the coldest blood runs through my veins; you know my name

I am an absolute, unapologetic sucker for revenge films.

Friends have heard me defend The Patriot, which is not a good movie at all. But come on! Mel Gibson looks up from the cooling corpse of his next-oldest son, grabs a handful of rifles from his burning house, and recruits his next two oldest sons to sprint through the woods and ambush the British! He charges out of the woods screaming with a hatchet! And all for revenge!

I liked Man on Fire, even in spite of Tony Scott’s camera antics. Sure, everyone in the film had two settings - histrionic or cold. Sure, the pacing left something to be desired. But come on! Denzel Washington loses his client’s daughter in a firefight. So after getting enough blood back in his body to stumble out of bed, what does he vow?

“I’m gonna kill ‘em. Anyone that was involved. Anybody who profited from it. Anybody who opens their eyes at me.”

And I got similarly excited about Taken, a movie so apparently mediocre that it’ll never get a domestic release (it opened in France in February of this year). The few critics who saw it described it as “paint by numbers.” It looks pretty formulaic (note that none of the protagonists have a last name).

But come on! Tell me you wouldn’t want to growl this into a live telephone:

Jack Bauer. Batman. Inigo Montoya. Jason Bourne. Dirty Harry. People who get beat down, lose the ones they love, and then come back in a blaze of indignation. Why does that speak to me? Why do I get such a primal, unavoidable kick out of that?

I think it speaks to that fundamental animal rage which all of us - who share more than 95% of our DNA with animals - carry. The “laugh in triumph over a defeated foe” that Orwell talks about: the brutal, pre-rational appeal of nationalism. We want to kill, and we want our killing to be sanctioned by a moral code. He hurt my family, therefore it’s okay if I cut off his fingers. He killed my wife, so it’s all right if I slaughter everyone he knows and burn his house to the ground. No impartial jury or outside observer would think that’s a proportional or fair response - but come on! I’m the Good Guy, so my savagery makes me driven. They’re the Bad Guys; their savagery makes them subhuman.

But ultimately, in stories like that, the tissue-thin distinction between Good Guys and Bad Guys suggests more than it divides. We don’t cheer the Good Guy because he did the right thing by stabbing the Bad Guy in the top of the skull. We cheer the Good Guy because he totally fucking killed that dude! Did you see that? We identify with him because he has his reasons - they took my job, they hurt my family, whatever - but that’s secondary^*. The chaotic, reptilian roar of victory after bashing someone’s neck seals the deal.

So my love of revenge arises from evolved instincts. I think that’s okay. I recognize and acknowledge it. Indulging in fantasy never hurt anyone, provided you keep it private. It’s the difference between GTA 3 and Columbine. It’s the difference between watching a Briana Banks movie and actually trying to fuck the babysitter. So long as I never take a drunken swing at a bouncer for wrongs real or imagined, I think I’ll be fine.

We all have instincts that we did not choose making decisions for us. I try to stay informed about mine.

^* Think about it: if maiming in pursuit of revenge makes him noble, wouldn’t taking the extra effort to keep his family safe in the first place be really noble?

make sure he a thug and intelligent too

Some life lessons, smuggled in the form of weekend anecdotes:

Learn Enough Dance to Dance to Funk / Soul; Everything Else is Wasted. Well, okay, and the bare minimum of dance required to get married in the States. But so few places bust out any sort of swing worth swingin’ to, and salsa can only be found in seedy gin joints with knife artists in sharkskin suits. But if you’re ever in Central Square on a Friday night - like I was for Rachel R’s birthday - stop by the Cantab and listen to Diane Blue and the Fatback Band lay down the oldest and greatest. “Dancing in September,” “Knock on Wood,” and maybe even a little James Brown for you. Really - all you need.

Pick a Party and Stick With It. I left Rachel’s celebration midway through to see if anyone had camped out at 90’s Night in Allston. Had I called ahead I could have saved myself the trip - the cool kids had been crowded out by the BU kids. After waiting in line for a minute and confirming the situation with Matthew, I returned to Cambridge and closed out the night at the Cantab. I probably missed a lot of prime dancing thanks to my indecision and I will regret it until the day I die.

You Build a Surprise Party with 90% Discipline and 10% Innovation. I went to a surprise party with Kym from work on Saturday evening. Kym’s friend Allie had been planning this for about a month and had gone above and beyond to keep everything quiet. But it takes more than just secrecy to get a surprise party going. So, that afternoon, she recruited Kym’s landlord, who called Kym and told her that a burst pipe had flooded her closet. She hurried home and found us waiting.

Never Drink On An Empty Stomach. Seriously! Never! What did you think would happen? And no, two plates of tortilla chips and a bowl of creamy dip do not count! And no, a single slice of a pulled pork quesadilla does not count! How old are you? Have you learned nothing? Seriously! It’s like I can’t even look at you!

(But I had an excellent time at Bukowski regardless, helping Kate G. tick off the last few items on her beer card. If you go into the Inman Square dive and find the Charlotte Perkins Gilman mug off its hook, you’ll know she’s in town)

If You Have Time Alone, Enjoy It. I caught up with Jodi at the Grafton St Pub in Harvard on a cool Sunday afternoon, giving her the chance to vent about dealing with undergrads (apparently, the dumb kids at Harvard are just as dumb as the dumb kids anywhere). After seeing her off, I took the T to Kendall and walked to Kendall Cinema to get tickets for Redbelt. With two and a half hours to kill, I had an early dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company right around the corner.

The afternoon had hit that “magic hour” that photographers love, when the sun lights everything soft. The red brick of the CBC kept the inside warmer than the outside (low 60s), but the ceiling fans provided a gentle downdraft. Not quite dinner time yet, so I had a quiet corner of the bar to sit and read some Fritz Leiber while a perky bartender brought me a pulled pork sandwich and the house pale. Afterwards I walked two blocks and bought ice cream at a 7-11.

Don’t look too hard for those moments; that never helps. Just stay ready when they arrive.

I still had two strong legs and even wings to fly

In lieu of actual content, here are some entertaining links:

#: I pick on the kid a lot, but really, Ezra Klein does not strike me as very bright. In talking about using carbon taxes to fund government programs, he says the following (emphasis mine):

This is the problem when people talk about replacing, say, payroll taxes with a carbon tax. If you want that carbon tax to fund Medicare and Social Security, as payroll taxes do, then you have to tax carbon at a rate that ensures stable, large returns. Alternately, if you want to tax carbon at a rate high enough that we stop emitting so much carbon, then your tax base is, by design, going to rapidly dry up, and Medicare and Social Security will no longer have funding.

In general, there are two types of taxes: taxes that fund things, and taxes that stop people from doing things. Taxes that fund things cannot be taxes that stop people from doing things, as if people stop doing the thing, there will be nothing to tax.

Really, Ezra? Two types of taxes? Oh man! Quick - somebody tell me which kind I’m paying, so I don’t inadvertently bankrupt public schools or defund the U.S. adventure in Iraq or build shoddy bridges. Am I being taxed to finance the latest project or as penance for my sins? Am I supposed to do less of what I’m doing or do more of it? No one told me! I live in a world of terror and mystery! AAAH!

#: Adobe launched a beta test of their new Photoshop Express product yesterday, a user-friendly entry into the image editing software so popular it’s become a verb. You can sign up for free and use it online. Seriously. You don’t download anything to your desktop; you just manipulate images in your browser. In other news, expect nothing productive of me for the remainder of this month.

#: As a fan of fantasy literature and Bayesian rationality, I was surprised to find peanut butter in my chocolate in one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s latest posts:

In one of the standard fantasy plots, a protagonist from our Earth, a sympathetic character with lousy grades or a crushing mortgage but still a good heart, suddenly finds themselves in a world where magic operates in place of science. The protagonist often goes on to practice magic, and become in due course a (superpowerful) sorcerer.

Now here’s the question - and yes, it is a little unkind, but I think it needs to be asked: Presumably most readers of these novels see themselves in the protagonist’s shoes, fantasizing about their own acquisition of sorcery. Wishing for magic. And, barring improbable demographics, most readers of these novels are not scientists.

Born into a world of science, they did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don’t have the scientific attitude, that nothing is “mere” - the capacity to be interested in merely real things - how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren’t nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.

#: Finally, the Onion once again highlights the path to truth: Study: 93% Of People Talked About Once They Leave Room. I won’t even bother quoting the article, since headline writing has always been the Onion’s strongest suit. But seeing it satirized by America’s paper of record helped me see that yes, it is silly to worry about this sort of thing - which is something I frequently do.

I worry about a lot of stuff. I worry about being talked about behind my back. I also worry about saying something stupid, looking foolish in public, getting in trouble for something I didn’t do, losing my job, wrecking my car, breaking my spine, suffering hideous facial scarring, being arrested, getting rejected by girls, hooking up with girls and then having things be awkward, entering relationships with girls and then coming on too strong, never seeing a girl again, running out of money, having too much money, looking immature, growing old, wasting time, being too serious, being too silly, and skin cancer. Among other things.

I used to spend a lot of time brooding over these unlikely scenarios - high walls in my mind that I could never imagine myself getting over. “I don’t know how I could possibly survive something like that happening,” I’d think.

But you know what? There’s only one thing in my life that I’m not going to survive - and I have no way of guessing what that is. Everything else should be cake.

why you at the bar if you ain’t popping the bottles?

So what did this past weekend hold?

I finished up some revisions for a Neutrino video project on Friday. Then, at the last minute, I drove to Central Square to catch an IB Show. Serpico, Michelle McN., Manny R., Paul K. and others did a series of Boston-related sketches. They hit all the important notes for some good Boston satire - drunken college girls, rowdy Red Sox fans, the mumblings of Mayor Menino - and kept me laughing.

I ran into Jacey and grabbed dinner with her at Tavern on the Square. For some reason the bar hosted a live DJ mixing some generic top 40 pop at too loud of a volume to allow for easy conversation. Dance music’s apparently a regular fixture at the Tavern but not a popular one - we were there until 11:00 and nobody started moving.

Saturday, Dennis Hurley asked me to play an extra in a sketch video he was shooting at IB. I showed up, held a notebook, and chatted with Matt McG. and Aaron C. about Obama during downtime.

Immediately after, I met up with Shannon and Brian P. for that aforementioned Neutrino project. Watching Dennis’s pals mess around with shot placement and multiple takes infected me with the video bug once more, leading me to volunteer to direct a project I had just helped write. I have been infected. I expect a two month convalescence.

I hung out with Lisa C. at B-Side Lounge on Saturday night. The nice server at B-Side introduced me to the wonders of the Manhattan - all the taste and power of whiskey, but without the indelible stigma of ordering a shot of Canadian Club. It is now my favorite drink. We compared notes on the Cambridge dating scene and agreed that it’s fraught with traps.

Sunday I stayed in my bathrobe all day. Every now and then I need a day where I don’t speak to another human being. It scours the palate, like one of those water diets that drops you two dress sizes in a weekend at a slight cost to kidney health. It leaves me eager for human contact by sundown. My introversion rules me but doesn’t rule me, if you value the distinction.

Also of note: Star Wars Battlefront has some of the highest replay value of any video game I’ve ever bought. If I’m in the mood for violence, I don’t need to load up a game and start some highbrow, ivory-tower “mission.” I don’t need to begin a quest and speak to the city fathers. I just say, “Put me in the gas refineries on Bespin and let me shoot stormtroopers” and forty seconds later I’m doing it. It has a beautiful purity I almost fear to touch.

Those last two paragraphs are probably the most interesting. Once again I have buried the lede.

everybody told her it was sweet and good

Some stuff about writing:

#: I’m maybe ten to fifteen thousand words shy of the first section (of three) of The Levittown Barbecue Club. Already I’m much more excited about this novel than I am my last one. So much so, in fact, that I think I might pass around this first draft to readers before I let anyone see a page of Three Born In Eden.

Why? Levittown feels more polished, already, than Three Born in Eden. Part of it has to do with the genre, no doubt - this one’s a thriller set in the modern day; the first one was a surreal horror novel set, well, somewhere weird. Further, Three Born in Eden was inspired by a dream I had, which gave it miles and miles of creative juice but not much in the way of coherence. But above all else, the very fact that I wrote Three Born in Eden first means that I have 110,000 words of experience going into this novel. I’m at least 5th level already.

I don’t think that Three Born in Eden will prove to have been a waste, even if Levittown becomes the first novel that I feel comfortable showing other human beings. The experience alone made it worthwhile. So I guess if there’s an object lesson in all this, it’s that no writing is ever wasted if it makes you a better writer^*.

#: A conversation I had with Victoria the other day reminded me of why I want to write:

Victoria: I was talking about mcsweeney’s and open letters with a coworker who was unfamiliar.
Victoria: and I went to find one that has been my favorite for a long time.
Victoria: so I was rereading it and got to the end.
Victoria: and started to laugh.
Professor Coldheart: that’s how you and I hit it off so quickly - you’ve known my name for years
Victoria: must be the case. my coworker is still laughing at me right now.
Victoria: well played, Professor. well played.
Professor Coldheart: I set that one up years in advance just to sting ya

I enjoy talking about writing with friends and peers. But that’s not why I write. I write because I hope someone’s going to find my writing, before they ever meet or know me, and say, “Damn - that hit the spot.” I don’t want to be a cool guy who also happens to be a writer; I want to be a writer who happens to be cool.

I know that my lifelong dream - to see my name on the cover of a hardback novel on a stranger’s house or in a bookstore in a foreign city - won’t be the End-All of everything. There are thousands of people who hit that step and fade into obscurity. But humans aren’t built to achieve One Perfect Moment and then die quietly. We’re constantly seeking new goals. We’re always moving.

So I don’t consider Getting Published my lifetime dream. It’s my dream for now. And I’m making slow progress.

Postscript: That ended a lot more after-school special than I thought it would. Short version: positive feedback on my writing makes me happy; accidentally discovering that I wrote something you love makes me happier still. I suggest randomly searching the forums on RPG.net and then IMing me when you find something funny: “did you write this?” Odds are I didn’t.

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^* Except Head of the Class fan-fiction. C’mon, Kev. I mean: seriously.

I’m surrounded by more babies than Ashanti songs

• I’m not going to talk much about work on here, as a rule, but: were I still in the semiotics game, I might have a lot to say about the degree of weeding I need to do when sorting a list of common search results related to babies. I mean actual babies, not ooh baby, so I have to manually pick out anything inappropriate. No, I don’t want baby got back lyrics. Or hey baby. Or mtv cribs. Or baby got boobs. Or america’s next top wet nurse. There’s enough infancy imagery in pop culture to make at least two masters’ theses, if not a grant proposal.

• Tuesday night I put just shy of 16 gallons in the tank and paid a few dimes shy of $50. That number’s going to sit with me for a while. I can buy an XBox 360 for 7 tanks of gas. I can get a decent suit for 5 tanks of gas. I can take a girl out for a quality dinner or I can fill up my car. You try it - it’s fun!

• Work and jiu-jitsu have taken over my life recently, meaning I haven’t had as much time to devote to the simple pleasures like paying bills. I still haven’t touched my W-2s. I know that I have more than a month to do them and the actual process will take me maybe 2 hours, but I still feel the obligation sorely. My all-time record for earliest filing remains Valentine’s Day. One year I hope to beat that record.

• While woeing is me the other day, I forgot one awesome development that blew the rest of the weekend’s bad news out of the water: I landed tickets to Atmosphere’s next show in Boston! April 26th. I’ve branded this date on the surface of my brain. I will have no schedule conflicts on April 26th. Nothing will stand between me, the Theatre District and the twin sons of Mini-Hopelessness. I understand that the birth / death of your loved one may be important, sir / ma’am, but I’ve got GA seats to Atmosphere, so you’ll excuse my rudeness.

• Speaking of memory, and of work: I have yet to forget where I parked or which locker I’m using in the gym. Given my tendencies toward occasional absentmindedness I consider this a pretty serious accomplishment. Apparently, all it takes is a conscious effort to remember a number - even if that number changes every day (”P3″, “44″, etc) - and I’m good. Or maybe I’m growing sharper in my old age.

• I transition from “mid twenties” to “late twenties” in about three weeks. I’ll make sure to update my viewpoints accordingly.

like a castle in its corner, in a medieval game

CNN confirms the passing of Gary Gygax.

I think I first started recognizing Dungeons and Dragons from ads in the back of the occasional Marvel Comic that I’d buy. One day in 4th grade I discovered a huge standing display of D&D boxed sets in the local Waldenbooks - the black box with the red dragon on the cover, for those who remember it. I begged my parents to let me buy one, which they said I could - out of my own pocket. So I scrimped and saved twenty whole dollars (plus $1 tax) and walked out with one about a month later¹. I was already familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books, and video game RPGs like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. But the idea that I could make and explore my own worlds thrilled me to no end. It turned on an addiction that I’m probably never going to get over.

Now here’s the pathetic part: I spent far more time preparing to play D&D than I spent actually playing. I had a friend, Stephen, who’d play D&D on occasion but liked Champions and Marvel Super Heroes better. My friend Patrick liked Shadowrun - the cyberpunk RPG where the 2050s look just like the nightmare of 1985 - and we played on and off for a couple summers. Other than that, though, I never had a regular gaming crew in high school. I was always too conscious of the judgment of the “cool kids” to risk admitting that yes, I liked half-elven fighter/mages and slaying pit fiends. Those kids at the corner table? With the greasy black hair and the pasty skin and the Dungeon Masters Guide with the cracked spine? They had more cojones than I did.²

I got back into D&D in college, with the gentle coaxing of Kevin H. and Serpico. I played a big, glorious mess of a one-off game with them and about seven other people one spring. Inspired, I took the slow steps necessary to start running my own campaign. Melissa, Serpico, Kevin and Aaron followed the trail I set for them, recovering two ancient artifacts that outlined a ritual for godhood and keeping them out of the hands of the demonic/celestial crossbreed, Duvaran the Fair. There were vicious halfling mercenaries and religious zealots and genocidal elves and half-orc barbarians and snow dragons and kobold traps galore. I think I even worked a barbazu in there. Good times.

Without RPGs, I never would have run the 7th Sea campaign (The Lost Histories) that got Melissa and Fraley better acquainted. Without RPGs, I never would have known Christine any better than I did. I probably wouldn’t still be friends with Bobby, Auston, Dana J., Will S. or half the people I went to school with. I probably wouldn’t still be reading. Or writing.

I’d also probably be at least $1000 richer, judging by the contents of the bookshelf closest to my computer, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve had a rich and imaginative gaming life so far and I’ve only been at it sixteen years. You’ll find me and a regular crew at the nursing home, shaking polyhedral dice and arguing over who has initiative. I can almost promise.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.” - Oscar Wilde

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¹ This should be especially funny to anyone still in the hobby, where $20 will buy you about 2/3 of one of the three core handbooks you need to play D&D today.

² Not hanging out with geeks all the time in my developing years had its other advantages, of course, so I don’t rue the whole experience.