese food, burgers and fries, salad bar, to name a few.  I opt for a plain hamburger, fries, a root beer, and a Milky Way candy bar.

I take my time eating, knowing I have over an hour until I am to report back to “duty,” whatever that means.  After finishing my less-than-satisfying meal, I go through the security check yet again and as I pass through the main holding room to my cubicle in the business room, I glance over at the white board to check the caseload.  It now reads “16.”  Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope for us getting out early.

1230h. I settle in for the afternoon, once again opening up Microsoft Word to begin another writing project.  This time I begin working on a piece for my third blogging endeavor[22], TowardTruth.net.  This one goes a bit slower than the earlier two.  I’m starting to run out of steam; I’m mentally spent and my fingers are getting tired from typing for the last four hours.  I am also easily distracted by Art Student’s progress on his sketches and by RPG Lady’s outbursts.  But after about two hours, a trip to the coffee shop for a bottle of water[23], and a couple trips to the restroom I have a publishable piece finished.

1530h. The Voice calls all prospective jurors back into the holding room to call two more jury panels.  The Voice reads the two lists of names, each list about thirty names long.  Since the names are read alphabetically, and my last name starts with the letter B, I quickly know I am off the hook.

After a final read-through of my TowardTruth essay, I save the document one last time and turn off and pack up my laptop.  I stare aimlessly at the wall in front of me for a few minutes – allowing myself a moment of tranquility – only to have my brief mental vegetative state interrupted by the business dealings going on between Art Student and Professionally Dressed Young Man.  Art Student has finished his sketches and is showing them to PDYM, who is asking for slight variations on the characters Art Student has completed.

1615h. The Voice interrupts my reading of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and asks in a rather perky tone, “Who wants to go home early?” which is greeted with cheers and applause.  As I pack up my belongings, I can’t help but overhear the finalization of the business deal between Art Student and PDYM.  PDYM gives Art Student his business card and the promise of $250 when Art Student has finished his character drawings for the promotional poster.

At least the time was worthwhile for someone in the room.

Ryan M Blanck is the co-instigator of Supposedly Fun Things…, the author of Letters to DFW, and a contributing writer for TowardTruth.

[1] While I do hold to the Judeo-Christian view of a place of eternal damnation, I also know that there are a number of places and circumstances on this side of the grave that merit the description of “hell,” such as being forced to watch Barney videos or listen to Justin Bieber on the radio.[back]

[2] Unfortunately I did not qualify for any of the pre-approved excuses and had no choice but to spend a day at the courthouse.  In the sixteen years that I have been eligible to serve, they have gotten much stricter about excuses for not serving jury duty.  In my college years I managed to avoid several summons, although I am going to invoke my Fifth Amendment rights and not tell you how, just in case I committed any improprieties by doing so.[back]

[3] Or, put another way, my wife got tired of me complaining about it, so I tried to have a better attitude.  Or, put another way, I stopped complaining and kept my feelings to myself.[back]

[4] I’ve read the speech probably a dozen times or more (after the speech was published, I started reading it to my senior English classes at the end of the school year as my parting words to them), but it was so much more powerful hearing Dave read it himself.  Thank you whoever made it available on iTunes; definitely $4.95 well spent.[back]

[5] I am later relieved to hear that I did, in fact, park in the correct parking lot.  During the upcoming orientation, we are told in which lots we are allowed to park and how we will get no sympathy from the traffic court office if we park in the wrong lot.[back]

[6] It is a video of Nora Jones and Elmo singing “I Don’t Know Why Y Didn’t Come,” a parody of her “Don’t Know Why” song.  While I, too, enjoy the video, this is just one example of what happens when you have a four-year-old and a six-year-old who know just as much about using a computer as you do.[back]

[7] Suffering from chronic migraines, I carry the stuff with me wherever I go because I never know what might trigger an attack.  A strong-smelling perfume, fluorescent lighting, not drinking enough water could all possibly trigger a migraine.  Although to be honest, there was a small part of me that was hoping to encounter one of these triggers which might provide a valid excuse to leave the courthouse early.  Yes, it would mean replacing one type of suffering with another, but at least I carry legally prescribed drugs to deal with the physical form of suffering.[back]

[8] Isn’t this the same name given to the facility used to house arrested crime suspects?  I’m just sayin’.[back]

[9] Most writers would insert the metric conversion here, but like the rest of America I don’t know what the metric conversion would be.  I do admit that I think it is extremely stubborn and arrogant of us Americans to not have joined the rest of the civilized world in converting to the metric system, but until I am mandated by law to convert I will stick to my inches and feet and miles, thank you very much.[back]

[10] I am not.[back]

[11] Of course this is simply the first image that pops into my head as the rather chipper voice comes over the intercom.  She could have been a young, provocatively dressed blonde bombshell, but since I never actually saw the woman, I have no way of knowing.  I could have missed out on some serious eye-candy.[[back]

[12] It reminds me of all those Cosby Show episodes where the mom yells from downstairs “Just wait till your father comes home” to her cowering children in their rooms upstairs.  Apparently the threat of an imminent uncomfortable situation can do wonders for gaining compliance from incompliant parties.[back]

[13] I seem to remember the Voice using that word, “important,” a lot.[back]

[14] Her quick anecdote about the day with over two hundred cases gets the shocked “oohs” and “aahs” she is probably expecting.[back]

[15] This part of the instructions I find rather confusing because there seems to be no recognizable difference between our “breaks” and the time that we are “on-call.”  We are allowed to leave to have lunch at a local eatery if we prefer, but the fifteen-minute breaks do not allow enough time to actually leave the facility.  The only difference I notice is that the line to buy coffee is longer during the “break” times than during the “on-duty” times.[back]

[16] A shout-out to my former student, Jaz Persing, for providing an explanation of the correct spelling and usage for the word “bitchen.”[back]

[17] When I think of online role-playing gamers, I think of college-age guys who drink Monsters and Red Bulls so they can stay up all night completing whatever mission or task the game has for them that night.  They wear wrinkled t-shirts with 80’s rock bands on the front and their hair always looks like they just got out of bed.  When they do emerge from their gaming den, it is usually to go hang out with friends and talk about online role-playing games or watch ridiculously stupid YouTube videos, sometimes while smoking a little weed to enhance the experience.

But here is this lady who looked more like she should be driving her kids to soccer practice than donning a headset and playing some fantasy RPG.  It was just weird and grew to be rather funny as she got more absorbed into her game and got louder in her conversations with her fellow gamers in cyberspace.[back]

[18] It wasn’t exactly five dollars, and I had hoped to use some of the eighty-six cents in change that was in my pocket, but I didn’t have the right change, so I ended up with even more change in my pocket, which meant even more change I had to dig out of my pocket and place in the dog food bowl and send through the x-ray machine when I reentered the building to go back to the holding room.[back]

[19] It seems to me to be a flaw in the design and construction of the facility.  In order to go from the holding room to the café one must exit the building, walk about ten paces the right and reenter the building through the café’s entrance.  Then to go back to the holding room, one must again exit the building, walk a short ways across the lovely courtyard with the non-working fountain, and reenter the building.  But upon reentering the building to return to the holding room, one must pass through a security check.  We were told we could go back and forth between the holding room and café as often as we wished, but had to empty our pockets into the dog food bowls and walk through the metal detectors each time.  It could have been so much simpler if there was an internal walkway between the two rooms, but maybe they are afraid of what a disgruntled juror might do with the plastic cutlery s/he might get from the café.[back]

[20] Ventura County has two courthouse facilities; one in the city of Ventura, the other in the eastern end of the county in Simi Valley, some thirty-five miles away.  This second facility handles mostly smaller cases, like traffic violations and some civil suits, that don’t typically require a jury.  However, if memory serves me correctly, this was the location of the infamous Rodney King trial in which four LAPD officers were found not guilty of a criminal act in the video-taped beating of Mr. King, sparking the LA riots of 1992.[back]

[21] She has mentioned this at least four times thus far to anyone and everyone who would pretend to listen, emphasizing how unfair it is that she has to drive all the way to Ventura when she lives mere minutes from the Simi Valley courthouse.[back]

[22] Chronologically speaking, it is my first blogging endeavor.  I began writing for TowardTruth over a year ago.[back]

[23] My previous theory proves correct; this trip being during a non-break period, the coffee shop is completely empty.[back]

When I recently joined Facebook, I was surprised to discover that several of my friends are well-established Mafia dons online; when my email address books started cross-pollinating in social outlets like LinkedIn, I was surprised to find several of my gaming buddies holding down serious day jobs.[1] But on reflection, I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, the desktop computer blurs the lines between our work and game environments, if they were ever really clear.  If you have logged the uncountably massive hours in front of a computer screen that are by now common for U.S. office workers, the notion of spending even more hours on that same computer, for entertainment purposes, has to feel a little weird.  This is probably a big reason why dedicated game consoles, like Playstation and Wii, are popular: even when the home computer isn’t being used for more mundane shopping and research tasks, it’s hard to imagine sitting in front of that screen yet again, with its ergonomic mousepad and office-like trappings (a desktop! on the screen!), in order to have “fun.”

And yet millions of Americans do just that: collectively, we spent $538 million on PC-based games in 2009 alone.  And while that’s only a tiny slice of the relevant sales pie – Americans spent almost $10 billion on console games in the same year – it’s still a big number.  Even though PC game players spend some of that money on games originally written for consoles, the big draw of PC gaming is its complex interface; while consoles’ handheld controllers have fewer than fifteen buttons, PCs have extended keyboards.  This means not just a complete set of alphanumeric keys, but also extra function keys, separate number pads, and – of special interest to gamers – dedicated macro-sequence keys.  These single buttons rattle off long strings of keystrokes; while office workers might use them to store oft-used word-processing phrases, like signature lines and letterhead customizations, gamers use them for devastating combo attacks and long game-chat speeches.  Setting up these macros is fairly complicated, requiring at least the kind of computer savvy that allows people to manually turn off the annoying paper-clip figure in Word, or work out a multi-argument Google search.

Which is another way of saying that the kind of people who play games on their home computers tend to be the kind of people who probably already have computer-savvy jobs, as knowledge workers; the very people who spend vast swaths of time on their office computers, all the while emailing and blogging: the modern chattering classes.  And sure enough, playing PC games involves plenty of chatter: Civilization includes a council of advisors that repeatedly opine on the player’s choices; The Sims gives lots of screen space to chat bubbles over character’s heads; World of Warcraft defaults to five real-time text-chat channels.  These are game environments for people who read very quickly, and whose idea of “fun” includes multitasking, endless customization, and complex interaction with multiple characters and plotlines.  After a session of computer gaming, I feel relaxed, but it’s a different feeling than from watching the sun set with a glass of wine, or emerging from the world of a compelling film.  It’s more like the feeling of a job well done, a sort of accomplished relaxation.

For whom is this funhouse fun?  Apparently, for people who like a challenge: PC games are notoriously hard, often so hard that they can’t be beaten, at least in the traditional sense of mastering the game’s central challenge and watching the game’s story come to a close.  Some games just keep making the same challenges faster and tougher until the player loses, while keeping actual victory over the game engine impossible;[2] the real competition is between players, who rank themselves based on high score, or how long they stayed alive.  Other games try to downplay the possibility of victory; for instance, The Sims self-identifies as a “software toy” rather than a game, to discourage its buyers from disappointment when they discover that there are no criteria for winning.  The prevailing philosophy, though, seems to be making games so complex, deep, and multifaceted that any single player will end up playing only a tiny subset of the available game.  World of Warcraft, for example, tracks over a thousand “achievements” for each player character, and finishing the game in a traditional sense – completing the quests offered and progressing through the game world’s valleys and towns in more or less linear fashion, eventually reaching the maximum character level – will only award a few dozen; the rest require completing more complex tasks, often requiring the cooperation of other players.

Even modern episodic television,[3] with its long story arcs, multiple plots and ensemble casts, isn’t as complicated as these big games.  What’s the attraction, then, that justifies such a steep learning curve?  It’s the unprecedented ability to suspend disbelief in the concept of really being the protagonist of an epic story.  As an audience, we can sympathize with the protagonist of a film or TV show, but her actions are dictated by the script, and when her choices deviate from our own, the “I am she” relationship is, shall we say, strained.[4] Reading fiction is a deeper mind-meld with the author, but the reader cannot exercise any meaningful control over the book’s plot, and this again strains the reader’s sympathetic relationship with the protagonist.

But in computer games, the player directly controls the protagonist’s actions, and as the games have grown more complex and mature, so have the player’s available choices.  Games from the early days of computing, like 1980′s Zork and 1984′s King’s Quest, led players through a few dozen locations, at most; later games got progressively larger, based on feedback from players who wanted the games to last longer.  In 1987, Dungeon Master brought 3-D graphics to a dozen-level dungeon; Ultima Underworld, from 1992, boasted a much larger dungeon including dozens of quests; 1993′s Myst took advantage of then-new CD-ROM technology to let players explore over a hundred locations.  By 2001, when Grand Theft Auto 3 opened up a world of three linked islands containing hundreds of quests, vehicles, and characters, it was clear that the actual game was taking place outside the structured storyline of the world narrative; gaming columnists began debating a new genre definition, the “sandbox” game, where the player has freedom to roam and explore the game world without finishing, or even following, any storyline at all.

It’s no coincidence, by the way, that many of these increasingly complex games were themed around medieval dungeons and fantasy stories.  Face-to-face role-playing games had caught on as childrens’ party games in the 1970s, and by far the most popular were medieval adventures.  The rules of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were first published in 1977, and role-playing game parties were quite the vogue for kids in the bourgeois classes in the 1980s, like me.  Those games involved lots of dice-rolling and arithmetic, and when we all got home computers, it only made sense to use them to help with the number-crunching and statistic tracking.  Computerized versions of the party game, first published by the D&D authors in 1980 (and available in unlicensed versions throughout the 1980s) had a ready-made audience, and they came to supplant the face-to-face game as they relieved us of the burdens of organizing role-playing parties, like having eight or ten actual friends on tap for frequent games.  By 1990, the publisher of the real-life party game, TSR, derived most of its income from publishing novels based on its games, and it finally went bust in 1997.[5] As the computerized games developed technologically, with more and more realistic graphics to portray monsters (and player avatars that could be customized to conform to the player’s own self-image or fantasy thereof), they came to be a reliable vehicle for players’ own aspirations.

The medieval fantasy setting is also popular because it’s well known and comfortable to all of us; even back in the years before computers were completely ubiquitous, there were dozens of well-known swords-and-sorcery films, TV shows, and books circulating around the zeitgeist.  There’s also a cultural element at work for Americans that kept the second-place contender–science fiction–from pulling ahead in the race: because technology both fascinates and scares us, it doesn’t provide much of an escape from anything.  Setting a story in the future can’t submerge subconscious fears about one’s having inadvertently contributed to whatever apocalypse is featured in the game/book/movie; indeed, some sci-fi adventure films directly criticize their own audience for letting the disaster happen.[6] But setting a story in the past assists with the escapism; because the player/audience lives in a reasonably happy present day, and all that happened during the Dark Ages is lost to history, medieval adventures can be as epic and super-sized as the imagination will allow, and yet never affect the course of actual history, or make life miserable for any contemporary people.  For a post-war American culture that spent thousands of hours watching television shows written to lack any connection to real-world events – so as to facilitate syndicated out-of-sequence re-runs until the end of time – this sort of existence outside history requires no real mental gymnastics.

So if the swords-and-sorcery computer game finds its niche in its unique ability for escapism, why are the most popular ones so difficult to play?  Because the game’s difficulty actually assists in the immersive experience of the game.  Being able to type one’s conversation in the game’s chat channel is far more realistic than selecting from a menu of pre-written answers.[7] Even putting in-game chatter aside, a complex game interface permits a wider variety of player actions, hence a greater feeling of autonomy, and freedom from some pre-scripted set of actions.  And that’s what PC gamers want: freedom and autonomy.  American culture deeply needs, maybe will fail without, a frontier to settle, and now that U.S. manifest destiny is geographically exhausted, the next frontier is online.

But given freedom and autonomy in a fantasy world, what do PC gamers actually do with it?  As it turns out, not that much.[8] A sizeable segment of the gaming population is obsessed with progress and rankings, as if the game were a sport.[9] This crowd obsesses over achievements and tournaments, studies the playstyles of top-ranked players, and chatters at length on blogs and chatboards about improving one’s play.  To keep players like this from scaring off (or in some game worlds, killing off) the more casual players, many games discourage excessive play.  For instance, World of Warcraft avatars need to rest or they incur a fatigue penalty, and the game’s most rewarding endgame activities – the quests and encounters that obsessive players would be most likely to grind over and over – are gated behind timers, restricted to once per day or week.  But intense players play multiple avatars, which largely neutralizes the timers’ effect, and spend additional time on the activities that aren’t timed at all.[10] To me, this kind of gameplay looks a lot like work, which if that strikes you as ironic, I agree.

A second group of players, which is not entirely exclusive from the first, focuses on exploration and completion.  Every side mission must be complete, every alley must be tagged, each and every car must be in the garage.  While this gameplay style is less competitive in the  interpersonal sense, it still engages the player who likes to focus on details, and usually ends up just as demanding of a player’s time and attention as competing directly with other players.  When I realized I was buying guidebooks and making checklists for the massive computer games–100% completion of Grand Theft Auto 3 takes quite a bit of recordkeeping–the fun I was supposedly having started to lose its luster.

The third common playstyle focuses mostly on socializing and role-playing, which is only possible in online games that permit chatter.[11] Sometimes, the chatter helps players achieve a shared goal, like building a cathedral or killing a dragon that threatens the entire game world; more often, it’s simply gossip about life outside the game,[12] which is oddly ironic: it prevents immersion in the game environment.  So a large cohort of gamers aren’t just escaping into a fantasy environment; they’re trying to build and maintain friendships with other people who enjoy the same fantasy.

In fact, if you think about the motivations for any of the player categories I’ve described, it doesn’t sound like people are escaping reality much at all, when they’re gaming.  In the game world, they do what they already do elsewhere: lonely people socialize, organized people organize, curious people explore; it’s not so much escapism as just another arena to play out one’s own contradictory desires and tendencies.  I worry that I’m starting to sound like Gerhard Schtitt, the philosophical tennis coach in Infinite Jest: the other players are not the game, the court and rules are not the game.  The game is only a canvas for the self to paint on, and the self expresses its intrinsic qualities through the game.[13]

But people still do manage to escape through the game, or at least exercise sides of their personalities that don’t get much exposure during their usual daytime activities.  The meek accountant joins battle as a strapping warrior; the housewife plays a beefy sheriff cleaning up an Old West town; the college athlete deftly manages planetary resources to win a long-fought space battle.  This classic role-play behavior used to be common in online chatrooms but are much less common these days; not only are chatrooms culturally passe, especially for younger people, but the believability of a false online persona is falling victim to two converging trends: anti-anonymity laws aimed at sex predators and political activists,[14] and the burgeoning influence of a culture that is willing to forego personal privacy in exchange for the ability to track what friends are doing.  It was weird for me to discover that one of my high school classmates is now an online poker mogul, but I’ll admit it’s somewhat reassuring to get online at midnight and find him working the tables as reliably as ever.

And perhaps that’s the reason so many people play games on the same computers they use for work; for most of us, especially the knowledge workers who spend a lot of time online already, work isn’t just a set of tasks to complete in order to get a paycheck; it’s a community of people.  And no console machine can let us interact with each other, or the games we play, as complexly and thoroughly as the desktop computer.

George Carr is the co-instigator of Supposedly Fun Things… and a lawyer in Cleveland.

___________________________________________________________________________________

I’m a lawyer, but I assumed all of my late-night gaming buddies were college students or slackers.  Shame on me.[back]

Were there games like this before Tetris, the massively popular 1986 time-waster that has ended up being more significant than Pong?  There have certainly been plenty in the years since.[back]

Say, after Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, which more or less invented the modern multiple-plot drama and season-long story-arc format that currently prevails.[back]

There’s also a generational factor at work here: for those of us who grew up a whole generation after Newton Minow declared television a vast wasteland in 1961, and whose parents capped TV watching but left computers unregulated, television can feel way too passive to hold one’s interest.[back]

The company was sold for little more than the licensing value of its old intellectual property, which include some beloved and lucrative game worlds that generate revenue to this day.[back]

Think of Logan’s Run (1976) and Mad Max (1979), which preached environmentalism and conservation, or The Omega Man (1971) and Blade Runner (1982), where humanity suffered the consequences of its own capitalistic excesses.  And anyone who’s seen Alien (1979) feels guilty for cooperating with multinational capitalism.  In contrast, one of the big metaphysical attractions of Star Wars (1977) is its being set “a long time ago” despite its obviously futuristic technology; its audience cannot be complicit in the creation of the evil Empire.[back]

Plus, the game authors, who must pander to the concerns of their teenage players’ most conservative parents, could not possibly write a message menu that would satisfy players’ desires for insult and gloating.[back]

U.S. residents’ freedoms to travel and speak as they like are the envy of the world, and we don’t tend to do much with them, either.  But I suppose true freedom includes the right to squander one’s gifts.[back]

Here I’m using the fairly common discrimination that sports are competitive while games are not.  Because this would make chess a sport but ballet a game, I’ll grant that the dichotomy has limits.  But it’s useful nonetheless.[back]

Plus, who plays only one game at a time?[back]

Oddly, most of the Facebook games are not social at all, because they don’t permit much in the way of contemporaneous messaging.  But because Facebook doesn’t use avatars, there’s some interesting implied communication happening, at least: when I fell into the habit of leaving Facebook open all day on my office computer, my wife’s friends contacted her with condolences on my getting sacked.[back]

And in creepier variants, they like to flirt with, harass, and cyber-stalk other players.[back]

One of the more poetic passages explaining this philosophy:

Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartener, nevertheless seemed to know what [other tennis coaches] seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, 2[to-the-n-power] possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically controlled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.[back]

As an instance of the latter, South Korea recently enacted a law requiring the use of real names on any online forum with more than 10,000 users.  This law is apparently aimed at restraining agitators or dissidents who want to anonymously criticize the government, but applies to computer games nonetheless; Blizzard Activision, the company behind several massively popular online games, is implementing a system that links in-game character names to real names (which will apply to all Blizzard games worldwide), but that may not satisfy the Korean government.  So fantasy names may be outlawed; the game world may soon feature Dwarven warriors named Pierre, and elf wizards named Shaniqua.[back]

Think “Lions Club”. If you’re like me, you think of those dark blue signs on entrances to towns and villages, luxuriously bordered in gold, stately lions’ heads facing away from each other, menacing, with teeth. With other signs like Rotary and the local sister cities. Usually on a thoroughfare, as you pass, way too many of them to ingest at once.  “Lions Club” remained in my American consciousness as one of those countless things that you know about but don’t know, mainly because you don’t need to.

In 1999 or so a resourceful friend (the same guy who resourcefully the previous year hooked me up with the woman who would become my wife) told me he had a contact to a lawyer who needed English lessons. This was a contact through his Czech girlfriend, whose father had a bureaucratic-sounding position in the military. Not that I could have later retraced how that contact ran, and how exactly Dr. Z would be getting his English help through a career middle-military man. I suppose I should mention that this is all in Prague.

So I started teaching Dr. Z individual conversation lessons. It was one of my better teaching gigs. He had a nice office in the north of the city, and then moved to a nicer office in the center, closer to my full-time job. His secretary would offer me coffee when I came in. Dr. Z talked easily, took corrections well, seemed to look forward to his lessons, and sometimes did the homework.

Dr. Z would talk about his cabin in Moravia, that he went to almost every weekend. This is typical in the Czech Republic. One day he started telling me about a plan to take flying lessons so that he could fly his plane to his cabin, which would take a fraction of an hour instead of the four-hour automobile trip. I laughed until I realized he was serious. As payment for one of his cases he took the client’s baby blue MG convertible, since that’s all he could get. He complained that the car was very nice, but he could not enjoy it on the poorly-maintained Czech roads. Dr. Z was a police officer—a detective—during the communist years of his adult life. He claimed he was always different from the other detectives, and suffered because of it. He liked to bike, run, do track and field, instead of sit in the pub, drink beer, eat sausage, and gossip about other officers. He also, he claimed—and I believed him—preferred to be fair.

When the revolution came in 1989, somehow Dr. Z got recommended to ascend to the position of the highest officer the country, Police President. I never quite understood the jump from detective to President, or how large that leap was in reality. In any case, he served as President for a couple years and then transferred his efforts to be the Head of Interpol for the country. This he did for 6 years. If  you’ve done your math, I met him a couple years after all of this happened. With the contacts he naturally obtained in these positions, and the fact that as a detective he technically had a law degree (a “Doctor” in the CR), he began a lucrative legal career, basically sitting in an office waiting for cases to come to him, deciding which ones to take, and raking in money on big ones like companies going into receivership, making no money on cases where it seemed he could help. By the time I met him, he was one of these guys who within a few years suddenly found himself with more money than he could even understand he had. One day he showed me an architect’s plans for a huge bed shaped like a wavy line, like a fat, elongated S, that would cost 800,000 Czech Crowns to build (probably something like 30,000 USD at the time). He said “800,000 Crowns is too much for a bed, even for me”. That is, the money would not be missed, but it’s stupid to pay so much for a bed.

One day he told me that he was a member of the Prague Lions Club and that the PLC would have a meeting in a couple weeks, and that the U.S. Ambassador to Prague would be there, and if I’d like to come.

I pretended that I knew what any Lions Club was, much less the Prague Lions Club, and said I’d enjoy having the experience of seeing the Ambassador in the flesh. I instinctively realized that it didn’t really matter that I didn’t know what the LC was back at home—even though people like Dr. Z would assume that I knew, it’s an American organization and I’m American, kind of like when you say “football” to mean “soccer” to any non-American you don’t qualify and make sure the person knows you are not referring to the American variety—because however that was translated in Prague would be something else altogether, and to survive this experience, I’d have to take it at face value.

Wait, now I know where I really know those dark blue with gold border Lions Club signs from. Since when you drive by you don’t really see them. My impression of a Lions Club meeting in the States, or at least an approximation of the vast majority of such meetings—assuming they have meetings, they have to, don’t they?—is a group of 10 or so “business leaders” in a farm community sitting around the big round table, and I mean THE big round table, in the corner, at Denny’s or Country Kitchen, or the equivalent. 60-ish men no longer enamored with their careers or done with their careers proper and seeing themselves as movers and shakers and maybe actually being so, but in a local kind of way. Big fish small pond. Not really more wealthy, but been around. Mesh-backed  baseball hats. Large plaid short sleeve button-down shirts. Lincoln Continentals. No smoking, anymore. Grim depression with the way the town/village and country at large are going. Mostly hate each other. Sit at the round table and complain to each other, and probably decide to move one initiative or another forward by using their various “contacts”, which gives them justification to go driving around socializing with others who are on other Lions Clubs or don’t happen to be on the local Club just yet, probably mostly also in Denny’ses or Country Kitchens, or the equivalent. Anyway, the sign is near the door of these places, the Denny’s or Country Kitchen, somehow always positioned so that you only see it on your way out of the place, not on your way in.

The Prague LC doesn’t meet in a Denny’s. Nor does it find the Czech equivalent. They meet in one of the most expensive restaurants in the quaint “lesser town” tourist district, commandeering a 14^th-century cellar room for the duration of the evening. The members are people for whom it is hard to say if they are in business or government, or neither or both, so infiltrated into each the distinction suddenly seems passé, people with money and experience like Dr. Z. Movers and shakers, almost in a too-real way. These are the people who no one really knows, but who actually get things done. Not always good things.

For some reason I met Dr. Z and his wife on the other side of the river from the restaurant, and we walked slowly across Charles Bridge together since we were early. As always, at the lesser-town side of the bridge, on the right side, was stationed the guy all Prague knew: I don’t think he had a name. All along the bridge, there were stands selling all kinds of souvenirs: jewelry, paintings, postcards, caricatures. This man was probably 50, semi-homeless, dark curly medium-long unkempt hair, and plastic red devil’s horns. Maybe you’ve seen him if you’ve been through. Rare is the Prague tourist who doesn’t cross Charles Bridge. He would paint self-portraits, featuring himself with his horns. Always the horns. His stand would consist of dozens of these self-portraits. Some of them had a background, such as the Prague Castle which was on full view from the bridge and his spot. But mostly it was just him, just his head, actually, done in sloppy watercolor, mostly, in different colors with different facial expressions, mostly with no background, just white, but always with the devil’s horns red. He’d paint them right there on the bridge. I assume he had to have a permit and pay for his prime location on the bridge, but I never saw anyone buy anything from him. Tourists buy on the bridge, no one else. I can’t imagine what tourists thought of this guy, why a tourist would buy one of his paintings. Those of us who lived there and saw the guy regularly didn’t get it. No one could really figure out if the guy was insane, or a genius, or just making money.

You’d think such a guy would acquire a popular nickname, but no. As we passed, devil-horn-guy said something in mumbling Czech to our threesome, we were speaking English, about what a pain in the ass it was to sit there all day on the bridge selling pictures, and that he was tired. Dr. Z simply responded in Czech “Me, too”. Devil-horn-guy was unfazed; we walked on.

When we got to the restaurant, we had a drink at the bar before going to the designated room. Then we went to the room and had another drink, and mingled some more, with other PLC members coming in as we stood there. God knows what we talked about, what I would have to say to Dr. Z in such a situation. We spent 2–3 hours a week sitting and talking with each other, but in those situations he was expected to talk. I could ask the stupidest question and justify it implicitly by pedagogical strategy, and he would have to say something in response. I knew quite a bit about Dr. Z by now, but it seems to me today that that would only accentuate the distance between our respective lives, now that mine has become something more like his. At that point I wasn’t married, had little thought of a career, was still comfortably unclear whether my life really belonged in the CR, the US, or both, or neither. Dr. Z was a hotshot nouveau riche lawyer with grandkids. His wife ran a museum and looked Italian. I either embarrassed myself in conversation with these older, sophisticated professionals, or somehow managed: either way I was oblivious.

The meeting started in earnest when the Ambassador arrived. John Shattuck, Clinton’s appointment, American-looking and tall. I had seen him speak at a local university once before, and he seemed like a nice enough guy, as probably all good diplomats do. When he spoke at the university, in the context of a rather general speech, he made a comment that in terms of human rights, there were many countries to confront, but the US was not completely free of human rights abuses either. Talking with students after the speech, they were very impressed by this admission, surprised that an official representative would say such a thing. This probably tells you more about the students and post-communist Europe than it does about Shattuck.

The meeting starting in earnest just meant that the mingling took on a focused nature. It was now focused on the Ambassador, with overweight graying businessmen used to telling people what to do all day casually waiting in line—without looking like they are waiting in line in fact without even making a line per se—to greet the Ambassador. He had a translator for those who needed it, interestingly not his own, but one of the lower-ranking (apparently) LC members doing a very good job. Eventually Dr. Z and me got to the front of the “line”, and he introduced me as a fellow American here at the PLC meeting, and God knows what I said to him but again he was nice enough.

So now I was still not quite sure why I was here. I wasn’t sure if Dr. Z wanted to show off his American friend; in the present company that struck me as unlikely. It’s not like any of these people would be particularly surprised that one of their members knew an American in Prague in 1999. It also wasn’t like I was from Shattuck’s home town, or I was personal friends with the Secretary of the Treasury, or I had just published a phenomenal genome study. I wasn’t special. The only thing I could think of is that Dr. Z thought it would be nice, it would be an opportunity for me to meet the Ambassador that I might otherwise not get. In the end, this was indeed the simple reason why I was there. Dr. Z was also a nice guy, but this was almost so nice as to be doubtful. And almost overly nice, because the fact that I couldn’t really justify my own existence at such a meeting was a weird thing. Mind, above I paint a picture of a rather undistinguished, somewhat wandering American guy living in Prague, and that’s not untrue, but all the same I was an adult, felt I had some kind of place in the world, and wasn’t comfortable with the possible accusation of pretension, or brown-nosing, or ignorance. I sat and smiled and rode it out, reserving my option of convincing myself that I was being made a fool.

We sat down at the table, and there were simple place cards to indicate where everyone should sit, some reconnaissance work had of course gone into such a meeting, and I found my place card, and it read RICHARD STUCK. I chose not to point out the error to Dr. Z.

The Ambassador made his speech. An apparently forgettable speech, since I can’t recall anything about it, although that may be because he read the speech in Czech. Or, rather, he tried. The Ambassador had the speech on paper in front of him, apparently in phonetic Czech. In high school, one of my friends took German when the rest of us took either Spanish or French, and we loved to take the German friend’s homework and read the German words straight as if they were American English words. He hated it. To him, somehow it was making fun not of the German language itself, or Germans themselves, but somehow making fun of the project of learning German. Which was even more strange since he was second-generation German, already spoke German, and so didn’t really have to learn it himself, anyway. Shattuck’s speech in “Czech” reminded me of how we used to read German. None of his pronunciation was anything but standard TV-news American, including not only sounds but stress and pacing. Czech isn’t radically different from English like, say, Japanese, but there are such differences. But the words that came out of his mouth were Czech words. Even at that gestational stage of my learning of Czech, I readily recognized the strangeness of the way Shattuck was speaking. I mean, in Prague you’d hear the odd American dreadfully mis-pronouncing dobrý den (“good day”, literally, really meaning just “hello”) by just reading it as they saw it, but such sustained mis-pronunciation had no real reason to exist in the world. The speech wasn’t long as far as speeches go, maybe 20 minutes. But still, anyone who has learned a language well enough to speak for 20 minutes had to have picked up some of the accent. Even though this wasn’t a mystery—Shattuck could not hide that he was just reading—it still grated my brain, that was trying so hard to get these sounds to come out of my mouth correctly. OK, maybe I do understand my friend learning German in high school.

When Shattuck started speaking, I expected English and it took me a couple sentences to realize that he wasn’t in fact speaking English. Then it took me another couple sentences to realize that he was trying to speak Czech. Another couple to realize he was reading it straight off the paper, and the paper must have had phonetic spelling of some kind. By this point I lost whatever thread of the speech I might have been able to grasp onto, and anyway I was more interested in the audience’s reaction than the speech itself. I looked around at everyone; we were all sitting at a long rectangular table, with the Ambassador at one of the heads, a floor-lit ancient stone cellar wall his backdrop. Everyone listened attentively, nodding, interested. Either the language of the speech did not faze them, or they knew to be extremely polite. Later I asked Dr. Z if he could understand everything that the Ambassador said in the speech, and he said he had no problems understanding. So I guess they were just not fazed. During the speech in any case I had to be polite, because I wasn’t understanding one thing. I sat and made myself into someone who was understanding and listening attentively.

Questions and answers was a different story. The aforementioned translator did a superb job of translating rather long questions for the Ambassador, and translated the responses. Each time the translator translated a question, while he was still speaking (the questions were asked in paragraphs, and the translator would take notes while the question was being asked, and then have to reconstruct it in English, really a feat) Shattuck nodded, made noises, and sometimes even interrupted, as if he understood the question already. I couldn’t tell if this was genuine or just a show. In either case he brought it off to great effect. It looked like indeed, despite the read speech, he did understand Czech. Maybe also the questions were all so banal that they were exactly the same ones he got at events like this every day, so he was impatient to deliver his talking points.

The U.S. Ambassador to Prague was kind of both the reason for the meeting and a prelude to the meeting. Dinner came after. Drinks were only served before he came, everything stopped when he was there, and when he finished the questions (OK, when he stopped the questions), he whisked himself off to his next appointment, doing it gracefully, pulling rank that he could just leave a meeting when no one else is yet leaving, saying he had other things to do and everyone being OK with that. He shook hands with almost everyone as he left, including me. I remember our little farewell exchange:

Shattuck: “You enjoy yourself while you’re here!”

Me: “You, too!”, with a sly smile, as if he’d know my meaning.

I meant: yes, it was likely that I’d only be in Prague for a short time, but he also would move on to another post at some time, and should “enjoy” the work of being an ambassador, like I should “enjoy” being a young American jerk in Prague. As if I could joke to offer him advice, like we were buddies. The American strategy that the amount of respect or value you show a person is in inverse proportion to the formality you employ with them. I’m sure it didn’t come off that way, and Shattuck hit the nail on the head. You go off and enjoy yourself while these serious men, like me, do real work. Implicitly: what the hell are you doing at this meeting. I wouldn’t have had an answer.

Richard Stock lives in Hrusice, the Czech Republic, and is originally from Chicago.