A Warrior Only Dies Once

 

I was eleven when I saw this cover the first time. And I knew. Immediately. Yes, absolutely immediately. That this book was important. It’s that moment when time stops and you realize you will be holding this book decades from now, and that I would never really let it go.

Well, I found that copy at my in-laws, 23 years later. I took it home. Funny how that works. I remember it being my favorite of the Redwall books (with Lord Brocktree a close second), and I think it's because of the following quote:

"A coward dies a thousand times, but a warrior dies only once."

At the time I had no idea the things that would come at me. I didn't know that life, which had already been filled with rapes, beatings, and manipulations, was about to get much harder. I did not know that I would have to figure out what all the evil I experienced meant to me, an act that would change me in ways that I am still trying to get ahold of, decades later. So was it providence that I ran acrost this quote one year before the questions about whether or not life was worth living in the wake of all that had happened? Before the battle became interior? I mean, I suppose? It certainly seems that way. All I knew was that my eleven year old self read that book and felt something very deep, primal, powerful, that I've not felt from anything else: dive in head first, giving up is far worse than dying.

And then over the next twenty years I more or less consciously forgot it. Thanks to the incredible amount of trauma I'd taken in, I couldn't (and still have a hard time) distinguish what was a threat and what wasn't, meaning that most of my day is spent wasting my energy on battles that didn't exist. Which meant that when the time came to actually face down the baggage I'd accumulated I'd be worn out... and fold before it, doing things that I didn't think myself capable of. And that was a death of cowardice. That's what the quote was referring to: giving up who you are because you are afraid. I have died many times.

But, holding that book, I realized that I had more or less forgotten what I had promised myself so long ago: failure was far scarier than dying.

Yeah, easier said than that. But I have to try again. I may not have died once, but I will not die again.

Oh, who'm I kidding? I’ll fail that. But failure was never an option. Forgiveness and trying again is. Nevertheless, one must aim for the impossible, even as one fails it.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Venom

Double Trouble was a nice surprise, a blast from the past that reminded me just how good Bendis really was, once upon a time. I didn’t need a reminder for the Venom arc. That was burned into my brain as a kid. Permanently. Well, at least I thought it was.

Turns out it was a hell of a lot better than I remember.

MJ’s broken up with Peter. Grieving, Peter finds childhood friend Eddie Brock… who’s working to finish their parents started: the Venom project. Peter tries to take some of “the suit”, only to find that it’s far more dangerous than could be expected. Peter wants to get rid of it. Eddie doesn’t.

Yup, that’s the seven issues. And it is beyond well done. Bendis patiently builds the slow burn, playing out Peter’s despair at MJ leaving, the heartwarming reunion with Eddie, and the inevitable whirlwind of discovery, joy, terror, betrayal, and the final awful conflict, with Peter having to confront the truth. 

There are few things I would call brilliant. This is one of those things. I hesitate to insult Bagley’s pencils by talking about them, because this is penciling about as good as it gets. I can hear the shouting, gunshots, the air pregnant with the silent screams of what could have been. It’s more than plot or art, but comics at the height of its power. 

This is seven issues of slow burn perfection. Period. 

The Point and Goal of Writing Dark Posts

 

I have been writing some dark stuff as of late. There have been two reactions to it, far as I can tell: very genuine concern for my welfare or "Oh, it's Nate being Nate". The genuineness of either is not in doubt, but one is accurate and the other is not, and it's the "Oh, it's Nate being Nate" camp that's closer to the mark. This is not meant to denigrate the former, however, but to explain one of the gradually evolving goals of this blog and the logic behind it. I am far more okay than most would like to think. The time to have worried about me would have been about six years ago, not now. I will explain that first.

Modern society has always felt very odd to me. The oddest part about it, however, is the insistence that people are completely conformitve creatures. This is patently false. People are inherently conflicted beings, who seek conflict and need it to help them process what they are. If you put people into a spot where there's not a lot of conflict it is a psychological fact that they will invent conflict. We have to have it. If a person wishes to stay sane that have to find a way to channel their need for conflict and they have to own up to this need. 

If you don't think that a fact of human nature you're not just wrong but you are a danger to yourself and  others. 

I am open and honest about it. I admit my need for conflict and therefore am actually at peace.

Yes, I said peace. Peace is not the same thing as calmness. Peace is about acceptance. I'm working on the calm part.

Six years ago? I wasn't ready to admit it. I was not at peace with my need for conflict, and that really messed me up. I blamed the darkness in my soul on the trauma and horror inflicted upon me, instead of seeing that experiencing such things merely increased my appetite for conflict. I took the need home and instead of channeling it properly I sat on the flashbacks and the rest of the horrors and sought conflict in my own house, where that sort of thing isn't helpful. I thought the flashbacks were the problem, but as I continued on in EMDR and therapy I realized three things:

1) Rage is frustrated energy

2) The flashbacks were not the source of my energy, but they made a handy scapegoat to not live up to my own potential.

3) If I didn't figure out what to do with all the energy I find in myself I would inevitably become frustrated, turning the energy to rage, as sure as damming a river leads to a water back up.

It's an ongoing process, but  the intent when facing myself has changed from merely nullifying rage to redirecting the energy to other things. And it has been marvelously freeing. I'm not terribly good at it yet, but it has been a breath of fresh air for me.

But sometimes that energy doesn't get handled properly. And so I write, and I make a conscious decision to publish what I write. It is extremely purposeful. I do it for one very simple reason: my experiences of reading Gene Wolfe have taught me that reading a frank confession of human nature as it is exists in an individual is healing for others to read. It is not a question of whether or not I am a good writer. That is not the point, although I do think I am getting better. The point is that the mere act of reading about someone else having trouble and trying to figure out what to do it with can be a good thing for people.

Now, if you've read my posts and you go "but I don't feel particularly helped", that's fine, you might not need what I've put up on the web yet. Maybe I just suck at writing. That's always an option. But someday you might. Someday your own nature may get the better of you and the lie that somehow you're anything like your sterile modern surroundings won't be enough anymore. This state of constant calmness, without death and illness and killing, does not calm you down, it makes you itchy, and if you don't deal with that itch you will go crazy. You need conflict. You need challenge. But few will tell you the truth.

And here is that ugly truth:

You need contention, and that contention starts right betwixt your own ears and in your chest. Different people will need different levels of conflict, but there is not a person alive who doesn't need it.

The calmness of a first-world environment will not help you channel your need for conflict, if anything it will frustrate you further. The privilege of a first world denizen isn't to stop suffering and conflict, but to choose a type of suffering and conflict that won't necessarily kill you or others. And that is better than 99% of all human beings who have ever lived. What a gift! You may need help learning how to channel that energy other places and you may need to grieve the bad shit that happened to you, but the end goal is not to eliminate the energy, but to just get it to where it needs to go.

I publish these posts because someone may feel relief from knowing they are not alone in facing the conflict from inside them. I publish these posts because I know others assume their inherent uniqueness in this fact, which is the type of lie that destroys families and nations. I do not publish these posts to ask for help. If I need help I would not ask on a blog. Or online.

But maybe you, the reader, will benefit from the meanderings and musings. I know I have benefited from such things myself. So I try, to the best of my ability, to pay it forward.

And if I can help someone face the real problem head on, no matter how slightly, that's not a life poorly spent.

The Most Important Thing Heroes of the Grid Taught Me

Play is not the same thing as games. Play is a state of creativity and imagination that is objectively good for you. One of the ways us humans make play easier is by designing games. I'm pretty sure at this point the point of a game is whether or not it actually makes play easy to enter into. So long as a game can get someone into play then it is doing its job.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about Heroes of the Grid. It’s been longer since I’ve played it. This has been a practical thing: toddlers destroy cards with alarming quickness, and the heart of HotG is in its cards. So up went the game! It’s too bad, but I’d prefer to be able to play later than lose components now. And I do actively feel the loss: the Guardian system, as I believe it is now called, is a fantastic thing. Mr. Ying had better be proud.

First off, the cards. They’re not too wordy, but the concepts they frequently communicate allow for a decent amount of depth for what they are. The cards and how they interact have a learning curve to them, but once a player understands what they’re looking at they find a responsive and intuitive ruleset, so much so that letting yourself lean into it is the trick. Looking for structure in the game rules themselves will only lead to frustration; there is no rule telling you what to do. Most new players I’ve introduced to the game sit there blinking, deerlike, as the structure has no inherently obvious use. “What do I do? When may I do it?”

Heroes of the Grid, in that respect isn’t like most board games at all. The rules are specifically reactive to the conversation at the table. Gameplay hinges off your ability to look at the board and talk about what you see, with friends who aren’t trying to boss you around. The conversation at the table is itself the game. Heroes of the Grid just gives you cards and dice to steer that game in unexpected ways.

I play this game a lot with my sons who, while they don’t really grasp the mechanics of the cards yet, still very much understand this rule: talk and play a card at some point, maybe even roll some of those chonky dice! Other games I’ve thrown at them they like well enough (Lanterns particularly) but time after time they open the box of cards for Heroes of the Grid and we fantasize about when we’ll next get to play.

So now we get to my point: the other day one of my sons was going through the cards as we both pined about being able to play again. My son knows I love playing MMPR Red Dragonshield, colloquially known as Jason Dragonshield. My son asked to see Dragonshield's deck and noticed that I was picking and choosing from the MMPR red cards. He realized I was constructing a deck, that I was making it up. He was stunned; he thougth there was a predetermined list of cards for Jason Dragonshield! I laughed and told him that the game supported you making your own character from the available cards you had. My son's face lit up, and he asked me to show him the deck all over again and explain it to him.

Jason Dragonshield

Team Tactics (Gain energy, someone else plays a card)

Blade Blaster (Dump energy for damage, 1 to 1)

Risky Moves (Take damage to grant bonus dice to another attack)

Lead the Charge (2D attack next attack at +1D)

Haymaker (1D attack, more dice for each shield on top of discard pile)

Power Sword (5D attack, +2D next attack)

Start with Dragon Dagger(3D twice) and Dragon Shield (-3 damage +1D next attack) in hand, giving you a greater than normal hand size. 

My son was curious about my choices, so I broke down the tactics of having a leader who could become a serious fighter if he needed to be. I had to break down each card and why it went into the deck. I then grabbed a few more rangers from the box and showed him how to balance the deck, and that there was a huge variety of things that could be done to make exactly what you wanted. I watched as my son's eyes glazed over a second trying to comprehend what he had just been told. He was no longer looking at a box of predetermined options, but an entire box of tools.

So now in the mornings whenever we take "the box" out he asks me how I would combine characters and why. The game went from just being something to do to being a vehicle to actually engage in play. Heroes of the Grid makes an honest attempt to put mechanics at the service of the conversation and off-table creativity, and that's positively impacted my son, who's now realizing their may be more to playing a game than just following the directions and seeing what happens.

It's a really cool thing to watch.

Dunno if this post any other point than that. But there it is.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Double Trouble

 It is an objective fact that Bendis and Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man run is as close to perfection as you can get. I’m sorry if you disagree, but there it is. It’s not often you get a competent run anymore, particularly for the exorbitant price of modern comics. 

Not this. 

It’s worth far more than the buck I was charged. A lot more.

Otto Octavius was put into a coma trying to inject Oz, the wonder drug partially responsible for Peter Parker getting spider-powers, into Norman Osborn. Oscorp exploded and Octavius became a plot time bomb. Peter knew Otto would take one look at his Spidey costume and see right through it. Peter knew that one day Otto would wake up and probably come right for him.

He was half right. Otto woke up, but with no memory of the explosion that almost killed him, or even why he was there. Instead, Otto wakes up to find his metallic arms grafted to him, along with the horrifying knowledge they were left on him… just to see what would happen. Dazed, grieving, and impossibly angry, Otto begins a rampage for revenge and knowledge.

But that’s not the end of it. Kraven, a twisted Steve Irwin,  has decided that he’s going to track down and kill Spider-Man. On a reality TV show. Y’know, because of his show’s dying ratings. His powers of tracking appear legit; Kraven shows up at Peter’s high school.

Can Peter help Otto, keep his identity secret, not get killed by Kraven, and keep his curfew?

And it just keeps getting worse. 

Peter finds himself up to his neck in corporate espionage, greed, human tragedy at every turn. He doesn’t have context, just some powers and the determination to never turn a blind eye, ever again. Unlike Ditko and Lee’s version bad child struggling to be a good man, Bendis portrays a good child trying desperately to stay that way in the face of an increasingly complex world. Whereas I wouldn’t put it past Ditko’s Spidey to be constantly tempted to kill Otto and kick himself for not doing so, Bendis’s Spidey simply doesn’t have those qualms. It’s something I miss from the Ultimate version. 

But the plot? Oh, Lee never wrote like this. The plotting is immaculate. Completely. Bendis used to weave a web of sci-fi noir no one else ever could. It’s so good I would read it without the titular hero… but the contrast between Peter’s world and his antagonists’ is so compellingly crafted you’d miss something.

If you can get your hands on this volume you owe it to yourself to read it. While I regret Peter’s defanging (a common trope of Bendis’s that only gets worse) the plot and characters and world of this book are so compelling that I can’t not recommend it wholeheartedly.

A Dark Night

I've always run this blog off of as close to total honesty as one can get. When given the opportunity to commercialize this blog at the expense of transparency of soul (and I have had more than a few of those times!) I have always spurned commercialization. It doesn't get me the views, and it sure won't make me any money, but this was always about me writing what I cared about, right now, and trying to show parts of a soul that might be profitable for others to read. They might be weird, and in some cases even shockingly so, but I have always wanted this blog to a place for the disconsolate to find something, anything, that may let them know that they are not nearly as alone as they think. And then I found myself getting into a particular groove, and thought "Hey, this is what the blog is going to be about for awhile".

Man makes plans and God laughs.

Because now I'm in a very different place. And I'm a bit surprised by it.

One of the things that I figured was that, as I healed from the trauma and the flashbacks, that life would more or less get back to what I thought to be normal. I thought the problems would get easier and easier, until there was a peace that would endure. And, for a little while, that certainly seemed to be the arc. Things calmed down, more and more and more, and I started to get comfortable. I could think more clearly, I could respond to things better.

And then the bottom dropped out, and I realized something: the problems weren't any easier. I was still facing the same question: do I continue to live? Or not? Do I quit? Or do I stay? The questions hadn't changed. I thought I'd be asking different questions than the usual "Should I kill myself or not?" that anyone with PTSD finds themselves having to ask. Not wanting to, mind. This is stressful stuff, it takes a toll on the body. You get tired and worn out, and sometimes your body quits. And when it quits you have to ask if that's the end. If it isn't you have to somehow find a way to keep going.

And the only way to do that is to just let time carry you along, like a wave on a beach. Sure, there may be a few sharp rocks along the way, but if you're too tired to fight it you're too tired to fight it. A rock is a rock. It sucks to hit, but ultimately the only thing I've realized in all this time isn't that the hits will be less, nor that they will magically go away, but I have always had a power I did not know I had to respond as I wished.

So yes, I'm sitting on that. It's not the freedom I anticipated. But it is actual freedom. Real freedom, to do as I will with what I've got.

Oh, you were hoping you'd get control over what comes at you?

Yeah, me too, but that's never going to be a thing.

A Moment of Unbridled Confusion

Y’know what the western canon is filled with? Flawed people making really flawed but important decisions, and everyone else having to figure out the consequences. I just summed up Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the Odyssey, not to mention the Aeneid and pretty much any Hellenic myth. I've found that this dedication to exploring consequences, to the fullest tragic extent, is exactly what I'm interested in. What do you do during the inevitable collapse? What do you try to do to make the most out of the situation? And that's why I made Crescendo. I've gotten tired of playing RPGs where that isn't the inevitable question: it's collapsing, now what? I wanted a game that made stories which continued the pre-modern paradigm. The last two years have been a steady sharpening and forging of a game to produce exactly this kind of story. During this point in time I've enjoyed ad hoc stories of incredible pathos and tragedy, with plenty of consequences and dedication to dealing with said consequences.

Did I mention that I've been having a hard time watching pretty much any TV shows and movies lately? And the one movie that I watched recently that I actively rewatched, The Glass Onion, I walked away deeply disturbed and found myself appreciating that I was deeply disturbed by the movie? I wasn't disturbed because I disagreed with the movie, but because it had shown me something I think actually valuable. More on that in a future post. But know it's coming.

The point is that is that aesthetics follow belief, and all of a sudden I hit a point where my beliefs have fully formed my aesthetics, and I'm not entirely sure what to do about it. 

No, that does not make me feel superior.

I feel rather confused. When the hell did this happen?

Like, I get what I wrote out earlier, but what the heck?

I sure didn't ask for this.

I didn't ask for people to tell me about music and TV and movies and go "Yeah, that just sounds boring". I'm not even sure what exactly is happening, honestly. A few years ago when I said "Hey, I don't think the way I see the world is really helping my situation" I did not mean to also say "Hey, I'd like my aesthetical tastes to change". But it really is the same thing, isn't it?

I'm not even sure the point of this post. The changes keep coming and I've no idea where any of this is going.

There.