March 2013

Life Under Gravity: The Videogame Arc

(Angry Birds Star Wars, Time Surfer, ZiGGURAT)

April 2013

The Endless Shopper

(Temple Run 2, Candy Crush Saga, Little Inferno)

May 2013

A Late Encounter with the Enemy

(Etrian Odyssey IV, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate)

Today

Phil skips graduation.

January

1/1  Phil Gaffigan wakes and says to himself,

“This year will be different.”

1/2  During his planning period, Phil adds

specifics to his list of resolutions:

– Lose Weight (40 pounds by summer)

– Meet Someone (go on at least 3 dates)

– The Project (for real this year, study

   Shark Tank)

– Less Internet (1 hour a day, maybe 2)

– Keep Diary (at least once a week)

1/3  Phil orders the Son of Baconator instead

of his regular Baconator at the Wendy’s

drive-thru. He gets the combo with chili,

no cheese, and a medium coke.

Phil sits in the parking lot and watches the

passing cars and pale evening sky while

he eats. Halfway through, he thinks

maybe he should have gone for the

Asiago Ranch Chicken Club.

1/4  Phil’s neighbor pokes his head out of his

garage and waves.

“Some week,” he says.

“That it is!  Or was,” Phil says, fumbling

with his keys.

“Got anything lined up for the weekend?”

“Not much, you know.  Going down to see

mom.”

1/5  Phil and his mother watch Roseanne on

TVland until it starts to repeat mid-

afternoon.  She won’t admit to liking it, but

she doesn’t change the channel either.

Roseanne begins working at the salon,

goes on a diet, files taxes, has a birthday,

fights with Jackie, makes up with Jackie.

Jackie often makes Phil tear up.

1/6  Phil writes in a new notebook:

Well, so far so good. I read somewhere

that it’s harder to keep a diary going if

you’re happy. So maybe if I don’t keep

this so regular, that’s a good thing! Ha!

Bet I have a ton of January diaries around

here somewhere. But this time’s going to

be different. It’s got to be. For one, I’m

really getting up there (officially!) and

time’s definitely passing quicker each

year. My memory’s shot, and it wasn’t

anything special to begin with! Seriously, I

can hardly remember last year. Did

anything much happen? I really have to

record things better. And not just on

facebook.

Kinda lost control today. Not really a

binge, but definitely a slip-up. And after 3

days of being good too. Maybe I should

keep a food diary.

Honestly, feels like just another Sunday.

Nothing new, really. 2013 still looks weird

when I write it, like it doesn’t fit. Got to

keep my new year’s mojo going

somehow.

Mom didn’t mention the blowup at xmas

yesterday. Didn’t say much of anything.

Me neither.

Man, I’m usually a lot more optimistic than

this. Pretty content, all said and done.

Been moping around the house too much

today. Maybe what I read about diaries

was that you don’t usually write about

happy things. Got to work on that.

1/7  Phil thinks of a great idea for a facebook

post in the shower but forgets by the time

he flosses.

1/8  Phil falls asleep early watching Ancient

Aliens.  He wakes hours later and

stumbles around the house turning off all

the lights.

1/9  Phil does 3 loads of laundry, cleans out

the fridge, and scrubs the bathroom floor.

A productive night.

1/10 On the way to work, Phil hears the

weekend forecast calling for clouds and

rain.  Then he makes 3 yellow lights in a

row and everything seems like it’ll work

out ok.  He kisses his palm and touches it

to the roof of his car with each light.

1/11 Phil discovers that all of Family Ties is

available on hulu for free.  There goes my

weekend, he thinks.

1/12 Phil waits to run errands at 4:00, when the

whole city is watching the game.

1/13 Phil writes in his notebook:

Going to have to keep this one short.  So

much grading still left.  Where has the

weekend gone?  Story of my Sunday

nights.

Actually was a pretty relaxing weekend

overall (except for the racket next door –

wonder what he’s building this time).

Watched tons of the early seasons of

Family Ties.  Really brought back a lot of

memories.  Though I didn’t remember

Jennifer being so funny!

Not doing so great with my being online

resolution.  I’ve got to get out more.  Maybe

see some actual movies in the theater.

Especially now that all the Oscar

nominations are out – got to catch up!

Should see friends more too.  Maybe I’ll

see if Alex is free later this week.  Sure

been a while.  Really miss seeing that guy.

Good week food-wise.  Only one bad

night.  Man, I remember when one

Stouffer’s lasagna was enough.  Just a few

years back, and I was still this same size

too.  I seriously think they changed the

recipe and made them smaller.  Or at least

less filling!

Want to wait a bit longer to actually get on

the scales.  So when I do, I’ll be able to

see some real change!

1/14 Both of Phil’s legs fall asleep after he

plays Temple Run too long on the toilet.

1/15 Phil sees two college kids holding hands

at Kroger and remembers the fantasy he

used to have about shopping as a couple.

Combing the aisles together for the

thousands of meals they would share.

Each shelf so full of possibilities.

1/16 On the way home from school, Phil’s

mother calls and asks if he’s coming

down this weekend.  Phil says he’s not

sure, that he has a lot going on right now.

His mother asks what he could possibly

have to do that’s so important.  Besides,

doesn’t he have a 3-day weekend?

1/17 Phil half-wakes from a nightmare and lies

frozen in bed.  All he can think of is a

closed door.  Behind that door, there is a

man.  He can’t see the man, but Phil

knows he’s there.  The man stands just on

the other side, face to the door, waiting.

1/18 Ian Rook, the AP English teacher, peers

down at Phil’s salad as he passes

through the teacher’s lounge and says,

“Good for you, sir.  Good for you.”

Paula Hager, the Geometry teacher, leans

in after he leaves and says, “Don’t pay

any attention to him, Phil.”

1/19 Phil spends the whole morning catching

up on facebook.  He likes 13 posts, 7

comments, 31 photos, and shares 2 funny

e-cards.  He jumps from timeline to

timeline until his eyes ache.

1/20 Phil meets his mother for lunch. She tells

him how nice the service was.

“I think I’d like to try the Zesty Roma

Chicken and Shrimp,” Phil says.

“What, is that supposed to be good?” his

mother asks.

“It’s new. One of their under 550 calories

entrees.”

“Well, I’ll be. Isn’t that Richard’s daughter

over there in the corner booth?”

1/21 Phil sees the Geico commercial about

Eddie Money running a travel agency

5 times throughout the day.  The look on

Eddie’s face as he sings “Two Tickets to

Paradise” cracks Phil up every time.

1/22 Before class, Phil writes in his notebook:

How is it that I have this long weekend

and still end up putting everything off until

the end?  Especially the most important

things.

It’s been 3 weeks now since the new year,

and what can I say?  Little progress on

internet habits.  None at all on dates and

the project.  This diary is the only thing I’ve

kept up with, and even it’s late.

And then the weight.  I got on the scales

last week, even after I said I was going to

wait.  Needed a little boost.  And then I saw

it: 1 pound.  Only 1 pound lost!  So I

doubled down right after, got super

serious.  Went to bed hungry most nights.  I

don’t know what’s worse than feeling both

hungry and fat.

Well, I can imagine a lot worse, I guess.

Should be grateful if that’s the worst of it.

Let’s see, what else?  Caught some of the

inauguration yesterday.  I’m not real

political but what I saw was nice.  So funny

how Al Roker got both the president’s and

vice-president’s attention during the

parade.  Biden even ran over and shook

hands.  What a guy.

Ok, gotta go.  Kids will be here in 2

minutes.  At least this week will be a short

one.

1/23 Phil searches for a box of old self-help

books in the garage.  He finds his National

Geographics and Chewbacca suit but not

the box he wants.

1/24 While eating his Special K, Phil watches

squirrels on a telephone wire playing

or flirting or dueling or teasing.

1/25 In the teacher’s lounge, Sara Beth Crouse

and Paul Estes wave Phil over.

“Hey, Phil,” says Sara Beth. “Can we ask

you something?”

“Sure, guys,” Phil says. “What is it?”

Paul leans back to make sure the copy

room is empty too. “It’s about Ian Rook.”

“About why he’s such a prick,” says

Sara Beth.

Phil grins. “Oh, you mean AP night?”

“We mean every single day.” Sara Beth

leans in. “What the hell is wrong with

that man?”

“Oh, he’s always been that way. A real

Mr. Tedesco,” Phil says.

“Mr. who?” asks Sara Beth.

“Did he used to teach here or

something?” asks Paul.

“Sorry, never mind.” Phil steps sideways

toward the fridge. “Before your time.”

1/26 On his way out to meet Alex, Phil sees his

neighbor dragging a heavy bag into his

garage.

“Howdy, professor,” Phil says. “Need a

hand there?”

“Thanks, Phil. I got it.”

Phil nods and waves, then ducks into his

car already warming in the driveway.

1/27 Phil writes in his notebook:

What a nice weekend this turned out to

be. Snow day Friday so the week was

extra short. Went in to pick up quizzes and

ended up staying the whole afternoon.

But it was good! Got caught up on

everything, so the rest of my weekend

was wide open.

Finally got ahold of Alex and met up last

night. It was great to see him. We can go

months and just pick up like no time has

passed. But then I remember why we

don’t get together more often. Guy’s really

sweet, but man oh man is he exhausting.

Everything’s a production. And he has the

hardest time enjoying anything. Still wants

out of his job. Still wants out of Kentucky.

He’s been saying that as long as I’ve

known him.

He’s really got so much going for him,

though. Still sharp as ever. His 30s

haven’t dulled his brain one bit. Not like

yours truly! Abby’s still great too. She

popped in before heading out herself.

Wish she would’ve stuck around. Alex is

so much looser with her there.

We ended up talking a lot about people

we both knew on facebook. He says it’s

kind of like a game to him. How much can

he figure out about people’s lives from

their posts. I asked him how he ever knew

if he was right, since it’s not like he ever

talks to anyone on there. He said he didn’t

know. Would never know.

Typical Alex. Glad I saw him, but I’m

probably good now for another few

months. Sometimes I just want to say to

him: it’s not as bad as all that, is it? Is it?

But if I did, I bet he’d say: typical Phil. Ha!

You got me.

1/28 Phil is staring at the moonlight on his

comforter and trying to fall asleep when

he remembers where to find that box of

books.

He heads to the garage but pauses in

the doorway. He doesn’t want to get the

bottoms of his new slippers dirty, but he

doesn’t want to go back and change

either.

He steps out of his slippers and down

onto the cold cement.

1/29 Phil rummages through the box before

bed. It’s filled with his father’s most prized

books. The Power of Positive Thinking,

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,

Awaken the Giant Within.

Phil remembers his father dropping by

unannounced to give them to him. The

look on his dad’s face as he held them

out.

1/30 At dinner, Phil spills barbecue sauce on

his yellow shirt with blue parrots, his

favorite.

1/31 Phil listens to the radio in the parking lot

at Wendy’s. A caller asks Delilah to play

her and her husband’s special song.

They’re separated right now, but she

hopes he might hear it, somehow.

Phil sings along to the chorus:

Walking in Memphis

Walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale

Walking in Memphis

But do I really feel the way I feel?

February

2/1  Phil wakes to a snow day.  His mind

flutters with plans.  The day is wide open.

Anything could happen.  Then he falls

back to sleep.

2/2  Phil leaves AMC on and catches

snippets of Groundhog Day all day long.

2/3  Phil eats way too much 7 layer dip.

2/4  Phil writes in his notebook:

Thought we might get another snow day

but no. It’s for the best. Wasted the last

one. The whole weekend, really. Got the

DVR down from 98% to 73% full.

Whoopee.

Last night was a total failure. Went to the

department’s Super Bowl party. Was a

little out of sorts with them ragging on

students like usual. Switched seats but

ended up too close to the food table. And

then it was just like before, like nothing

had changed in the last month. I must

have gained back every one of the 3

pounds I’ve lost, all in one sitting. It’s like

that story where a guy pushes a boulder

up a hill only to have it roll back down

every time. Every dang time. What’s his

name? It’s just like that.

Also, got kind of down after watching

Shark Tank. Seriously, what am I waiting

for? There was this rabbi on there with a

piece of plastic that bends sound around

to the front of an Ipad. Simplest little

device, and the rabbi was so funny and

smart and charming. He made a deal with

Damon but had an offer from Robert too

(who I always thought would be nice to

work with). Man, it’s like his whole world is

going to change now. And the rabbi

deserves it! He really knew his stuff.

What am I doing? What’s different so far

this year? I don’t mean to be so down, but

I’m really getting tired of the same old

same old. If Dad were still around, he

would tell me to pick myself up. Your life is

your own. You’ve got to take it in hand.

But it doesn’t feel that way right now.

I don’t feel it.

2/5  “Would someone please wake him?”

Phil asks.

Kyle rattles Jake’s desk. “Dude. Mr. G can

totally see you sleeping.”

“Are you with us now, Jake?”

“History class is a nightmare to which I’d

rather not awake,” Jake says.

“Is that some kind of joke?” Phil asks.

2/6  On his way out, Phil rubs the wooden

animal head built into his mantelpiece.

For luck.

2/7  “But when did Dad know he wasn’t going

to make it?”

“Why in the world are you asking me all

this?”

“I was going through some of his stuff last

week. Just trying to get the timing

straight.”

“That was so long ago, Phil. I can hardly

be expected to remember every little

thing.”

“Mom, please. You forget nothing.”

2/8  Phil spends half an hour browsing netflix

instant but can’t find anything he feels like

watching besides Cheers.

2/9  Phil slips into Walmart just before

midnight. It’s practically empty. As he

searches the shelves, he remembers a

story he heard about late night sightings

of aliens in the aisles. The pale, thin kind.

Something about store lights shining off

buffed floors so you might only see their

black eyes, at first.

Phil takes his corners slowly.

2/10 Phil writes in his notebook:

Just reread the past few entries. Man,

writing sure brings out the complainer in

me. Things really aren’t so bad. Course

days have their ups and downs, but most

are pretty good in the end. I sleep well

enough, and I’m always excited about

what the next day might bring. You just

never know.

I’ve been thinking today I should write

down things I’m thankful for. To at least

balance things out.

First, my health. I do need to lose some

weight, but the doctor said I was decently

fit for someone my size. And I don’t even

look my age. People are always surprised

when I tell them. My skin’s clear and my

hair’s good. Still that little wave and

bounce!

Money’s fine too. House payments

steady, no new credit cards, not wanting

for much. Mom’s always telling me to live

a little already, but it’s not like I don’t do

what I want. Job’s secure and easy

enough. Maybe I’m not the best teacher,

but I’m certainly not the worst! Kids are

nice too, mostly. And with summers to

myself, I can’t really complain about the

schedule.

I do have some habits I’d like to change,

but they’re not so serious. Not like I drink

or smoke or anything. Just some daily

stuff. Oh, and have good friends too. Wish

we could see more of each other, but I

know they’re busy. That’s something else

– I’m not too busy. Really have time to do

what I want.

So I shouldn’t complain. Perspective, Phil,

perspective! Sometimes I just overreact to

little things. Like last night…ended up

spooking myself over something silly. Got

this image stuck in my head of an alien

from a movie I saw in high school. Slowly

peeking around the corner of a dresser.

Ug, don’t even want to write it now.  So

stupid. It’s not like I really believe in

aliens. But I couldn’t shake the feeling it

gave me.

The whole thing made the house feel a lot

emptier today. That feeling like I was

being watched. Course, whenever I

turned to look behind me, nothing. But

still. Funny, these haunted feeling days at

least feel more memorable.

When I look back at the entries here, it’s

crazy how little I remember of the days in

between. If I try real hard and do the math,

I can sometimes figure out when certain

things must have happened. Then the

details might come back. But mostly no,

just days and days mushed together.

What I need to figure out is how to make

the days more memorable. Without

scaring myself half to death, that is!

2/11 Phil’s sister leaves a message on his

phone during class.  She says to call back

if he gets this in the next 15 minutes.

Otherwise, she’ll just try him later in the

week when things are less hectic.

2/12 Phil realizes too late that he’s out of toilet

paper, and there’s no spare under the

sink.  The extra rolls are in the hall closet.

2/13 After dinner, Phil calculates that he finally

made it through a whole day on less than

2,000 calories.  He decides to go to bed

early, just to be safe.

2/14 At the end of school, Phil runs by his

mailbox in the teacher’s lounge and stuffs

all the papers in his bag.  Only later at

home does he find, amidst observation

forms and safety reminders, a typed letter

from a secret admirer.

2/15 Phil sits in the parking lot and watches the

teachers and students enter the building.

He sees a stain under a window that he’s

never noticed before. He sees a still-

burning cigarette roll along the sidewalk.

He sees someone else sitting in a car.

Phil is suddenly afraid to go in.

2/16 Phil spends most of the afternoon going

through a shoebox of stuff from his ex-

boyfriend.

He finds a note dated February 16th but a

decade past. It says:

Go ahead and make yourself comfortable

if I’m not home when you get here. Can

you also take out the soup and put it on

the stove? You’ll never believe what kind I

made.

~ M

2/17 Phil writes in his notebook:

Something crazy has happened. I was

going to write earlier, but I didn’t know

what to say. I still don’t! But I’m about to

burst, and I don’t know who else to tell.

So, on Thursday I got this…love letter. Is

that what I should call it? At first I thought it

was a joke. I mean, these things don’t

happen in real life. Just too crazy. But

then I thought: why would someone go to

all that trouble?

Friday was weird because suddenly I was

looking at everyone like: Is it you? Is it

you? I really felt paranoid or something.

Guess I’m most afraid that it’s a woman

who doesn’t know. But practically

everyone knows! Plus, the letter does

sound like a man. Still, I need to make a

list and try to narrow down the

possibilities.

The whole crazy thing has turned me

upside down. Bringing back all these

memories of feelings I thought were long

gone. Even got out the dreaded shoebox

yesterday. My ex-box, ha! The weird thing

is, while I do remember a lot of the

feelings from back then, there are all

these things he mentions that I can barely

recall. Little daily things that I’m sure were

important at the time. At least I understand

better now why he was always such a nut

about keeping records and dating

everything.

(His handwriting does still get me, I have

to admit.)

I don’t know, everything just feels different

now. Like I’m in a movie or something. For

once I wish we didn’t have tomorrow off. It

just feels like the world out there is so full

of secrets!

2/18 Phil paces the house.  He tries to grade.

He flips between channels.  He clicks

from site to site.  He stares into the fridge.

He gazes through the blinds.  He checks

the mail again and again until he

remembers it’s a holiday.

2/19 Phil wakes 30 minutes before his alarm.

He takes a scalding shower, brushes

twice, shaves extra carefully, doubles up

on deodorant, gets his hair just right, and

dresses in his most slimming shirt.  Before

leaving, he decides to add – why not? – a

splash of cologne.

2/20 The handsome new Physics teacher,

Ben Maddox, smiles at Phil in the hallway.

Phil smiles back, gives a little wave.

2/21 “Could be raccoons,” Phil’s neighbor

says. “Very smart animals. Natural

tricksters.”

“Maybe it’s just dogs,” Phil says.

“I doubt that. The local strays never

struck me as particularly bright.”

Phil starts rolling his can up the driveway.

His neighbor says, “Whatever the case,

we can’t be having our garbage strewn

all over the neighborhood.”

2/22 Rita Campbell, the Algebra II teacher,

sticks her head in during Phil’s planning.

“They tell you about the open house this

afternoon?”

“That they did, thanks.”

“They’ve got me running around like a

madwoman reminding everybody!”

“Well you can check me off your list!”

“Word of advice: always look busy during

your planning!”

“Don’t I always, though!”

“By the way, looking sharp today, Phil.”

“Oh. Well…thank you.”

2/23 Phil’s mother asks if he saw the news

report on channel 18 about his old high

school.

“They said it’s haunted and whatnot.

Lights coming on at night, footsteps in the

halls, desks rearranging themselves.

That kind of stuff.”

“Now mom. You don’t believe in any of

that.”

“No. But you do.”

2/24 Phil writes in his notebook:

Interesting week, that’s for sure. But I don’t

know what to make of it. Maybe I’m a little

rusty at reading the signs. I’m going to

start a list of possible people, just to keep

things straight.

So first, the known single men at school:

Hal Warner, Rodney Hopkins, Cecil

Walker, Ben Maddox. I know Ben is a

stretch, a hope! I’ve never heard him

mention a girlfriend, but then I’ve only

spoken to him twice. He was friendly this

week, true, but he’s always friendly to

everybody. If I’m being honest, I can’t

imagine him writing a letter like that. He’s

too straightforward, doesn’t seem the kind

to mess around. Plus, he’s just too hot!

As for the others, Hal is certainly a nice

guy. Helped me out a number of times

with some of the problem kids. Hard to tell

with guidance counselors, though. Been

wrong before.

I hope to god it’s not Rodney. I can never

tell if his jokes are just in bad taste or if

he’s the biggest homophobe in the

school. He’s always been nice to me one

on one, but the man’s kind of gross, to be

honest.

Which leaves Cecil Walker. Now that

would be something for the history books!

A dead serious, no nonsense blowhard

like our department chair writing little old

me love notes! Simply not possible.

Of course, this doesn’t include any

married ones. At least they’d have a

reason to write in secret. But none of them

give off signals, except maybe Paul Estes.

Though his are definitely mixed. Literature

guys are tough to read. Ha! (Dear lord just

let it not be Ian Rook.)

I guess I can’t discount the possibility of it

being one of the women. Rita was sweet

last week. She’s certainly been through

enough – I would hate to disappoint her.

And I do get along with many of the

others, too many to list. (Yikes, just

remembered Betty Jo Crenshaw back at

Homecoming. Ack.) Only if it was

someone like Josephine Overstreet would

I be really shocked. Such a classy lady! It

would kind of be an honor.

I don’t know what to do next. I’m no

detective, that’s for sure, so even writing it

out like this is probably useless. Maybe I

should just write a letter back. Leave it in

my own box and hope he checks soon.

Maybe that’s too risky. Maybe he’ll write

again on his own. Who knows!

2/25 During breakfast, Phil checks the Oscar

winners he slept through.  He wonders if

Argo would be a good date movie.

2/26 Phil notices Gene lingering by his map of

the Fertile Crescent after class.

“How’s it going there, Gene?”

“Good, sir, good.”

“Your mom doing ok?”

“Yes, sir.”

Gene makes no move to leave. He rattles

the earphones in his hand like dice.

“Those boys giving you any more

trouble?” Phil asks.

“Not since Christmas break.”

“Well, if you ever again need me to”

“I will, sir…thank you. I’ve been meaning

to tell you. Thank you, I mean.”

2/27 Before the first bell, Phil tries to listen in

as Kaylee tells the crowd of girls

around her desk how her boyfriend’s

cousin’s stepmom once babysat

Jennifer Lawrence.

2/28 Phil struggles to write a letter to his secret

admirer after dinner.  He doesn’t even

know how to begin.  Dear Sir (or Madam)?

To whom it may concern?  Dear you know

who?

March

3/1  Phil finds a second letter in his school

mailbox.  It’s in the same fake handwriting

font but much more explicit than before.

He quickly hides it in his bag, along with

the letter he wrote before school.

3/2  Phil writes in his notebook:

Now I’m really confused. If I had actually

delivered my letter just a day earlier,

everything might be different!

I’d just about given up when I wrote it.

Written the whole thing off as some weird

fluke. When I reread the first letter on

Thursday, it just seemed kind of vague.

Like it could have been written to

anybody. Or put in the wrong box by

mistake.

So I wrote that there must have been

some misunderstanding. No hard

feelings. I guess it was kind of a test to

see if the person would even check.

For once, it was a good thing I waited so

long to do anything. Well, maybe. The

second letter is kind of nuts. And there’s

no mistaking it’s for me (he even noticed

I’d been dressing up a little more

recently). He asked all these personal

questions. Like really personal! I can’t

even write them down.

I was all ready to try and forget the whole

thing, but now I don’t know what to do.

The second letter has stirred things up all

over again. And the new tone is kind of…

exciting? I guess I always have liked

dominant types.

But how do I respond to that? I think I’ve

forgotten how! My mind keeps going to my

ex. Though that’s probably too serious, at

least right now. This person almost seems

like he just wants an encounter. (Which

also sounds nice.) But why go to such

trouble if that’s all he wants?

He sounds complicated, perhaps

conflicted or kind of new to this. I don’t

know, maybe I could be the experienced

one this time. Part of me is still hesitating,

but I don’t know why.

3/3  Phil heads down to the river, crosses on

the ferry, and drives the backroads of the

county he grew up in.

3/4  Phil sings “Against All Odds” in the

shower.

3/5  “Come say hi to your Uncle Phil!”

“How are the girls doing?”

“They were just asking when you…Greg!

Get the girls in here!”

“Bern, it’s fine…”

“Tell them I’ve got their Uncle Phil on the

computer!”

“Bern, really…”

“Listen Phil, I’m really sorry about

Christmas. I should’ve had your back, I

should have. But you know Greg didn’t

mean it. And jesus you know how mom

can be. You know the crazy shit she

comes out with sometimes.”

“I know.”

“No, tell them I said RIGHT NOW!”

3/6  Phil likes and then unlikes a photo of his

ex.  He hopes he’s in time to stop the

notification from showing up.

3/7  Phil clicks on a link:

Feel like a Luigi in life?

Nintendo says this is your year!

3/8  Phil finds a third letter in his box.

It suggests they meet next Wednesday.

3/9  Phil is browsing in the Relationships

section when he hears an announcement

for a signing by local transgender author

Alana Nicole Sholar.  He browses closer

and closer and then hovers nearby so he

can hear what she says.

3/10 Phil writes in his notebook:

I’ve made a decision. I’m going to meet

this ‘secret admirer’. I can hardly believe it

myself. Just yesterday morning I had

decided the complete opposite. But today

things are different. And I feel good

about it! And scared!

Ever since the letters started, things have

just been off balance for me. All those old

feelings for my ex stirred up. Not even for

him, really. But for that time I guess. I

haven’t talked to him in forever, and it’s

not like the last time was bad or anything.

I’ve seen his occasional updates on

facebook (guess he’s not into it much), but

that was only weird when I first joined

years ago.

It’s not about him (him him him…he-who-

must-not-be-named, ha!). It’s not about

Murphy. It’s about me. I started to think:

What am I so afraid of? Why not try?

Didn’t I make a resolution to meet

someone?

I’ve wondered if maybe I don’t know how

to have a relationship anymore. I’m not

sure I even did when we were together.

I remember when we had those long

breakup talks. Well, mostly Murphy talking

(I always did like to listen to him talk). But I

never even got what I did so wrong.

So I went to JB’s yesterday to just look

around. I don’t know, try to get some

perspective or something. I hadn’t been

there in forever (and it looked different

again this time – why they keep

rearranging the shelves is beyond me!).

I guess I wondered if the ghost of Murphy

would still haunt me there.

But you know what? It was fine. It really

was. And I was kind of enjoying myself

looking through the books. Not that I’ve

suddenly become a reader or anything,

but it was nice to just soak in the

atmosphere and browse a little.

Then I saw this signing event for an

author named Alana Nicole Sholar. I’d

never heard of her before, but I saw that

her book was a memoir about growing up

here as a transgender person. This kind

of blew my mind. For one, I couldn’t

imagine JB holding an event like this 10

years ago. But even more, to grow up as a

transgender person here? HERE! And

then to write a book about it!

I was just so impressed. Alana was so

honest and real, and the people at the

event looked so much like everyday folks

around here. I wouldn’t have guessed

they could be so open and accepting. It

was all so inspiring! I ended up getting

her book – it’s on my nightstand right now

(I even got it signed, very cool!).

When I came home afterwards, my head

was light and I was shaking. I thought:

Phil, you can’t keep doing things the

same forever. You can be brave too. You

said this year would be different!

So I decided to take the risk and meet this

mystery someone on Wednesday (why he

chose Wednesday at school, I have no

idea). This time next week, everything

actually could be different. I keep

reminding myself: People can surprise

you. Even you, Phil, can surprise you!

3/11 Phil walks into the spare room but

forgets what he was coming in for.

3/12 Phil changes the sheets.

3/13 Phil waits by the trophy case. He stares at

the team photo from the year they went to

State and watches in the glass for anyone

approaching.

“Yo, Mr. G!” Kyle calls out from down the

hall.

Please don’t let it be him, please don’t let

it be him, Phil thinks. He nods at Kyle and

then turns back to study the faces in the

photo.

“Hey, what are you still doing here?” Kyle

asks.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Just about to

head home.”

“Cool cool,” Kyle says. He looks at the

photo behind the glass. “Pretty rad that

year, huh? I mean, those dudes didn’t win

it all, but they’re still legends if you ask…

what the fuck?” Kyle peers over Phil’s

shoulder and then walks past him.

Lordy, that was close, Phil thinks. Does

seem he’s a bit late, though. What if

someone else comes? How long should I

wait? He straightens his shirt and checks

himself in the glass. You look just fine, he

tells himself.

Phil turns to make sure Kyle is gone and

sees him arguing with some kids just

around the corner. He strains to see who

the others are when Kyle suddenly takes

their phone, throws it down, and cracks it

under his boot.

“Mr. G, you gotta bounce!” Kyle hollers.

“These assholes are messing with you!”

Phil accidentally smiles, as if to say it’s ok.

Then he hears the sneakers of the other

boys squeaking down the hall as they run

off. They laugh and scream: “YOU FAT

FAGGOT!”

3/14 Phil calls in sick.

3/15 Someone knocks at the front door,

but Phil doesn’t answer.

3/16 Phil eats an entire box of Cheez-Its while

watching the episode of Roseanne where

Jackie sleeps with Arnie and decides to

become a trucker.

3/17 Phil opens his notebook and reads the

last sentences and then hurls it across the

room.  The notebook slides down into the

crack between the bed and the wall.

3/18 Phil sits in his car before school.  No one

seems to notice him.  The day looks just

like any other day through the glass.

3/19 Phil hears muffled arguing in the

teacher’s lounge, but everyone goes quiet

when he opens the door.

3/20 Phil calls in sick.

Midmorning, he hears a sneeze out front.

He peeks through the blinds, and

someone passes directly in front of him.

He tracks the figure around the side of the

house, just missing him at each window.

In the kitchen, he crouches beside the

dishwasher and peers over the

countertop into his backyard. He sees his

neighbor walking across the grass.

Phil’s neighbor looks over his shoulder

and then passes through the hedge into

the subdivision that backs up against

theirs.

3/21 “Why didn’t you ever get married, Mr.

Gaffigan?” Randy asks.

“He’s not that old, Randy. There’s still

time,” Amelia says.

“Yeah, maybe he just never met that

special someone,” Cody says.

“Right. That special…someone,” Randy

says.

“Let’s all get back to work now,” Phil says.

3/22 Phil eats a cookie cake for dinner.

3/23 “Promise you’ll at least take me to the

service next Sunday.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Is that too much to ask, Phil?”

“Mom, things here haven’t been so”

“So even the death and resurrection of

our Lord won’t bring you down to see your

own mother.”

“Ok ok fine I’ll come.”

“Well you don’t have to say it like that.”

3/24 Phil flips through the new Entertainment

Weekly in the bathroom.  He skims articles

on the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, Cyndi

Lauper’s Broadway album, the Bates

Motel TV series, and Doctor Who.

3/25 Phil watches the snow falling faintly

beneath the streetlight. He checks the

school closings again and again.

But Fayette County does not appear.

3/26 Phil lingers in the Wendy’s parking lot

after dinner and listens to the latest news

about Hollingsworth v. Perry and

United States v. Windsor.

3/27 “You got a minute?”

“Sure, Paula, hi. Come on in. I’m just

finishing up here.”

“How are things going with you, Phil?”

“You know, same old same old.”

“You holding up ok?”

“I’m fine. I’m good.”

“That’s good. I’m right down the hall, you

know.”

“I know, I know.”

“Just don’t let them get to you. Really.

It’ll all blow over soon enough.”

“I know.”

“There are people here who have your

back. We’re not all assholes.”

“Haha, right right. It’s just…I don’t know…

anyway.”

“Listen, I know you’re keeping your head

down. And sure, keep on keeping on and

all. But you don’t have to take any more

bullshit, honey. You hear what I’m

saying? Those vicious little fucks don’t get

to decide things for you.”

3/28 Phil sees a little boy hiding behind his

mother’s legs at the checkout.  He

remembers how often he used to hide like

that.  How his mother always wore dresses

and heels in public.  How she would say to

strangers every time, “Please excuse my

son’s rudeness.  I don’t know what’s

gotten into him today.  He’s not usually

like this.”

3/29 “Madison, please take your seat,” Phil

says.

“In a minute,” Madison says.

“Whatever you’re telling Shawna can wait

til after class.”

“Actually, it can’t.”

“I can’t start class until you’ve taken your

seat.”

“Come on, Mr. Gaffigan. Today’s not even

a real day. Half the class is already on

their way to the beach!”

“So why aren’t you with them, huh?” Steve

asks. “Couldn’t get one of your boyfriends

to drag you along?”

“Shut up, Stephen.”

“Madison…” Phil says.

“You guys are with me, right?” Madison

says to the class. “Free day, free day, free

day!” she chants, shaking her hips.

“Your fat ass ain’t gonna work on Mr.

Gaffigan!” Steve shouts.

“Then let’s try yours!” Madison says.

“Madison, please…” Phil says.

“She’s just playing around, Mr. G,” Kyle

says.

“Speak for yourself, Kyle,” Madison says.

“I mean, come on. What’s he gonna do?”

She holds out one limp wrist and makes a

face that Phil can’t see. The class erupts

in uneasy laughter.

Kyle stands up. “Take your seat, bitch.”

“WHAT?” Madison screams. “Mr. Gaffigan,

did you hear what he called me?”

Phil looks from Madison to the class to

Madison’s empty seat.

“MR. GAFFIGAN. Aren’t you going to do

something?” Madison says.

Phil’s left leg starts to tremble. He looks

Madison in the eye and says through his

teeth, “You heard Kyle. Sit down.”

3/30 Phil makes a To Do list for spring break

and then gets right to work on the first one

– CLEAN HOUSE TOP TO BOTTOM.

3/31 Phil is surprised how easily the words

come back to him:

All hail the power of Jesus’ name

Let angels prostrate fall

Bring forth the royal diadem

And crown Him Lord of all!

But he can’t remember the other verses.

He glances at his mother in her

handsome new hat and sees she doesn’t

know the rest either.

April

4/1  Phil knows Google Nose isn’t real, but he

wishes it were.  He remembers being

fooled by the Google Romance prank

years ago.  Love is just another search

problem, they said.

4/2  Phil checks his email and sees his

Amazon order has already shipped.  He

feels lucky to have a warehouse so

nearby.

4/3  Phil treats himself to Qdoba and Cold

Stone and a double feature of Oz the

Great and Powerful and The Croods.

4/4  Phil lies in bed trying to hold on to a

fading dream.  Something in an Ethan

Allen, something about a flood, something

with his old friend Solomon, something

good.

4/5  Phil quickly finishes his taxes and

wonders why he waits so long every year

when they hardly change at all.

4/6  Phil sees another ad for Mad Men and

thinks maybe it’s time to finally check it

out.  Either that or Game of Thrones.  Or

Breaking Bad.

4/7  Phil digs his notebook out from behind the

bed. He writes:

I don’t know why but a dream I had a few

days ago just came back to me, and I

want to record it before it goes. The weird

thing is, I think I’ve had this dream a few

times before. It just feels really familiar.

I’ve been having a lot of old dreams lately.

This one started at Ethan Allen. I used to

love when mom would take me and Bern

there as kids. It was like visiting a weird

palace with too many rooms. All these

bedrooms and dining rooms and dens

mixed together and out of order. I would

get lost every time, but for some reason I

didn’t mind.

In the dream Solomon was with me, which

never really happened (mom didn’t like to

take other kids on her errands). We ran

through all the rooms exploring and

laughing about something I can’t

remember. But it was really hilarious.

Then I heard water running somewhere in

the walls, and I saw the rugs getting

darker. Solomon told me to climb up on

the furniture, but all I could find was this

tall dresser. I climbed up all the drawers,

and when I got to the top, Solomon was

already there waiting for me.

We looked down and saw cloudy water

filling up the whole place. Solomon said

not to worry, so I didn’t. I could hear my

mom still talking with the owner in the

other room, and I didn’t call to her. Then

all the furniture started to move. It was a

flood, like in the Bible.

We floated outside and most of the world

was water. Other furniture would

sometimes float by, but no people. It was

just me and Solomon, and for some

reason I felt really happy. Solomon had a

stick he would put in the water to guide

us, and I said, “Where are we going,

Solomon?” And he said, “Everywhere!”

And then we started to roam the earth. Or

float around it, I guess.

I’m pretty sure now I’ve had this dream

before, or one like it, because I remember

thinking about him out of the blue a few

years ago after I got on facebook. I looked

up his page and saw all these nice

comments saying what a great person he

was. And I thought: wow, it doesn’t sound

like he’s changed one bit, how great.

And then I realized that the page was kept

alive as a kind of memorial to him.

Because actually he was dead. A car

accident the year before. He looked so

gentle and confident in his pictures, so

like himself. I hadn’t seem him since he

moved away in middle school, but when I

looked at him with his wife and two sons, I

felt like I still knew him.

Sometimes I forget that he’s dead. Even

the other day after I woke up. But in the

dream, he’s so alive. I can see his bright

eyes and his dark skin and his crazy big

smile. And I can see us sailing to the ends

of the earth on that mahogany dresser.

4/8  Associate Principal Diehl stops Phil in the

hall between classes.

“Mr. Gaffigan, I’d like you to come by my

office when you have a minute.”

“Sure thing, Mrs. Diehl. What about?”

“Maybe at the end of the day tomorrow?

I’m all tied up this afternoon.”

4/9  “Come on in, Phil. Have a seat.”

“What can I help you with, Mrs. Diehl?”

“Seems we have a little parent problem

on our hands.”

“Oh.”

“You have a student, let’s see here,

Madison Ledford?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, her mother has written us a very

strongly worded letter. She’s claiming that

during class you allowed another student

to call her daughter a…well, a bitch.”

“Oh.”

“Now I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

We’ll need to talk to the student she

named, and we’ll get your side too, of

course. But that’s for later. That’s not what

I wanted to give you a heads up about.”

“Is there…another problem?”

“Well, I’m not sure to tell you the truth.

Seems she’s been talking to some of the

other parents about your classes. Now,

there’s nothing specific, and I think maybe

she’s just trying to make her case

stronger, but she makes vague references

to class material that is incompatible with

her religious beliefs. And those of her

daughter.”

“Madison’s religious beliefs?”

“I know, I know. But seems some parents

have been getting themselves worked up

over that vetoed state bill that was just

overturned. You know, the one about

‘sincerely held religious beliefs’.”

“I’ve heard a little about it. But I didn’t think

it was for schools.”

“That’s what I’m thinking too. But it doesn’t

take much to embolden these people.

Mrs. Ledford even makes reference to

bringing her complaints to the next school

board meeting. And that is something we

certainly want to avoid.”

“Of course.”

“I haven’t even told Jim about the letter

yet. You know he’s a lot more…sensitive

to the politics here than I am. So this is

just between you and me for now. I don’t

want to bring him into this unless

absolutely necessary.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Listen, I know your classes have been a

little unruly lately. The kids are always

going to be looking for an angle, so don’t

give them anything. Just go on about your

business. Don’t give them any cause.”

“I don’t. I mean, I’ve tried not to.”

“I’m sure you have, Phil. And let’s keep it

that way until we get this mess sorted out.”

4/10 Phil feels a sharp pain in his lower right

side and fears it’s appendicitis.

4/11 Phil looks out the kitchen window but

sees only a reflection of himself doing the

dishes.

4/12 After school, Phil lowers the blinds and

lies down on the couch.  He listens to the

hum of the refrigerator.  It lulls him to

sleep.

4/13 Phil writes in his notebook:

What an exhausting week! Guess I got too

used to sleeping in and lounging around

during spring break. But now the official

countdown to summer has begun. Only

six weeks left and I can’t wait.

Guess I’m at that point in the year where

the end is in sight, but it’s not actually that

close yet. Still all those days to get

through when I just want it to be over.

Wish I could just call it a day and try again

next year.

Been feeling so old lately. Sleeping long

hours like when I was young, but I don’t

wake up feeling rested. Even right now.

Saturday morning and I’m already too

tired to write or do much of anything.

Not much else to report anyway.

4/14 Phil watches Sandwich King, Love It or

List It, Dog Eat Dog, Extreme Couponing,

Swamp Wars, Skating and Gymnastics

Spectacular, Chopped, House Hunters

International, Dirty Dancing, Golden Girls.

4/15 Something wakes Phil. He gasps for

breath and hears a strange chorus.

Car alarms going off all over the

neighborhood.

4/16 At breakfast, Phil eats a bag of Dill Pickle

flavored Lay’s while rehearsing what he

will say to Mrs. Diehl.

4/17 Phil fills up his gas after school.  The hook

won’t catch, so he holds the lever himself

and watches the numbers flicker past.

4/18 Kyle comes by during Phil’s planning.

“Mr. G. Just need my work for next week.”

“I’ve got everything right here.”

“Hope it’s nothing too heavy, you know?”

“It’s light, don’t sweat it.”

“Right on, man.”

“Kyle”

“Don’t even worry about me, Mr. G. I got a

week’s vacation out of this.”

“It’s not exactly”

“Chance to work on my own things,

you know?”

“Sure, but listen. You didn’t have to make

it worse for yourself like”

“It’s cool.”

“I mean, I appreciate what you did. But

you didn’t have to lie for me.”

“And have a good guy like you dragged

into it? Nah.”

“You didn’t have to”

“It’s done, Mr. G. Besides, have you met

Madison’s mom? Steer clear, man. She’s

a beast.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Kyle. I appreciate it,

I do. But why did you, I mean, for me?”

“I just hate fucking bullshit. You know?”

4/19 Phil wakes before his alarm.  He stays in

bed and listens to the rain.

4/20 Phil checks the mail and realizes that the

Summer Preview was a double issue, so

there’ll be no new Entertainment Weekly

this week.

4/21 Phil writes in his notebook:

I need to go to bed in a minute, but I at

least want to record that things are going

better. It gets better! Actually, I’m not sure

about that. But at least this week turned

out ok. And today was even good.

I decided to go down and see mom today

without calling ahead. Yesterday was so

nothing, and I didn’t want that again. So I

just showed up at lunch with Cracker

Barrel. Mom seemed really surprised.

Thought something must surely be wrong.

We ended up having a nice talk, mostly

about the past, which she always enjoys.

Maybe I just caught her in a mood, or

maybe it was mine, or maybe both. Who

knows? I’m just happy to have a nice visit!

No need to overanalyze it.

I’m sleeping a little better too. Except

when the neighborhood animals get riled

up, which has been strangely often lately.

So much barking and howling and weird

cat sounds, like all together at once. Must

get each other going. Or maybe it’s

something in the air. Something to do with

spring.

Almost forgot, mom asked today if I had

any birthday plans. I said I didn’t, but now

that I think about it, maybe I should. It is a

big one, after all. Better start planning!

4/22 Phil finds his old Kroger Plus card and his

lucky nail clippers in the couch.

4/23 Phil catches himself in the hallway mirror

on the way out.  He retucks his shirt and

tries to smooth down the back.  But it

keeps puffing out.

4/24 On Man o’ War, a little girl waves at Phil

from the backseat of the car ahead.

Phil waves back, makes a funny face.

4/25 At the checkout, Phil sees a broccoli

casserole on the cover of a magazine.  He

thinks maybe he should make himself one

for his birthday.  But he can’t decide

between a Ritz or Cheez-It crust.  They are

both so good.

4/26 All evening, Phil’s internet keeps cutting

out.  His router blinks strange patterns of

light.

4/27 Phil reads online about a sinkhole that

swallowed up a house with a man still

inside.  He steps lightly afterwards, as if

the ground beneath his feet might give

way at any moment.

4/28 Phil catches the end of the Hot Burrito

Show on his way back from the mall.  He

remembers how Murphy used to take him

on long Sunday drives through the

country, blasting the show the whole way.

4/29 Phil listens to the kids talking about

Saturday’s prom before class.  They make

it sound really great.  He wishes he hadn’t

backed out of chaperoning this year.

4/30 “Howdy, professor.”

“Hello, Phil. Sorry to bother you so early.”

“No problem, I was just getting ready to

leave. Wow, looks like it’s going to be a

nice one today, huh?”

“I’m not looking forward to the summer

heat.”

“Well, what can I do you for?”

“Would you happen to have some bleach

I could borrow?”

“Sure do. Come on in.”

“Nice place you have here. You keep

house much better than I do.”

“Thanks, I try!”

May

5/1  Phil waves to Gene in the hall, but the boy

ducks his head and hurries past.

5/2  Phil notices another foreclosed home in

his neighborhood.  He remembers this

family moving in some years back, both

kids bouncing in the grass while their

parents unloaded boxes from the van.

5/3  Paula stops Phil on his way in and tells

him how Mrs. Ledford showed up at the

SBDM Council the night before to

complain about him and two other

teachers.

5/4  Phil writes in his notebook:

I’m kind of upset right now. There have

been some things happening recently I

haven’t had time to write about. And I

thought they were over. But they’re not.

The mother of one of my students has it

out for me, which is bad enough. But now

she’s gone and gotten other teachers

involved. Paula said she probably did it

so she wouldn’t be accused of only

attacking me. That just sounds too crazy.

Who would do that?

I don’t know all the details yet. I didn’t talk

to the other teachers yet either, Ms. Wilkes

and Mrs. Barrow. Freddie’s been teaching

Biology since way before I started. She’s

nice enough, but I wouldn’t say we’re

close. And Gillian’s still in her first year

teaching English. Seems like a sweet girl,

very bookish, but we’ve never really

talked.

I just hate that they got dragged into this. I

was already upset about another student

being involved, even before this. I thought

it was all over. I thought everyone was

moving on. So why do things keep

happening, one after another? I don’t

understand. I just want it to end. I want

things back to normal.

5/5  Phil writes in his notebook:

Paula called to see how I was doing

today. She’s so nice – no one ever calls

like that. I think she’s even more upset

than me. Which helps, since for some

reason others getting worked up usually

calms me down.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff this

weekend. Something related to all this

happened a few weeks ago. With a

student who has always been really nice

to me. I have no idea why he covered for

me like he did, or why he even likes me.

Do I remind him of someone? I have no

clue. But he did a good thing, not the kind

of thing you see every day, and now it’s

like it was for nothing.

Sometimes I think my brain is really slow.

Not only in figuring stuff out, but in

feeling things too. Like there’s this delay,

and I feel things at the wrong time.

When I used to feel happy, mom would

often say: What do you have to feel happy

about? Look at your life, Phil. And other

times I would be down and she would

say: What do you have to feel upset

about? You don’t know how lucky you

are.

I guess most of the time everything seems

fine. I mean, life is ok most days. But then

I’ll have one bad day that makes me

wonder about all the others. And I can’t

tell which days and which feelings are

true.

5/6  Phil plans stirring speeches in the

shower.

5/7  “What are you going to do?” Gillian asks.

“We need to talk to Mrs. Diehl first,” Phil

says.

“I don’t even know if they were planning to

bring me back next year.”

“I’m sure they”

“I really really can’t afford to get

pinkslipped right now.”

“I don’t think”

“Laurence is still out of work, and I just”

“It won’t come to that, Gillian.”

“I hope you’re right. At least we have

Ms. Overstreet in this. Man is she sure

fired up.”

“Thank goodness she’s on our side.”

“I know, right? Now I’m actually thankful

she heads the department! The woman

does not suffer fools.”

“She sure doesn’t.”

“But, I don’t know, what if? I mean, Laur

and me, we just can’t move back home.

Not now.”

“You know, my dad was from eastern

Kentucky too. Whereabouts exactly

did you grow up?”

5/8  “Excuse me, Ms. Wilkes,” Phil says.

“Just a minute now,” Freddie says.

“Sorry, I can come back later.”

“No, gimme one…oh Mr. Gaffigan, it’s just

you.”

“I wanted to be sure you’d heard about

tomorrow’s meeting with Mrs. Diehl.”

“Yeah sure, I know. Same old crap as

always. I’ve dealt with these parents so

many times now. Wears me out, I tell you.”

“But I think Mrs. Diehl might be able to

help us.”

“Oh, she’ll try alright. She doesn’t have

any more patience for these freaking

people than I do. She needs to minimize

damage, though. Especially for Rhodes.”

“I’m afraid Principal Rhodes and I don’t…

have much in common.”

“Who does? If you’re not useful to the

man, you might as well be invisible.”

5/9  Phil stops at Wendy’s on the way home

from school. He keeps thinking about

Mrs. Ledford’s phrase: a pattern of

disrespect.

5/10 Phil forgets what he was saying.

5/11 Phil sleeps, off and on, all day.

5/12 Phil writes in his notebook:

Spent the day down with mom. She was

all dressed up when I got there, though it

was only me coming. We had a nice

lunch, cake too, and then just visited all

afternoon (she didn’t ask me to take her to

church, thank goodness).

She certainly was in high spirits. Told

many of the same stories I’ve heard so

many times now – how hard the early

years had been with dad, how Bern had

been such a difficult child, how she wasn’t

even sure she wanted to be a mother, but

then along came her boy. She’s not

superstitious but said she knew it meant

something that I was born on her day.

I think she really wanted me to celebrate

more today, even though this year my

birthday’s not actually until tomorrow.

(Bern would disagree – she always says

mom doesn’t actually like to share and

only makes such a big deal like this as a

cover. I’ve told her many times I don’t see

why mom would bother. It’s not like

anybody’s watching. But Bern says mom

imagines an audience for everything.)

Mom could tell I wasn’t totally there. She

asked about my plans tomorrow, and I

said something about going out with Alex

and a few friends. She thought I would

have a big to-do for this one, but I said I

wanted something more intimate. Truth is,

I did have all these plans, but I’ve barely

thought about them the past week. Didn’t

even tell anyone. At this point, I just don’t

want to make a big fuss.

She finally asked straight out what was

wrong, and I told her it was just some

boring school stuff. Honestly, I wouldn’t

even know where to begin. Doesn’t seem

like anything serious is going to happen,

but listening to all of Mrs. Ledford’s

complaints, I felt…I don’t know, I could

kind of relate somehow. Not with exactly

what she was saying, but still.

I told Paula about this, and she didn’t

know what to make of it. She asked why in

the world I would feel bad for someone

who has it in for me. I told her I don’t really

know. I can’t seem to help it.

5/13 Paula sticks her head in during Phil’s

planning.

“Happy birthday there, Phil!”

“Oh Paula, you scared me half to death.”

“Got big plans tonight?”

“Well, not quite sure yet, might have, gotta

confirm a few, I mean, it’s a Monday and

all, people are pretty busy.”

Phil looks back down at his desk. Paula

squints, studies him a moment.

“Listen, honey. Some of us, well, we’d like

to take you out for a drink after school.

How does that sound?”

“Really?” Phil says.

5/14 Phil wakes to a terrific hangover.

5/15 Phil writes in his notebook:

I still can’t believe how amazingly great

my birthday turned out. A bunch of people

showed up for drinks after school, some I

would have never expected. Like Ms.

Overstreet, drinking an actual beer. It was

a wild sight! And Ben showed up for a bit

too, which just completely floored me. He

brought a girl (ok, no real surprise there),

but at least he was nice to look at for an

hour!

It’s hard to describe, but there was just

this feeling in the air. Sometimes it

happens with a certain group of people,

something just clicks. Everybody was

drinking and chatting openly (lots of

Ledford talk). There was just this energy

like I haven’t felt since those first years

after college when I was going out almost

every night. I couldn’t stop smiling, drank

way too much. I just didn’t want it to end.

I don’t even remember the end very well.

A few stayed with me til I could drive

home, which was so nice of them. I was a

mess yesterday at school (still can’t

handle my liquor at all). But it was kind of

a wonderful mess. I showed a movie in

class and just sat at my desk trying to

remember every detail. All day, teachers

kept asking how I was, but in that way like

we had a secret or something. It was so

great.

At the bar, they gave me a card that said:

“Lordy Lordy, Look Who’s 40!” You know,

I really think my 40s could be better than

my 30s!

I just feel so grateful right now. To Paula

for sure, and to everyone who showed up.

But also to the universe for giving me

such a great night. Thank you, universe!

5/16 Phil weighs himself.  He’s gained 17

pounds in the past 2 months.

5/17 Ian Rook catches Phil in the teacher’s

lounge.

“My good man, I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve

heard about your trouble with that

woman.”

“Who do you mean?”

“That parent, oh, what’s her name? Mrs.

Lanford or some such. The one giving

Mrs. Barrow grief over, which was it this

time? Oh right, BELOVED. Can you

believe it? Let’s alert the New York Times!

The esteemed Mrs. Lanford has an

opinion!”

“I doubt”

“And with Ms. Wilkes, it was the usual

intelligent design nonsense again, wasn’t

it? Mrs. Lanford and her erudite pastor

know better than Mr. Darwin and every

other respected scientist on earth!

They’ve never made it to the Galapagos,

but they survey the beaches of Florida

every year now don’t they?”

“Actually”

“And what was it for you? Oh yes, your

disrespect for the South. Of all things!

Because what, you said the Civil War was

about slavery? Not their precious states’

rights? Did you besmirch their honorably

racist ancestors? And they say this was a

border state!”

“We probably shouldn’t”

“NOW they want nuance? NOW they want

to talk about complexity? THEY teach US

about nuance and complexity? Let’s have

these philistines attend one of my classes

and see if they can keep up! Though I

suspect they could teach my Lear a thing

or two about being a bad parent!”

“Well, I wouldn’t say”

“Of course you wouldn’t. You’re too easy

on them, Mr. Gaffigan. These fools cling to

their quote unquote beliefs and then bring

their cretinous bile to your door and you,

what, invite them in? And the whole time,

they never even admit why they’re really

there, why they chose YOUR door.

Cowards, all of them.”

“I need to be going, Mr. Rook.”

“The next time Mrs. Lanford or any of

these…people come around, call on me

will you. Will you, Mr. Gaffigan? I’m on

your side!”

5/18 Phil attempts a 15-minute run on his

treadmill.

5/19 Phil writes in his notebook:

Well, 5 days left with students, then back

for 1 more to pack up my room (though I

hope to get most of that done this week).

I don’t remember when I was last this

excited for summer. I probably say that

every year, ha!

It does seem like things are finally settling

down. Hopefully smooth sailing from here

on out. I think Mrs. Ledford is not going to

push anything further (Paula says she

made a big mistake attacking so many of

us – we teachers stick together,

apparently). Maybe I do need to

reevaluate some of my curriculum this

summer, though.

I want to reevaluate a lot of things soon.

My birthday was wonderful, but I’ve got to

get myself out there more. I can’t act like I

have all the time in the world at my age.

I want to meet more people and really

enjoy every day. Want to feel better too

and get serious about my weight again.

I tried to start things up yesterday, but I

think I pushed too hard. I’ve always been

bad at cardio, though ok with weights.

Maybe I should join a gym and get a

whole routine going. Need to buy some

new workout clothes first!

5/20 Phil eats a quick snack so he won’t be

hungry while shopping at Kroger.

5/21 Phil gives his first set of final exams.

5/22 A brown bird lands on Phil’s side view

mirror while he’s stopped in traffic.

5/23 Phil notices his microwave clock has

been reset when he gets home from

school.  He figures the power must have

blinked out again.

5/24 Phil tells his students to have a good

summer.  They tell him to have a good one

too.

5/25 Phil skips graduation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My favorite videogames are the games I don’t fully understand.  They stay with me after I stop playing.  They ask questions I cannot answer.  They resonate with mystery.

I get little satisfaction from completing a game.  How boring, the feeling of 100%, all content exhausted, all achievements earned, all collectibles collected, all endings ended.  If I see all there is to see and then put the game away, satisfied, then the game has failed me.

I can no longer stomach good game design.  Wherein I am led, step by step, through a litany of features and abilities, all while being made to feel strong or smart or cool.  I am rewarded with unambiguous feedback and steady progression.  I am assured that every puzzle and challenge, every problem, is solvable in the end.

But the most interesting problems aren’t solvable.

What I seek is a game that feels alive, that is more than the sum of its well-oiled parts, that makes me believe.  Because once I believe there’s something really there, some roiling, churning presence, a coded will – I play differently.  I act as if.  I reach out, once again, to encounter the reality of my experience.  To make contact with mystery.

~

Mystery is not a puzzle.  I do not solve mystery.  I enter in, I explore, I am held captive, I doubt, I am disarmed.

~

Mystery does not arise from the vague, the convoluted, the simply confusing.  It’s not a fog, some atmospheric condition.  Mystery is about something.  It has content.  Though not videogame ‘content’.

Mystery is not a style.  It’s not wallpaper or mood lighting or a gravel-voiced narrator.  It can’t be added in post-production.  It can’t be sprayed on, like a tan.

Limbo appears suffused with mystery.  It demands that I admire its grainy noir.  But to actually play Limbo is to encounter a thin, incoherent game.  A stylish paintjob can’t redeem sluggish verbs and puzzle potpourri.  In fact, it makes it worse.

When something appears mysterious, when it points beyond what we see or understand, we want to believe.  We push and we want something to push back.

But when the there is not there, when there’s nothing behind the curtain, we rightly call it fraud.  We call it hoax.  And our belief in actual mystery suffers.

~

Mystery asks me to dwell.  It is not a ride.  It does not have me off to the next thing, distracted, consuming, consumptive, desperate.  It does not offer loot.  I do not regret it the next morning.

~

Mystery cannot abide formula.  Over time, the iterative nature of most games kills mystery.  It’s not just the story questions answered in a sequel.  It’s the world and mechanics that are already known, given, expected even.

A videogame sequel begins with most vital questions already answered.  Who am I?  Where can I go?  What can I do?  How does the world work?  What are the limits?  Instead, I only ask: What’s different this time?  Is it better than the last one?  Can I dual-wield?

Videogame sequels traffic in features and upgrades, keeping pace with the times, meeting fan expectations.  Their logic is that of the genre novel, of repetition with variation.  Their pleasures are those of the tweak, the nuance.  They reward the discerning palate with shades of difference.  It is the death of mystery by a thousand refinements.

The Super Nintendo had wonderful games, but it was a sequel system at heart.  Its core classics were updates, not radical new vessels for mystery.  Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Super Metroid…they had their share of mystery, sure.  It helped if you were new to each series.  If you played their NES predecessors, then these sequels were mostly just great games.  Rounded, handsome, refined.

They fulfilled their 8-bit promise.  They were fairer, clearer, more rewarding, less jagged, more super.  And less mysterious.  Their auras diminished by excellence.

And mystery is not excellent.

~

Mystery lingers.  It sticks, resonates.  Sometimes I only recognize it much later.  That game of the year has deadened in the mind.  Its scripted glory did not last.  While another game, flawed and cranky, keeps buzzing in my head, all gadflylike.  It won’t let me go.

~

Mystery comes from person.  When I sense a human presence behind the game, the not-quite-dead author.  Sometimes in the handcrafted details, sometimes in pure vision, sometimes in raw vulnerability.  I am thinking of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and Fez and Dys4ia, one of the only games to make me cry.

Mystery comes from the machine.  The procedures generating a Minecraft world, the behaviors governing a Spelunky ecosystem.  Understanding the code would not dispel the eerie delight that comes with happening upon a magnificent cave entrance designed by no one.  Or setting off a ruinous chain reaction with the toss of a single stone.  Chance and consequence, daily mystery.

Mystery comes from the total work.  When a design team obscures the person and the machine is more predictable, a game can still be shot through with it.  Demon’s Souls and Mario, explorations of power and gravity, trafficking in misery and delight, both trembling with mystery.  Their worlds alive, present, total.

These sources of mystery are not exclusive.  The Binding of Isaac comes from all three.  Its fecal cuteness arises from person, its blithe randomness from machine, and its total vision signals a singular work, right down to its stillborn weapons and fetid lingerie powerups.  At its monstrous heart (your mom’s) is one of the most heinous and inexplicable stories in the Bible, which is saying something.  I play it over and over without unraveling its dark core.

~

Mystery, like art, cannot be exhausted.  It deepens with reconsideration.  A well I draw from again and again.  Replay is required.  I can’t possibly experience everything the first time.  Mystery demands second quests.

~

Everyone recognizes the first screen of the Legend of Zelda.  The lone cave, the slight asymmetry, the edges opening to the north or east or west.  But the most significant edge for me was always at the bottom.  South.  The place I could not go.

The place I can never go.  It’s not just a locked area awaiting a dogged keymaster.  It’s a forever-locked area.  An area that doesn’t exist outside my imagination.

I believed something was there, south of first screen.  Part of me still does.  It’s not just old games and some willful naivety.  The single screen of this year’s ZiGGURAT is equally fringed with ache.  My gaming life is shot through with longing for places I cannot go.  The screen edge, the clouded map, any background just out of reach.  30 years of gaming and their power is undiminished.

Game spaces are particularly good at evoking wonder.  We see before we arrive, and the views are often stunning.  Across that field, down that path, around that corner, behind that door, the world unknown.

But wonder is only a beginning.  Once you’ve come, seen, conquered, what remains of that feeling?  If wonder does not give way to mystery, I have little reason to return.

Mystery is the residue of wonder.  It’s what remains once the initial feeling has faded, once knowing has flooded in but not drowned my questions.  It’s what survives of Shadow of the Colossus to this day, after the awe aroused by its landscapes and each appalling encounter has passed into memory.

Games excel at worlds, and a world is a mystery.  It’s not a hallway leading to a single end.  Its measure can’t be taken in one panoramic glance.  A world threatens to overwhelm at every moment.  To keep my bearings and maintain my HP-bound kernel of self, I must pay attention.  I must pay complete attention.  Metroid’s first Zebes, the underworld of Ultima V, untold Minecraft depths.  The threat of becoming lost everpresent.

Minecraft evokes world and mystery with its fullness and consistency.  No false walls, all stuff between heaven and hard bottom.  A profoundly material world, like ours, every single thing unearthed and shaped from raw landscape.  Its unbounded scope impossible to domesticate.

~

Mystery resists.  Mystery refuses.  It will not yield.  Not to me.

~

When a game resists me, when it denies me my little plot of scorched earth, my will is provoked.  I sense another will at work, in the machine.  And the encounter becomes, painfully, more real.

I cannot maximize or respec or stunlock and be satisfied.  I cannot resort to the gamer’s war of attrition: the grind.  I adhere to a strict no-grinding policy these days.  Which means I sometimes lose.

I’ve come to accept this as the real end to some games.  Perhaps I was primed by incomplete endings of old.  At the conclusion of Phantasy Star II, on a pitiless dungeon ship, after Dark Force, after Mother Brain, you are suddenly attacked by several hundred earthmen.  Your party responds with insults, threats, philosophy.  “You have shown me the ugliness of continued existence.”  And then…nothing.  No comfort, no closure.

Phantasy Star II asked, “I wonder what the people will see in the finals days?”  Final Fantasy VII asked a similar question 7 years later.  The ending as open wound.

Mystery resists closure.  It resists completion and clean getaways.  It, instead, insists.  I’m not done with you yet.  Get back over here.

Mystery, as opposed to mastery.  An alternative to domination.  A surrender.  Mastery subjugates the world to my will, temporarily.  Mystery is an encounter with the world, whatever that world is, and with others.

What actual masters know are their limits.  The old Socratic model: she who knows what she does not know.

Mystery, not mastery, breeds love.  I do not love a game because I have conquered it.  That moment of victory is instead the most dangerous of our relationship.

~

Mystery contradicts.  It draws me in while pushing me away.  It confides and distances, seduces and blueballs.  It upends and roots, at once.

~

Every time I read about another disappointing E3 or gorgeous game that failed to live up to its screenshots, I know that the promise of videogames has not died.  The promise of an experience unlike any other, a world beyond our imagining.  Minds blown, faces melted.  The future.

The disappointment means we still expect something amazing.  Not the latest entry in a venerable series.  Not hours of content “well worth your time”.  Not new forms of badassery.  But radical new experiences.  Revelation.

We’ve had those watershed moments, when the future of gaming seemed boundless, the rapture imminent.  For me, it was at a Pizza Hut in 1987.  The destructible environments of 1-2, the shells bouncing back from offscreen, a world with real presence and weight.

And in 1996, at a Toys”R”Us, walking into the screen and around foes, taking control of Lakitu’s camera.

And 6 years later, amidst the unscripted collisions of Liberty City.

And last fall, in the kingdom of Boletaria, as my brain soaked in a chemical bath of fear and disgust and, finally, pity.

And this spring, when I spent my first night in a hollowed hillside, standing in the dark because I did not know how to make torches or beds, listening to gurgles and moans while watching the stars dip below the horizon.

Each time, I marveled at the weird and wonderful experience I was having with controller and screen.  I crave mystery in games because it foregrounds the mystery of virtual experience itself.  Immersion is never total.  I don’t forget the body holding the controller or the world framing the screen.  I am both in and out of the game, at once, and it’s a mystery how I manage.

But I do, as everyone does.  The basic experience of media is mysterious, from videogames to that ancient technology, the written word.  Marks on the page and how they still conjure.

I am reminded of the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr, which asks: How can a faked experience produce real emotions?  How can an illusion, which we know as such, lead us to some truth?

~

Mystery is not mystical or superstitious.  It is hardheaded.  It is ornery.  It is, though, about experience.  It demands interpretation.  It requires of players, and especially critics, a more rigorous subjectivity.

~

Mystery is not just something in games.  It responds to how we approach games, our attitude towards play.  When my object is encounter not victory, surrender not sovereignty, awareness not oblivion.  I am plunged into the very weirdness of virtual experience with my body intact and my whole nervous system alight.

Concerns for value or content subside.  I’m not at a buffet, shoveling it on my plate, down my throat.  I treat it not as balm or distraction or prop for my ego.

Primed for mystery, I am vulnerable to transformation.  I am curious about every odd reaction in myself.  My senses are on fire.

I want to believe something is there.  I offer the game a chance to earn my belief.  I open myself to my own experience.

Why do we diminish our own experience?  Are we afraid of not connecting, of confirming our solitude?  We retreat to structure, design, quantifiable entanglements.  All important but also insufficient, incomplete.  We think subjectivity means only opinion and bias.  We cry nostalgia at the first hint of feeling.

Yes, our experiences are unprovable.  That is why we voice them.

What resonates as mystery for me may not be the same for you.  This is wonderful and necessary.  Because mystery requires human transaction.  It’s not eternal and unchanging.  The experience of mystery depends on time and place and person and context.  Just as the experience of a game does.

We lack the vocabulary for videogame experiences.  They are so strange and diverse and fugitive.  But we must dare to reach beyond our grasp and wrestle with these experiences we can barely articulate.  Mystery is a dialogue, and insatiable.

~

Mystery is not merely the unknown.  It is the impossibility of knowing and yet the continual attempt to know.  It is unknowability itself.  It is futile and essential.

~

I hope games do not arrive soon.  I hope we are not satisfied with what we have.  I hope videogames push us into deeper contact with the world, and ourselves.  There is mystery there, in the dark places, in our everyday experience, and we are explorers.

We are explorers, all.  Game creators, game writers, game players.  We are still in the early days of the medium.  And these are vital days.

I came upon a lone Minecraft island a while back.  A tiny patch of sand just above the waterline.  I climbed up to rest and noticed a single square hole that dropped into a colossal cave system beneath the ocean.  I gazed down into it a long time before deciding to descend.  I thought: no one built this but here it is.  It looks like an island, but it’s an entrance to a whole other world.  This is mystery and I am going into it.

~ Written by Tevis Thompson

Image by David Hellman

October 24, 2012

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

~ pdf version ~

~ chinese translation (中文版) ~

Watch this, Xeno mouthed.

His arm writhed upward like a snake, charmed.

“You have a question?” Teacher Lin asked.

“Can I go to the bathroom, ma’am?”

“You may.”

Xeno’s ID shaded orange to indicate his destination.  He gripped the rails of his seat, his sleek tanned forearms for a moment defined, and hopped into the aisle just as the desklock clicked.  “No need, Miss L.”  Then he winked at me.

Teacher Lin said, “As I was saying, what lesson can we learn from this character’s piety?”

As Xeno strolled past Teacher Lin he calmly and in one simple motion placed something on her back and continued towards the door, in no particular hurry.  His fingers sprung out from his fist, one second at a time.

Teacher Lin rotated her head almost 180 degrees and her arms bent back.  Her blouse pulled tight across her chest, just enough to show the smooth undercurves of her breasts.  I sideglanced at Umber, a giant log of a boy, but he just gaped dully.  Xeno turned to face her, four fingers out.

“Now, Xenorlena.  This is a poor trick.”

I agreed.  Not up to Xeno’s usual caliber.  Though he’d never gone after a Teacher so directly before.

Teacher Lin plucked a sticky note from her lower back and pivoted her wrist to show it to the class: PICK ME. “What did you hope to accomplish by this act?”

Drusilla on my left hiccupped and lowered her thick eyebrows.  Xeno drummed the four fingers on his thigh.

“I asked you a question, Xenorlena.”

“And I asked you to call me Xeno.”

“You know I cannot accommodate that request, Xenorlena.  Sit down.  Your hall pass is revoked.” Xeno’s ID reverted to its regular color.

Teacher Lin’s head and limbs returned to their former positions.  Her blouse went slack.  Xeno trudged back to his desk with his head down.  But I could feel his smile beneath his hair.

“Now, where were we?” Teacher Lin asked flatly.

I’d lost count of Xeno’s conflicts with Teachers.  They usually followed a pattern, testing the limits, right to the edge, but not over.  The goal was always the same: to break the illusion, briefly.  Xeno hated fakes; he hated being duped.

With Teacher Lin, it was harder to find the limits because she was so advanced.  But nothing intimidated him.  Whenever Teacher told us the correct meaning of a poem, Xeno would offer an alternative, often two or three. Whenever Teacher asked what lesson we could learn from a great writer, Xeno would bring up some dirty gossip about his personal life. He asked repeatedly why everything we read had to be so boring and realistic.

Xeno had a secret soft spot for lost causes, which I could understand, sort of.  One time I wrote a poem of my own, just on a lark.  I sent it to him but at the last minute I changed the name.  I told him that my aunt had found it lost in the stacks of an actual archive, that it had been harmonized long ago.  She liked the poem, but I wasn’t so sure.  What did he think?  I waited and waited for him to respond.

“Not one of your best,” I admitted at lunch.  We sat in one of two booths that survived intact when the last chain in town decided our little valley was ‘unfranchiseable’ and made off with their pop dispenser, glossy posters of foreign vegetables, and the rest of their green and yellow junk.  At least that’s what Xeno had told me.

“Go on,” Xeno said.

“If your point was to tighten Teacher’s shirt, that’s boring.”

“Boring?  That part was for you, my man.” Xeno slapped my shoulder and I could smell a faint musk on his fingertips.  “But it was just bonus.  I confirmed my theory today: she’s an actual L series!”

“Was there any doubt?  It’s hard to fake a name.  That’s locked down, buried deep.  You know that.”

“My brother says it’s getting easier all the time.  He says cheap imitations are creeping into the market every day.  Fakes that’ll go by any name you want.”

“Maybe in the cities, but who would bother down here?”

“Especially down here!  Do you know how much just one L model costs?  You really think Smote has the credit to afford one?”  Across our little cafeteria, the principal appeared, as if summoned.  He crossed in front of a makeshift stage and made a direct line for our table.

“Keep your head down, Xeno.” I said.  Which of course made him thrust it up and around in mock panic.  Thursey snorted wetly, dribbling milk into his lap.  He always had one eye on Xeno, a ready audience if my attention ever lapsed.

“I hear you disrupted class again this morning,” the principal’s voice echoed somewhere above his mammoth belly.  Xeno met his hidden navel, eye to eye.

“A simple misunderstanding about names, Principal Smote.”  Xeno grinned and tossed his hair to the side.

“Xeno, you know there is no point fighting Teacher Lin about that.  Don’t cause her any more problems or you will join Mr. Han for the rest of the month.  I will not have you testing a new teacher.”  Smote broke off and followed an invisible bee somewhere above us.  “I will not have another like your brother in my school.  I will not have turmoil.  Do you understand me?”

“Of course, sir.” Xeno’s charms visibly diminished at the mention of his brother and Mr. Han.

“Keep an eye on him, Myron,” Smote added.  “I know I can count on you for that.”  His red, sagging eyes brightened a moment above his wide mouth.  Then he plowed through two of his lunch crew on the way out.

“Yes, do that, My Ron,” Xeno spat. “Top students excel at that.”

“It’s not my fault Smote likes me.  He knows my family somehow from way back.”

Thursey said, “Smote knows all our families.  That’s the problem.”

“Shut it.  Now you decide to have an opinion?” Xeno’s hair fell back over his eyes.  Thursey returned to watering his milk powder.

“Back to what you were saying.”  I had to get him talking again.  “What’s so special about Teacher Lin being a real L?”

“They’re configurable.  They can be modded.”

The earlier series all had single job functions.  I knew that.  Otherwise, one could do the work of many.  Not good business.  Plus, they weren’t built well enough to handle too much variety.

And I knew Teacher models had dedicated personality and social systems.  Of course, the L series were famous for their ability to handle the humanities.  Literature, art, music, philosophy – the seemingly open-ended stuff the J’s and K’s still struggled with.  A new campaign had begun to make sure students received proper training at the beginning of upper school.  So we understood the appropriate lesson each story or artwork contained.

Still, I didn’t see what Xeno was getting at.  “What kind of mods?”

“Every kind you can think of!  The grey market has exploded since the L’s came out.  Cleaning, Repairs, Security, Gaming, you name it.”

Thursey was tittering beside me with a name.

“Yes, perv.  Love mods too.”  Thursey’s bug eyes swarmed.

“Still, what’s the big deal?” I asked.

“You don’t understand much, Myron, do you?  That means we can modify her.  We can change Teacher Lin.”

“Why would we want to do that?” He still wasn’t out of his funk.

“No imagination at all, My.  You’re already drying up.  Like a lychee nut.”  Xeno looked to Thursey to make sure he was there.  He was.  “Like your aunt!”

A static crackle from the busted speakers overhead meant our lunchtime was up.  Thursey asked, “But how did you confirm it, that she’s an L?”

“The sticky.  I made sure not to touch her back, just her blouse.  But she knew, she could sense it.  My brother says real L’s have a wider field.  They’re more sensitive.”

My aunt didn’t say anything to me when I got home.  She rarely did.  Sometimes I would find her just sitting in the dark.  Her cheeks bulged out like uncooked dough.  And her eyes were creekcold and blue.  You didn’t want them on you.

Neighbors called her Miss Connor.  She called them nothing.  Just stared right through them until they scattered.  When she did speak, she pronounced such judgments that were sure to keep them away for good.  Sometimes I heard my mother call her Bobbie.  When they used to chat about the past, her dough blushed.

Still, I knew she liked me.  Mother wouldn’t trust me with her otherwise.  When my aunt spoke to me at night, it was always about how the morons and all their kin never would leave this valley, or whether I had managed to avoid brain damage that day from the idiot Smote and his ‘teachers’ (the quotes in her voice could be understood even by a snail).  Everybody was weak, she always concluded.  And because she confided in me, I knew we weren’t everybody.

That night I told her I liked Teacher Lin.  That she wasn’t like the others.  More advanced.

“It doesn’t matter,” my aunt said.

Teacher Lin reminded me a little, just a little, of mother.  But I didn’t say that.  My aunt wouldn’t understand.  Then I’d be everybody.  My aunt was moody about mother anyway.  Sometimes she was full of stories.  Even included my dad in a few.  But other times she would snap, “Don’t be a fool.”  I could never predict which way she’d go.

But Teacher did remind me of mother.  The tidy way she dressed.  Her thin arms.  Her precise, heavy steps.  Even her voice.  Xeno told me that was no accident.  That they had voice samples from all our mothers and had combined them on purpose so that Teacher could better control us.  I told him that was stupid.  His mother had been dead since he was born.  The only words he’d heard would’ve been dulled through her stomach wall.  She’d probably called him “Lena” anyway, since she wanted a baby girl.   Half the county knew about her weirdness.

My mother had been gone over a year.  At first, my aunt told me she had gone looking for my father, who had been taken away one night back when we lived in the city.  I asked when she would return.  “When she finds him,” Aunt Bobbie said softly.  Later I asked why she didn’t go right away.  My aunt just looked at me.  Then she said, “She thought she just needed to wait.  But she got tired of waiting.”

Xeno was quiet the next day.  Which meant he was waiting, planning.  His casual tricks were never casual.

That morning, Teacher Lin sent back our essays on animals and their uses.  “Now, I want to point out a mistake made by Vernon.”  Little Vernon, with his watery eyes and toast-colored hair, drew his head down between his shoulders.

“Vernon, why did you write that one use for a chicken is friendship?”

“Because DillyDally was my best friend,” Vernon mumbled.  “When I was little.”  A few classmates began to snicker, but Xeno silenced them with a look.

“Ok, but now you are grown.  You know the use of things.  Your conclusion was wrong, Vernon.  People should eat chickens.  Haven’t you ever eaten chicken before?”

“Yes, ma’am.  When I was little.  But I didn’t know chicken was a chicken.”

“Vernon…listen to me.  You are forgetting all the farmers who depend on chickens to survive.  Just imagine: what would they do if you didn’t eat their chickens?  Do you want the farmers to be poor?  Do you want a world overrun by chickens?”

“No, ma’am.”

Drusilla’s downy forearm shot up.  “You have a question?” Teacher Lin asked.

“Yes, Teacher.  Is that why they say ‘Kill the chicken before the monkey’?  Because there aren’t as many monkey farmers?”

Teacher Lin paused for a moment.  So I said, “Silla, don’t be ridiculous.  That’s a bad translation.  ‘Before’ means ‘in front of’.  Actually, it’s ‘kill the chicken to scare the monkey’.  To make an example of.”

Xeno added, “We’re the monkeys, Silla.  Vernon’s the chicken.  Right, Teacher Lin?”

“Xenorlena is…correct, Drusilla.  Everyone should learn from Vernon.  Don’t repeat his mistake.”

“Don’t try to save her,” Xeno whispered to me and winked.  One of his thick eyelashes dropped onto his freckled cheek.  It looked like a fresh comma between two faded periods.

Teacher continued as before.  “You must think things through, Vernon.  Your attitude is selfish, and you must correct it.  I want you to write a self-criticism, in addition to today’s assignment.  Do you understand me, Vernon?”

“Yes, Teacher.”

Our school occupied the old minimall, and every afternoon we had group exercises in the parking lot.  My aunt wrote me a whole collection of excuses to get out of it.  She was a former librarian and despised all forms of physical activity.

Xeno didn’t mind, and it took over half the routine to squeeze a bit of sweat out of his limber body.  A darkening under his sleeves and a damp arrowhead at his collar were about it on a good day.  I waited until the second half before showing my note.

Instead of lingering just inside, I crept back towards our classroom, dodging a whistling Smote on the way, and peered through the storefront window.  I didn’t really know what teachers did when we were out.  Sometimes they were in the exact same position as when we’d left them, as if they had just been patiently waiting.  I didn’t know if they could really feel that a half hour had passed.

She wasn’t at the front of the class where I’d last seen her.  I guessed maybe she had returned to her cabinet, like she must do every night when we went home.  Then I noticed someone standing in the back alcove, just out of sight.  The class door was open slightly, so I slipped in.

Teacher Lin’s back was to me.  Her long blue-black hair was spilling out of its usual bun, and her skirt was crooked.  She held a mirror in one hand and was fixing her face with the other.

I wanted to watch as long as I could, but I didn’t know how far the sensors Xeno had tested really reached.

“Teacher Lin?”

Teacher closed her tools and turned to me.  “Myron.  How long have you been there?”  My mother would ask that when I surprised her.

“Just a moment, Teacher.”

“Why aren’t you at afternoon exercises?”

I held up my note.  I knew she knew every detail in my medical files.  “I just need to rest,” I said.

“You should go to the nurse’s office,” she said.  No one wanted to go there.  Nurse was a very old model who treated every student like a piece of meat.  Her speech systems had degraded, and she was particularly inexact with needles.

“Can I just stay here with you til they come back?  You should rest too, Teacher.”

“Your sympathy is admirable, Myron, though misplaced.  I will note it in your behavior report.  But you cannot stay here now.”  Her eyes fixed on the open door.

“Are you ok, Teacher?”

“That is an inappropriate question, Myron.  Please wait outside.”

I nodded and left.  Outside, I looked back through the display window.  Teacher had returned to her mirror.  After she finished with her face, she tidied her hair and straightened her blouse.  She checked each limb thoroughly.

After father disappeared, I would find mother sitting at her dresser staring into an antique oval for hours.  I had searched Teacher’s face when she used the mirror for any signs of emotion.  Don’t trick yourself into seeing things that aren’t there, Xeno would say.  But I didn’t.  I didn’t see anything.

I went down to Xeno’s after school.  I didn’t ask my aunt, though she probably wouldn’t have said no.  It’s not that she liked Xeno.  She knew about his family, like everyone.  But she tolerated our friendship.

I wanted to tell Xeno about Teacher Lin’s strange condition, but I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for more conspiracy theories.  I watched his house from a thick kudzu patch for about 15 minutes before knocking.

The porch looked like it hadn’t been used in weeks, and there was little noise besides the steady electric hum coming from Xeno’s brother’s room.  If his father were home, it would be obvious.  He was a wiry man who managed to take up the space of 20.  He possessed any room he entered.  But mostly he kept to the woods in the deeper hills, tracking, digging, drinking, for weeks at a time.  Xeno was always on edge towards the end when he knew his father might return at any moment.

I crept under the ledge of his brother’s window and tried to peek in.  It was dark, as usual, and the only light came from the screen.  Tubes hung down from his brother’s bag, and one of his hands dangled from the arm of the couch.  I could just make out the shape of the stubs where his fingers used to be.  Only once had I seen his face.  His mouth had been papered over and crossed with hundreds of little scars like the burnt crust of a casserole.

I stole over to Xeno’s window.  He sat crosslegged on his bed with his shirt off, fiddling with something in his lap.  His smooth skin was the opposite of his brother’s.  His shoulderblades arched out like the first set of rooster wings.

I waited a good while, but he was intent upon his project and didn’t notice me.  Finally I rapped on the window.  His back went vertical and he slipped something in his pocket as he turned around.  I could see the relief in his eyes when he saw it was me.  He motioned me over towards the porch with a nod.

“Let’s get out of here,” Xeno said as he pulled on a shirt.

“Where to?”

“I don’t care,” he said, walking ahead.  “The rail.”

We climbed one of the tallest hills and then the tallest tree on that hill.  Xeno had built a small platform off the trunk a few years back, but it still held us just fine.

We could see everything.  The October hills were already a dull orange, almost the same color as the irises of the I-series, which had made them so unpopular.

Above the woods, the pillars of the rail rose hundreds of meters.  You could hear the magnetic hum before the train flashed by.  Xeno used to scope the train as it passed, hoping just one blurred shot could be cleaned up enough to show the faces in the window.  Who were these faces, blurring to the city?  I knew he wondered.  The train didn’t stop anywhere near here.  I still had memories of the city, before we were sent down to the countryside.  Xeno knew this, but he never asked me anything.

The air was still and clear.  No sign of trains.  “Haven’t seen this far in a while,” I said.

“Yeah.”  Xeno was rubbing his knuckles.

“Drusilla still live down here?”

“I expect.”  The only girl in our class worked hard to justify her place.

“And Smote’s over there, right?” I pointed.

“Everything’s right where you left it, Myron.  Lord.”

“I’m just–” but I didn’t finish.  A breeze shot through my shirt and bit at my chest.  I could feel the heat coming from Xeno’s shoulder.

“Smote’s small-time.  Without the mandate and funding to cover these hills, he wouldn’t be able to keep his little game going.”

“Still, Xeno, you should be careful.  Just don’t push it, not directly.  You know, the first to stick his neck out gets his head cut off.”

“Don’t be such a pussy, Myron.  What I know is that Smote doesn’t want trouble.  He just wants to keep his little operation plugging along without too much interference from outside.”  Xeno looked out to the rail.  “Can’t say I blame him for that.  My brother says Smote used to be a programmer.  Not good, mind you, out there.  But not good there can still strut like a peacock around here.  I bet his house is just another failed hacker den.”

I didn’t want to imagine Smote at home.  I knew he couldn’t siphon off much, given how little each student brought in.  “How do you think he afforded Teacher Lin?” I asked.

“Maybe we should ask her.” Xeno fished a dozen small circular stones from his pocket and began aiming them at a stubbornly green leaf on a tree 25 feet away.

“Must’ve taken the budget for the whole year,” I offered, hoping this would satisfy him.

“At least.”  He pegged the leaf again and again.

“Probably not enough left to upgrade the test teachers.”  Next year we would begin intensive preparation for the national exam.  Smote wouldn’t spend much on those anyway.  It didn’t take an advanced series to provide the repetition and discipline required.

“Probably,” Xeno muttered.  I knew he was still counting on the national exam.  It was the only sure ticket out of here.

“We don’t need them anyway.  To leave, I mean.”

“It doesn’t matter.  It’s all the same.  There’re no human teachers anywhere out there.”

“I heard that in the best univers–” I started.

“You heard?  What have you heard, Myron?”

I could feel him staring into the side of my cheek.  I fixed my eyes to a shadow on the forest floor.  I wanted to tell him about Teacher Lin, about what I’d seen that day.  I wanted to ask him what it meant.  Or have him ask me.

During our poetry lesson the next afternoon, Xeno raised his hand.  He hadn’t looked at me all day.  I was sure his dad must be back.

“You have a question?”

“Yes, ma’am.  A simple one.  What’s your favorite poem?”

“I don’t have a favorite poem, Xenorlena.”

“You must have a favorite.  Everyone has favorites.”

“You are mistaken.”  She turned to the center of the class.  “Now where were we?”

Xeno raised his hand again.

“You have another question, Xenorlena?”

“You didn’t answer my first one.  You know billions of poems.  When you taught students before us, didn’t one poem mean something more to you?”

“This class is my first.”

“Oh, don’t be embarrassed, Teacher.  There’s nothing wrong with being secondhand.  We all know there’s no way Smote bought you new.”  Our classmates began exchanging glances, but Xeno held Teacher Lin’s gaze.

“She doesn’t lie,” Drusilla whispered to Xeno.

“We don’t know that,” Thursey said.

“We don’t need to know about Principal Smote,” I said directly to Xeno.

“Right, right.  We common people don’t need to know what the big potatoes are up to.  Even the local crop,” Xeno said without looking at me.

Teacher Lin continued as if no question had been asked.  “Now we will discuss the steps for the correct interpretation of today’s poem.”

Watch this, Xeno mouthed to me.  He slowly raised his hand.

“You have a third question, Xenorlena?  You know this will be your final one for the day.”

“By my count, you never answered my first.  It’s simple, Teacher Lin.  Personal preference.  Even a dog has a favorite chewtoy.  Don’t you?”

Teacher Lin paused for a moment.

“I don’t have a favorite poem.”

“Do you have a favorite anything?” Xeno hissed.

“You have reached your question limit for the day, Xenorlena.”

I raised my hand.

“You have a question, Myron?”  I felt Teacher’s eyes on me.

Xeno suddenly flung something small and silver into Teacher Lin’s neck.  Then he sprang from his desk and walked directly towards her, saying, “One.”

“Xenorlena, return to your desk.”

“Two.”

“This is your final verbal warning.”

“Three.”

Teacher Lin said nothing.  Did nothing.  Xeno stood in front of her and pressed a finger into her stomach.  “Now, Teacher Lin, let’s see what you’re really made of.”  He untelescoped a dirty copper tool.

My skin went loose and doughy.  I wanted to speak or scream or cry.  But there was nothing.  Nothing inside me that moved.  The rest of the class sat silent, transfixed, though our desks were now unlocked.

Xeno slid around her.  He slit her blouse down the back and then stopped, shaking his head.

“What is it?” Thursey asked.

Xeno yanked at one sleeve to expose the shoulder, and we saw it – a bra strap.  Everyone was thinking the same thing: why would she need that?  No series needed that.

Drusilla jumped up like she’d just been bitten and ran out the door.

Xeno climbed up Teacher Lin’s back.  He started working on the base of her neck and then down her spine.  All with swift confidence.  He knew what he was doing.  We could see nothing from our desks.  Then her bra strap went slack.  Xeno opened something and reached into her back.

“Son of a bitch.  Someone’s already been here.”  He tried to swing her around so we could all see, but she wouldn’t budge.

“What is it, Xeno?  What is it?” Thursey Purvis panted.

“She’s maxed out.  Modded, every slot.  I don’t need to add a thing.  Just gotta turn them on.”  He reached up to the base of her skull but lost his balance and had to grab her shoulder to steady himself.  The entire class gasped.

Her bra had slipped down to reveal a nippleless breast.  And a wide set of fresh teeth marks engraved upon it.

I turned my head down to my sour armpit, as if I’d just glimpsed mother after a bath.  “Xeno…please…”

“Don’t you want to look inside, Myron?  To see what’s there.  And what’s not.”  But Xeno could tell no one was looking at him.  Everybody’s eyes were on Teacher Lin’s left breast.  He followed their gaze and leaned over Teacher’s shoulder to see.

“Holy…” but he lost his balance and tumbled over.  One arm flailed up, and his tool hooked Teacher Lin’s cheek.  Gravity tugged the gash down to her chin.  A clamor rose from the class.  Even Umber breathed, “No.”

Xeno shot up and took careful steps back.  His eyes flashed between me and the bitemark, his expression like a cornered animal.  Only one other time had I seen him look that way.  But I’d told him it was ok back then, it was normal, and he’d calmed down in the end.

The class door opened behind him, and he turned only halfway before Smote’s hand swatted him into the wall.  Xeno didn’t get up.

Teacher Han followed Smote into the room.  From the doorway, Drusilla covered her pinched eyes.

“Take that one to your closet, Teacher Han.  Then come back and help me with Teacher Lin.”

Smote didn’t even look at us.  He pulled Teacher Lin’s blouse back up to her shoulder and held it in place with his puckered fingers.  He leaned her back against himself, gently, and tried to pull her towards the door.  But she was too heavy, even for him.

“Get out.  All of you.”

We scrambled for the door.  In the hall, I saw Teacher Han disappear around a corner with Xeno slung over his shoulder.  He looked so thin and rubbery dangling down Teacher Han’s huge back.  I kept expecting him to turn his head to me and wink.

After the incident with Teacher Lin, I waited for Xeno to return.  I kept thinking he would just show up like nothing had happened.  When he hadn’t after a week, I went down to his place, but it was all boarded up and the power was cut.  My aunt just shook her head when I told her.

Teacher Lin was replaced by Teacher Jiang, and we didn’t see much of Smote anymore.  By the end of that year, our school was out of money and declared a failure by the State.  They incorporated us into the neighboring county and provided a beat-up shuttle for transport.  A few months later, my aunt received word that we could finally move back to the city, which we did.

Thursey told me recently that they found Smote, after years of looking.  He was holed up with a bunch of his teachers in a one-room shack near the old testsite.  They took everything to pay off his debts.

I keep thinking about Teacher Lin among them.  I’m sure she was there with him, the first and last L our county would ever see.  In the city, with the M-series already popular, she’ll be a hard sell.  I can see her sitting there, off, among the other models, Kun and Kong, Huang and Hu, even old Guo.  I wonder if they fixed her face.  I wonder if she has much use now, even at a discount.

For a long time I searched for a poem to give Teacher Lin, one she could use as her favorite, if she was ever asked again.  I enjoyed imagining what she might like, what she might repeat to herself, alone at night, in her old cabinet.

I remember when Xeno would talk excitedly about robot liberation, he’d always insist: it’s not for them – they don’t know the difference.  If he were here now, he would laugh at how I still imagine Teacher Lin.  He would say: there you go, putting yourself in them again.

I wouldn’t disagree.  I would tell Xeno that I imagine him too.  Coming to the sale.  Finding her there with his note still attached: PICK ME.  And taking her home.

~ Tevis Thompson

Published March 15th, 2011

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Late in the original Zelda’s second quest, I got stuck.  I couldn’t find the relocated and very well-hidden eighth dungeon.  Then one night I had a dream in which I took a map of Hyrule and drew large circles around the other seven dungeons.  Somehow I had figured that dungeons were probably not right beside each other, and so by sectioning off portions of the map, I could better find the missing dungeon in the blank areas.  I woke up, drew the circles, found the dungeon.  Zelda possessed me, and in those pre-internet, pre-FAQ days, my mind worked on it even while I slept.

I still dream about videogames.  Sometimes Mario, sometimes the latest Civilization, sometimes nightmares brought on by Demon’s Souls.  But I don’t dream about Zelda anymore.

I’m a Zelda fan.  The original captured my imagination in 1987 and hasn’t quite let go.  I convinced my mother that Zelda II was so vital to my 11-year-old soul that she called, from Kentucky, a store in Canada to secure a copy.  (This proved unnecessary, and that French version of the Adventure of Link ended up going to my cousin, Bear.)  I’ve played every console Zelda through Skyward Sword, and I’ve even written fiction that takes Zelda (and Mario and Metroid) pretty seriously.

I’m still a Zelda fan today, but I’m not an apologist.  Zelda sucks, and it has sucked for a long time.  It’s not the greatest series in gaming, and Ocarina of Time is certainly not the greatest game of all time (it’s not even a great Zelda).  The original Legend of Zelda is the greatest Zelda, Skyward Sword is the worst, and the trajectory is mostly downhill with a few exceptions (the bold horror of Majora’s Mask, the focused charm of Wind Waker).

But merely comparing Zeldas is of limited value.  Sure, Zelda seems to occupy its own little pocket universe, but this doesn’t exempt it from comparison to its contemporaries.  Game reviewers with expertise in a series seem particularly prone to these sorts of provincial arguments: Skyrim is a much-improved Oblivion!  This does not mean it’s a good game. Skyward Sword being a fully actualized Wii Zelda doesn’t matter if Zelda itself is just a pleasant anachronism or, worse, fundamentally broken.

That is what I’m claiming: that modern Zeldas are broken at their core.  By modern I mean the console Zeldas Ocarina forward (though Link to the Past is not innocent), and by core I mean their central structure and mechanics.  I’m not going to harp on peripheral issues, though there are many that deserve mention.  I’m not concerned with graphics, even if Wind Waker’s still-amazing style nearly saves it or Skyward Sword’s compromise between the painterly and the realistic is just that – a compromise, where nobody wins.  I don’t think a modern game requires voice acting, although slow, repetitive dialogue boxes remain serious irritants.

I’m going to talk about the core of Zelda, its world, gameplay, difficulty, and story.  Consider it an open letter to Nintendo, or at least my plea to the goddess.  I want Zelda to be saved.

Everything That Is the Case

Why are there so many complaints about the initial thrill and then disappointment of Ocarina’s Hyrule field or Wind Waker’s ocean?  Even the Lanayru desert in Skyward Sword offers a similar unfulfilled promise.  The promise being: a world, vast, spread out before you, ripe for exploration, free.  But when was the last time Zelda truly offered this?  When the game plopped you in an open field and said: here is a world – have at it.

Modern Zeldas do not offer worlds.  They offer elaborate contraptions reskinned with a nature theme, a giant nest of interconnected locks.  A lock is not only something opened with a silver key.  A grapple point is a lock; a hookshot is the key.  A cracked rock wall is a lock; a bomb is the key.  That wondrous array of items you collect is little more than a building manager’s jangly keyring.

Almost everything in Zelda has a discrete purpose, a tedious teleology.  When it all snaps into place, some call this good design.  I call it brittle, overdetermined, pale.  It’s the work of a singleminded god, a world bled of wonder.

Players are constantly reminded that they’re shackled to a mechanistic land.  There is no illusion of freedom because the gears that keep the player and Hyrule in lockstep are eminently legible.  You read the landscape all too easily; you know what it’s asking of you.  One of the greatest offenders occurred early on with A Link to the Past: most bomb-able walls became visible.  What had been a potential site of mystery in the original Legend of Zelda (every rockface) became just another job for your trusty keyring.  Insert here.  Go on about your business.

It’s only gotten worse over the years.  Skyward Sword, with its segregated, recycled areas and puzzly overworld dungeons, is not an outlier; it is the culmination of years of reducing the world to a series of bottlenecks, to a kiddie theme park (this is not an exaggeration: Lanayru Desert has a roller-coaster).  But a world is not one predetermined sequence after another, and a world is not a puzzle with a single solution.  A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit and be inhabited by.  What you infuse a space with to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul.

Tolkien knew this.  His landscapes speak more convincingly than his characters.  And Miyamoto knew this too.  The apocryphal tale of his boyhood discovery of secret caves makes perfect sense when you play the original Zelda.  That spirit of wonder, of potential secrets on every screen, permeated the map (and even the instruction booklet – it discreetly placed hints on the bottom of the page, inviting the player to pay attention because the hidden was everywhere).  The rules of Hyrule were not at all clear to its first visitors, and one of the greatest pleasures came in intuiting the underlying logic (one secret per overworld screen, but almost one on every screen).  The very existence of a second quest that remixed all the dungeons and all the secrets spoke of a world that was open and supple.  The magic of the first Zelda was not locked down, given to a single iteration.  It was its own sequel.  It seemed like it could go on forever.

It did not.  If Zelda is to reclaim any of the spirit that Miyamoto first invested in its world, it needs to do a few things.  It needs to make most of the map accessible from the beginning.  No artificial barriers to clumsily guide Link along a set course.  Players know that game; they know when they’re being played.  Link must be allowed to enter areas he’s not ready for.  He must be allowed to be defeated, not blocked, by the world and its inhabitants.

This world, dangerous, demanding exploration, must also be mysterious.  This means: illegible, at least at first.  Zelda needs new unstated rules, ones that must be relearned, even by Zelda veterans like myself.  How can you truly explore if you know how everything works already?  How can you ever be surprised if every ‘secret’ is conspicuously marked as such?  Hyrule needs space to breathe, fields of purposeless grandeur (like Shadow of the Colossus), where secrets could be anywhere because they’re not obviously right there.  What is an adventure if not a journey through an unknown landscape?  It’s not a retread across familiar ground, the car ride to work, the province of sleepwalkers.

Going Through the Motions

I know there’s something wrong with a game when it begins to feel like work.  When it becomes predictable, rote, tedious.  When I know what I’m supposed to do, but then I have to actually do it.

Zelda has felt like work since Ocarina, overstuffed with tasks, jobs, trials.  And not just in the plodding opening sequences or all the requests by the feckless citizens of Hyrule.  Even the sacrosanct Zelda dungeons, holiest of design holies, have fallen victim to this.  So many things to do, so little pleasure in doing them.  Dungeons suffer further in their over-reliance on environmental puzzles.  Even calling them ‘puzzles’ does a disservice to all the fine puzzles in gaming.  Most Zelda puzzles are tiresome and dull, but the problem isn’t just puzzle quality or lack of ingenuity; it’s using them as the structuring principle of a 30+ hour game.  They determine the very flow of Link’s dungeoneering and make the whole plunge into the dark seem more like a modest exercise, a mock trial in which you needn’t break a sweat.  Some claim the result is balanced, tastefully paced, well-appointed.  So why do Zelda’s dungeons often feel so pedestrian and domesticated, with about the same rhythm and urgency as the music we call ‘adult contemporary’?

But wait, hasn’t Zelda always been like this?  Aren’t puzzles somehow required by the Triforce?  No, they are not.  And it wasn’t always this way.  The first two Zeldas had virtually no puzzles.  You might have to push a block here or there, but the real test was finding your way through a maze and surviving.  You had to keep track of where you were, explore every corner, and fight your ass off.  In fact, mastering Link’s position on screen, in the game’s gridlike space, was key to fighting effectively.  It was, and is, a surprisingly coherent, unified experience.  It was, unapologetically, an action-adventure game.  And a fuller, more complete experience in 1987 than anything Skyward Sword, and its magic stick, apes today.

A game that relies on puzzles, and Zelda in particular, is sometimes considered a ‘thinking man’s game’.  Which is funny, because I haven’t had to think about much of anything in Zelda for years.  This embarrassing prejudice against facility with a controller certainly isn’t doing Zelda any favors.  We get instead a salad bar of limp riddles and the vague sensation that it’s good for us (kid-tested, mother-approved).  Where is the joy in movement, the miracle of motion onscreen?  We mostly just fumble with our keyring and call it a day.

It’s really a missed opportunity.  Because clearly Zelda can offer compelling action when it wants to.  Boss fights, when not overly puzzly, can still wow, and even standard enemies can engage on occasion.  I still remember my first Stalfos battle in Ocarina.  It felt like an actual encounter with real risk.  But after a few repetitions, Stalfos became just another bundle of ticks to observe and exploit.  The fighting in Wind Waker had potential too; Link was limber, his movements fluid.  One of the greatest Zelda moments occurs when he ‘wakes’ the drowned castle and must fight hordes of Moblins and Darknuts simultaneously.  The resulting chaos, and challenge, offers one of the few robustly emergent encounters in Zelda history.  And yet, its rarity speaks again to all the untapped potential.

Skyward Sword would seem to respond to this – it’s even got sword in the title.  But what a terrible, terrible response it is.  I must give credit to Aonuma and his team for trying something new.  But instead of dynamic, 1-to-1 motion controlled battles, we get fights that have been turned into puzzles.  True, you can’t flail and succeed, but the supposed precision required actually just makes for a game of Simon Says.  You go that way, I go this; you signal horizontal, I comply.  Each motion is discrete, requested.  (And that’s when the prickly Wii motion-plus actually works.)  It creates a moment-to-moment pacing problem, inserting pauses, start-stop-repeat, and thus you rarely chain moves together with any sort of fluidity.  Enemies are patient, almost polite, and usually allow for individual encounters, yet in a game about mastering a sword, you never even duel.  When the mobs do finally come at the end, there is no finesse to be had.  You will hack, and you will slash.

Basically, your skyward sword has no depth, never developing beyond the moves you learn at the beginning.  And it lacks all robustness, proving as brittle as the rest of the world.  There is, in fact, something brutish about Link and his whole grab bag of items, or rather, the way he switches between them.  Controls for any single tool are generally manageable, but there is nothing graceful, or even coherent, in trying to string them together.  It’s as if Nintendo thought the ‘adventure’ genre (which only Zelda seems to occupy) meant the player should be able to do just about anything.  Want to shoot arrows, bowl bombs, blow sand, fly a beetle?  Welcome to Zelda Party Resort, the mini-game gulag of champions.

We should’ve seen this coming.  Zelda’s inevitable item creep started with a Link to the Past and has led to a Link-of-all-Trades.  It’s only more pronounced now because of the mania for literally going through the motions, as if that’s what gamers have wanted all along.  I don’t reject motion-control out of hand – I’m curious about all the possibilities of play.  But when grafted onto Zelda, what becomes clear is that the series has lacked focus in its gameplay for a long time.  Zelda simply has too many verbs.  If the designers would choose just a few actions that Link could do very well (like moving) and coordinate them according to a common control scheme, then we might see Zelda achieve a true richness in its adventuring.  It needn’t be as tight and utterly focused as Mario is with jumping, but it could at least be of a piece, compelling and consistent from the beginning.

Zelda has struggled with lucid, integrated gameplay since transitioning to 3D.  Ocarina is lauded for taking Zelda into the third dimension, but I remain unconvinced.  Modern Zeldas are translations of their 2D forbearers; they’ve never been fundamentally reconceived in 3D from the ground up.  In choosing what elements made Zelda fundamentally Zelda, Nintendo chose poorly.  They took the puzzles instead of the action, the conventions instead of the world, the items instead of the spirit.  They never adequately considered the pacing differences inherent to 3D, the consequences of constantly looking around and recentering the screen, the changed expectations that attend a more recognizable world (not a compressed 2D gamespace).  Unlike Mario, Zelda never convincingly made the jump.  It’s no wonder Link still can’t.

Skyward Sword, the proclaimed future direction of the series, has only made this worse.  It’s built upon so many layers of clumsy, sloggy protocol that it can’t possibly save the series with new features.  Zelda needs subtraction, not addition.  It’s not radical to suggest that Zelda fans would prefer a game that is elegant rather than convoluted.  Fewer, deeper items and utterly overhauled but central swordplay would go a long way towards solving this.  With such focus, Zelda might develop technique in its players, such that they actually improve as they play.  As is, I can hardly claim to be much better at Zelda than I was after the first pitiless sequel.  Not that I have to be.

Helicopter Parents

Zelda needs to be harder.  Much harder.  Not harder to solve, like Ocarina’s Water Temple, but harder to survive.  The first two Zeldas were exquisitely difficult (the second excruciatingly so), and they were all the more wonderful for it.  Thus, when I beat Link to the Past the first weekend I had it, after three years of waiting, I couldn’t help but feel let down.  The Adventure of Link had actually demanded things of me, had forced me to up my game.  But Ganon fell within three days that spring of ‘92.  Heroism was, apparently, passé.

It’s been equally so ever since.  It’s not that certain encounters or sequences in Ocarina or Twilight Princess aren’t challenging (the silent realms are a Skyward Sword highlight).  But they are separate, repeatable, often asking me to merely hone a skill or discover a weak point (a strategy, they call it) before getting whacked too many times.  Failure occurs, but with little penalty.  And given the often incoherent controls, with little responsibility either.  The games themselves, piecemeal affairs, are not difficult.  It’s never a matter of if I’ll succeed, only when.

Don’t get me wrong: modern Zeldas are not simple, only simpleminded.  Some of this comes from convention and repetition, both within and across games.  The path through each is laid down with paternal care.  One senses at every turn that the experience has been carefully crafted by someone who surely knows best.  His guiding hand remains on the gameflow spigot so that it drips steadily; meanwhile, you won’t be tempted to get ahead of yourself or go out of order.  The first time you play Zelda, it’s no surprise that this tasteful staggering of content and gentle guidance of the player comes off as masterful game design.

For veteran players like myself, though, the profound conservatism at Zelda’s heart feels more patronizing with each repetition.  Why bother paying attention to the old man when I can just tune out and coast?  The game will do all the fretting for me.  It won’t let me fail.  I don’t even have to get good; I just have to get through.  Zelda asks nothing, demands nothing, except that I play along.

Another way to say this: modern Zeldas do not respect the player.  Many gamers express this as too much handholding and blame the Nintendo helpline reps who accompany you through Hyrule.  No doubt, Navi, Midna, and Fi intrude, remind, and overexplain, all naggy and mothersome.  At least Midna, one of the only strong characters the series has yet to produce, is cheeky when she chastises you.  Yet even if these more obvious guiding hands were eliminated from Zelda, respect for the player would not be restored.  Each game is one giant guiding hand, and even when its condescension is not spelled out very slowly via text scrawl, its gated world, blatant signaling (this goes there), and countless safety nets make sure the player gets the message.

Some contend that all of this is really for the new kids and we longtime Zelda players (the actual fan base) just have to suffer along like patient older brothers and sisters.  If only anyone could convince me that the tangled conventions that define Zelda were also approached with new players in mind.  Zelda pretty clearly wants to have it both ways, but it’s hard to imagine either veterans or novices being satisfied with, say, Skyward Sword.  Every Zelda has to be someone’s first, but I can’t help pity the player who thinks this is what the legend was all about.

Actually, we needn’t speculate on what the gods of Zelda had in mind when designing the difficulty.  Eiji Aonuma, director of Zelda since Ocarina, spoke to Game Informer about this directly:

“I never actually finished [the original Legend of Zelda]…I almost feel like there’s still no game more difficult than it. Every time I try to play it I end up getting ‘Game Over’ a few too many times and giving up partway through. Certainly after playing the original Zelda for the first time, I didn’t ever think that I wanted to make a game like that.”

Congratulations, Mr. Aonuma – you never have.  Instead, you’ve taken the teeth out of a hardcore series.  There’s no real danger now, no risk, nothing to lose.  You’ve redefined game designers as the ultimate helicopter parents.

The point of a hero’s adventure (and Zelda is the hero’s adventure in gaming) is not to make you feel better about yourself.  The point is to grow, to overcome, to in some way actually become better.  If a legendary quest has no substantial challenge, if it asks nothing of you except that you jump through the hoops it so carefully lays out for you, then the very legend is unworthy of being told, and retold.  Death and punishment for failure are not outdated old-school notions, too demanding for the new eggshell generation.  Nor are they too grim for the charm and wonder essential to Zelda’s tone (Mario proves you can be both delightfully whimsical and motherfucking hard).  Meaningful difficulty, in which successes are owned and failures chastise rather than annoy, would more deeply engage the player, making her responsible, necessary, worthy of the legend.  Not just the recipient of a gold star, the kind you get for showing up.

Death Mountain Speaks for Itself

Zelda would be better if it had no story.  Or more precisely, no plot to structure the adventure.  The first Zeldas barely had any plot, and they were the better for it.  With plot, sequence matters too much.  The early Zeldas had situations, worlds and scenarios that framed the action, gaps to be filled in by the player, sequences to be broken.  Optimal paths and shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned.  Items were the most prominent plot devices, and even they were not unduly strict about order.  You could be slow and steady or blast straight through with a little know-how.  The basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot.  You could even play through the entire first Zelda up to Ganon without ever getting a sword.

Plot in modern Zeldas is another culprit in the Case of the Sluggish Pacing.  It only thinly veils the mechanics being explored, and it bends the adventure in ways that feel forced and unnatural.  Especially when the needy denizens of Hyrule get involved.  At this point, I fear speaking to anyone without a golden triangle on her hand.  When did everyone become so inane and needy?  The original Zelda had no villages or houses; the only remaining residents were hidden away in caves, the clearest indication that Hyrule had already fallen to the enemy.  They were cryptic, terse, mercenary and only rarely asked anything of you (one letter to be delivered to an old woman, one grumbly Moblin to be fed).  Link was a student of Hyrule and its people, learning how everything worked, how the world could be saved.  He was not the people’s personal benefactor slash errand boy.  This makes the player feel awkwardly like both the center of the universe and an indentured servant.  Myself, I need neither additional chores nor reinforcement for my solipsism.

Zelda doesn’t even have central characters.  It has echoes.  Repetitions with variation.  Only one-off characters, like Midna, have a singularity that matters.  The rest are foregone conclusions.  At their best, they can offer nuance or temporary affect, but the very nature of Zelda’s iterative narrative makes it hard for anything to stick. Even the more vibrant versions of characters (Wind Waker’s Tetra, Skyward Sword’s Zelda) are hamstrung by the larger narrative’s conservatism.  Get your crown on, princess.  Go to sleep.

Building up a world with a past, a believable place with its own logic – that would be enough.  Wind Waker’s post-apocalyptic drowned world was enough; Majora’s Mask’s temporal loops and grinning lunar horror were enough.  Zelda is a perfect candidate for environmental storytelling.  A Hyrule you can dwell in, despite its limitations (perhaps because of them), with gameplay that compels you further in – such a world will produce its own stories.  It will speak without over-signaling, it will invite readings without being immediately legible, it will become evocative, a space to be occupied by imagination.  A place of wonder.

To do this, Hyrule must become more indifferent to the player.  It must aspire to ignore Link.  Zelda has so far resisted the urge to lavish choice on the player and respond to his every whim, but it follows a similar spirit of indulgence in its loving details, its carefully crafted adventure that reeks of quality and just-for-you-ness.  But a world is not for you.  A world needs a substance, an independence, a sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around (even if it kinda does).  It needs architecture, not level design with themed wallpaper, and environments with their own ecosystems (which were doing just fine before you showed up).  Every location can’t be plagued with false crises only you can solve, grist for the storymill.

Some Zelda critics complain about padding and filler, especially in Skyward Sword.  But Zelda’s plots have long been game-length filler, filling in for a failed, unbelievable world.  Its clockwork vistas do not evoke stories, so it must construct plots to tell them.  The game mechanics of early Zeldas provided plot enough, the kind that is boring to tell (then this, then this) but thrilling to play.  They required no narrative scaffolding to be justified; they justified themselves.  And strangely, the iconic simplicity of early Hyrules fired the imagination the way a good map does, opening up story possibilities rather than narrowing them down to just one.  Story flowed from world instead of world from story.

Zelda II performed a masterstroke in sequel-land when, after handing you your ass in the Death Mountain maze, it revealed the world from the first game to be but the tip of the Hyrulian iceberg.  It altered the scale of the screen (the original overworld’s 128 became approximately 1) and thus expanded the scope of the entire adventure in the player’s mind.  The raised stakes of the sequel were palpable; they were right there on screen.  The world, not the towns or their people or any text, grounded the adventure, gave it shape.  Death Mountain spoke for itself.

For all the talk of golden triangles and lost girls and pig thieves, this onscreen shift between the first two games makes visible the essential Zelda story.  It’s the movement from the world you know to the one beyond, from country to city, from country to world, ongoing still, ever incomplete.  It never gets old because it speaks to the inexhaustible experience of growing older, the perpetual Katamari Damacy scale shift of a life in time.  Modern Zeldas don’t need to lean on tired plots to tell this story.  The player could experience it firsthand if offered a compelling, expansive Hyrule, the kind of world that seems to expand the more you explore it.

Old Zelda Hands

There’s nothing like your first time, I know.  For players who came to Zelda later than me, I’m aware my criticism is treading on sacred ground.  But unless Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword was your first, the rest of the Zelda faithful must at least recognize the limits of the formula and how little the core experience ever changes.  For me, being a Zelda fan means wanting each new game to be the best possible Zelda, to further its promise as a videogame.

So fans can both acknowledge that a series’ glory days are long past and still earnestly hope that they’re wrong with each new release.  The revival of a once-great series also does not entail a simple return to its roots.  Despite all that modern Zeldas might learn from the first two, I’m not advocating remakes or revivals.  3D Dot Game Heroes tried this with Link to the Past as its model, and the result was curious for a few hours but ultimately slavish and unfulfilling, like most nostalgia projects.

Yet belief in Zelda is not based simply in childish attachment or blind need.  There is really some magic there; Zelda has not survived so long by chance.  The pleasures it first offered – those that come with being an explorer, a pathfinder and labyrinth conqueror, a fighter and survivor, a finder of secrets – remain completely viable in modern games.  They’re just not present in modern Zeldas.  Instead, we are given an unconvincing world, unfocused gameplay, unsatisfying difficulty, and an unnecessary story.  Skyward Sword is guilty of all of this and more, and yet as the proclaimed future direction of the series, it is unapologetic.  This is Zelda, they say, and you can hardly remember a time when it was much different.

But I remember.  I remember the peerless original, its unfairly-maligned sequel, and those later elements that suggested the magic had not been completely exhausted, from Wind Waker’s exuberant charm and grace to little Midna’s boundless sass.  Yet focusing on the series’ greatest moments won’t save Zelda.  Its obsession with its own conventions and culture has resulted in an insular little kingdom, walled off from the rest of gaming.  Zelda no longer has a vision of anything but itself, and the wrong parts at that.  It is choking on its own tail.

If I were to suggest where else Zelda might look for inspiration, it wouldn’t have to go far.  Mario remains as vibrant as ever, in no need of saving.  No series has so many extraordinary, crucial games that still sing when you play them.  Its focus on jumping and all its variations is bold and visionary rather than conservative and safe, and it manages to make the familiar new again and again.  As a model for how to develop a series, you could hardly do better than Mario.  But that would still not help create a single new Zelda, encumbered by its own legend as it now is.

For a while, I’ve been unable to imagine a better Zelda myself, not even as a reboot with a new studio.  I sensed what was wrong, and yet I couldn’t point to another modern game that offered many of those original Zelda pleasures.  Then I played Demon’s Souls last fall.  Its unremittingly bleak vision would seem to have little to offer a land as enchanting as Hyrule.  And yet, it captured my imagination (claws sunk into my brain, to be more precise) in a way that few have since the original Legend of Zelda.  Its world seemed real, lived-in (died-in), with a history and an artistry that burned every twisting passage into my memory.  Its gameplay was focused, coherent, and deep, built around encounters that were far more intellectual than Zelda’s puzzles.  Its famous difficulty demanded so much, not just from my hands but from my entire ragged nervous system, even from my temper, my character.  It never explained itself and so conjured, via ingenious online components, a community as helpful and treacherous as any group of humans.  And yet its difficulty was also exquisitely balanced and eminently fair.  It respected me enough to let me fail, then gave me reasons to try again.  And it graciously pushed all of its storytelling into the background, letting the world speak for itself.

After Demon’s Souls, I felt a better Zelda was possible.  The core experience it offered had not become obsolete over the console generations after all.  Games were still capable of possessing me; I was still capable of being possessed.  This didn’t mean another great Zelda would necessarily be like Demon’s Souls, especially in structure or tone.  But its spirit might be saved, so that old Zelda hands like myself might dream of Hyrule, and its secrets, again.  Isn’t that what we want?  For games to get deep inside of us, to restructure our consciousness, to reroute our labyrinthine nerves, to resonate with our captive hearts, to matter?  The way legends do.

~ Tevis Thompson

Published February 10th, 2012

Note: This essay has a Second Quest, a graphic novella with artist David Hellman.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

*Published daily in 2012

January

1/1  the dream of the open road

1/2  no delay

1/3  no u-turn

1/4  no parking any time

1/5  winding road

1/6  dip

1/7  pothole city

1/8  shift gears

1/9  carpool

1/10 is god your co-pilot?

1/11 click it or ticket

1/12 road work ahead

1/13 fines doubled

1/14 narrow lanes

1/15 be prepared to stop

1/16 keep your hands on the wheel

1/17 you’ve got to be fucking kidding me

1/18 detour

1/19 soft shoulder

1/20 blind curve

1/21 use daytime headlights

1/22 rubbernecking

1/23 snarl-up

1/24 bumpertobumper

1/25 a sudden break

1/26 crossroads

1/27 do not block intersection

1/28 do not pass

1/29 one way

1/30 last exit

1/31 yield

February

2/1  come on let’s take the long cut

we’ll get there eventually

~ Uncle Tupelo, “The Long Cut”

2/2  you go on ahead for a while

I would like to just follow you awhile

~ Sunset Rubdown, “You Go on Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)”

2/3  I am the passenger

and I ride and I ride

~ Iggy Pop, “The Passenger”

2/4  telephone poles trees and wires fly on by

car wheels on a gravel road

~ Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”

2/5  I see the junction git nearer’

and danger is in the wind

and either road’s lookin’ grim

~ Judee Sill, “Jesus Was a Crossmaker”

2/6  80 miles an hour with a worn out map

~ Drive-By Truckers, “The Righteous Path”

2/7  I think last night

you were driving circles

around me

~ Kristin Hersh, “Your Ghost”

2/8  I been here so long

my heart is a parking lot

~ Wolf Parade, “Language City”

2/9  promising light on the sidewalk girls

~ Iron & Wine, “Promising Light”

2/10 your ass it draws me in

like a Bermuda highway

~ My Morning Jacket, “Bermuda Highway”

2/11 all around your every curve

I hope to go tonight

~ Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, “Nomadic Revery (All Around)”

2/12 go downtown and eat it like a vulture

~ Missy Elliott, “Work It”

2/13 and if a double-decker bus

crashes into us

to die by your side

is such a heavenly way to die

~ The Smiths, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”

2/14 who’s gonna drive you home

tonight?

~ The Cars, “Drive”

2/15 starting and then stopping

~ Radiohead, “Let Down”

2/16 always crashing in the same car

~ David Bowie, “Always Crashing in the Same Car”

2/17 the concrete broke your fall

~ R.E.M., “Why Not Smile”

2/18 last night I dreamt

that I hit a deer with my car

blood from his heart

spilled out onto my dress and was warm

~ Neko Case, “Favorite”

2/19 dreaming of mercy street

~ Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

2/20 while we sleep we know the streets

get rearranged

~ Arcade Fire, “Suburban War”

2/21 I have ridden on these waves

I have crashed into the shore

I have rolled along the floor

I will be there in no time

~ Moonface, “Dreamland EP: marimba and shit-drums”

2/22 hi-ho silver ride

~ Pavement, “Stereo”

2/23 leaving the valley

fucking out of sight

~ Gillian Welch, “Revelator”

2/24 and at once I knew

I was not magnificent

high above the highway aisle

~ Bon Iver, “Holocene”

2/25 parallel lines on a slow decline

~ Guided by Voices, “Tractor Rape Chain”

2/26 westbound and rolling

taking refuge

in the roads

~ Joni Mitchell, “Refuge of the Roads”

2/27 these days days days run away

like horses over the hills

~ Sufjan Stevens, “Star of Wonder”

2/28 we sleep in the morning

we dream of a ship that sails away

a thousand miles away

~ Brian Eno, “Spider and I”

2/29 go long! go long!

right over the edge of the earth!

~ Joanna Newsom, “Go Long”

March

3/1  Let’s try hard to win.

~ Super Monaco GP (Team Minarae)

3/2  mode 7 as far as the eye can see

~ F-Zero

3/3  get some air, do some tricks

~ SSX 3

3/4  drive erratically for psyche out takedowns

~ Burnout 3: Takedown

3/5  within punching distance

~ Road Rash

3/6  zerg rush

~ StarCraft

3/7  Before dying, you managed to kill two

hundred forty of the alien freaks who

killed everybody else.

~ ZiGGURAT

3/8  pushing onwards

~ VVVVVV (track by SoulEye)

3/9  leaving a trail of blood wherever you go

~ Super Meat Boy

3/10 a cosmic doppelgänger shadowing your

every move

~ Super Mario 3D Land

3/11 Nozomi clinging to your back

~ Shenmue

3/12 a quick time event

~ Heavy Rain

3/13 world of balance or world of ruin

~ Final Fantasy VI

3/14 apes on rocket barrels

~ Donkey Kong Country Returns

3/15 chasing bananas

~ Ms. Pac-Man

3/16 all anonymous companions

~ Journey

3/17 safe in your armor

then miscalculation

then smithereens

~ M.U.S.H.A.

3/18 here comes the Bonewagon

~ Grim Fandango

3/19 all unencumbered

nowhere to go

~ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

3/20 wind along the highway

the city in bloom

~ Flower

3/21 “How far are you going to take me?”

she says.

~ OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast

3/22 dowse like you want to win!

~ The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

3/23 Step in time with the whistle.

Shake that baton.

Perfect!

~ Wii Fit Plus (Rhythm Parade)

3/24 you shall be as gods

~ Xenogears

3/25 You found Mom’s Heels!

Now run.

~ The Binding of Isaac

3/26 death to everyone

~ Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (track by Jim Guthrie)

3/27 scan the ruins

curl into a ball

~ Metroid Prime

3/28 hit the sign at top speed

try to change the past

~ Sonic CD

3/29 the end in sight

then fucked by a spiny blue shell

~ Mario Kart 64

3/30 jump the rails

smash things up

go down

spectacularly

~ Grand Theft Auto III

3/31 if you can just get back to where you died

everything will be ok

~ Demon’s Souls

April

4/1  A car traveling south on Leestown Road

lost control, went airborne, and ended up

in a stand of trees off the highway.

18-year-old seniors Allen Williams, Nick

Jacoby, and Ben Laslie died in the

accident.

(Franklin County, Kentucky ~ 2011)

4/2  Eduardo Gutierrez, 25, was driving a

1995 Infiniti north on Highway 101 when,

for unknown reasons, he lost control of his

vehicle and struck a 2010 Toyota and a

2006 Ford and then crashed into a sound

wall.  Eduardo died at the scene of the

crash.

(San Mateo, California ~ 2010)

4/3  A 2009 Jeep Wrangler X ran a red light

and struck Rebecca Ann Isbell’s 1998

Saturn SC2, causing it to travel

northbound and come to rest facing south

in the northbound lanes. Rebecca, 58,

was pronounced dead at the scene by

emergency medical crews.

(Las Vegas, Nevada ~ 2009)

4/4  Christa Harvey, 21, died when the car she

was riding in slammed passenger side

first into a tree.  Police reports estimated

the speed on impact at 66 miles per hour.

(Orcas Island, Washington ~ 2004)

4/5  Highway Patrolman David Bailey, 27,

died attempting to pull over a speeding

vehicle.  While accelerating to catch up,

another car pulled in front of David,

causing him to skid off Interstate 85 and

down the embankment.

(Greenville County, South Carolina ~ 2000)

4/6  A 2004 Toyota pickup chased and

attempted to overtake a 2004 Ford pickup

on the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway.

Near the 95-mile marker, the Toyota lost

control, flipped, and landed in an adjacent

lava field. Passenger Pena

Keliinohomoku, 19, died three hours later

at the community hospital.

(Kona, Hawaii ~ 2008)

4/7  An 18-wheel semi ran through a red light

and smashed broadside into a Pontiac

sedan.  Barbara Ryan, 44, and her

daughter Joanna, 11, both died in the

accident.

(Bethpage, New York ~ 2010)

4/8  Jon Mustafa, 18, and Lesley Carness, 16,

were bringing a cake to her grandmother

for Easter when they were cut off by what

authorities believe was a dark-colored

Jeep Liberty.  Witnesses said Jon tried to

avoid a collision by steering his Honda

Civic sharply to the right.  The vehicle

rotated, hit the curb, and rolled over until it

struck a tree.  The young couple died as a

result of their injuries.

(East Brunswick, New Jersey ~ 2007)

4/9  Jason Yurk, 38, and Scott Combs, 40,

were thrown from their vehicle when it

crossed the median from southbound

Interstate 43 and flipped over into a

northbound lane.  Jason was pronounced

dead at the scene by paramedics.  Scott

was taken by a Flight for Life helicopter

for treatment of his injuries.

(Port Washington, Wisconsin ~ 2011)

4/10 A white 1989 Pontiac Trans Am was

struck head-on by a pickup truck on route

95, four miles north of Interstate 40.  Sam

Kinison, 38, died at the scene.  Malika

Souiri, who had married Sam five days

earlier, survived the accident.

(Needles, California ~ 1992)

4/11 Composers James Brody and Franz

Kamin, both 68, died when their car

veered off the road and struck a tree on

Lexington Avenue.  The car was traveling

about 35 miles per hour when the crash

occurred.

(Roseville, Minnesota ~ 2010)

4/12 A 13-vehicle accident occurred on

eastbound I-610 near the Elysian Fields

exit when a dump truck lost control and hit

another car, starting a chain reaction.

Shirley Wood, 76, died at the scene and

17 others were injured, including Shirley’s

daughter-in-law Bridget.

(New Orleans, Louisiana ~ 2011)

4/13 Tana Thompson, 21, died when a car

driven by her brother crashed into a ditch.

Tana’s fiancé, Chris Olson, was thrown

from the vehicle and became quadriplegic

as a result of his injuries.

(Madison, South Dakota ~ 2001)

4/14 A 1987 Volvo crashed into a utility pole on

Route 130 near Church Road.  Kimyada

Albright, 22, and Charlene Henley, age

unknown, died.  Driver Deborah Phillips

and Tesa Childs were seriously injured.

They were returning from a girls’ night out.

(Cinnaminson, New Jersey ~ 2000)

4/15 Volunteer firefighter Jose Ramirez, 35,

died while responding to an emergency

call.  Jose’s rescue unit crashed into a

utility pole near Luna Azul and Bobby

Lane.

(Chaparral, New Mexico ~ 2006)

4/16 Sgt. Brian M. Wood, 21, died when his

vehicle pulled off the road while on patrol

and hit a land mine.  Brian was a quiet and

sensitive history buff.

(Tikrit, Iraq ~ 2004)

4/17 Courtney Barber, 17, died when she

drove her Volkswagen Jetta through a

stop sign at the intersection of Sheckler

Cutoff and Highway 50 and was hit by

another vehicle.  A few weeks before she

died, Courtney wrote a list of the things

she loved, which included:

really sudsy shampoo

lame jokes

“Einstein” moments

hardcore shows

dinosaurs

when you get to the hotel

when I fit in a smaller size

when people remember you

(Fallon, Nevada ~ 2010)

4/18 Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena, 48, died

in a car accident while returning from a

transmitter inspection at Channel 5 in

Veracruz.  As a child, Guillermo built a

laboratory in his basement.  Later, he

invented one of the world’s first color

television systems.

(Puebla, Mexico ~ 1965)

4/19 Jeanne Leiby, 46, was a teacher and

editor.  She also wrote stories, including

“Viking Burial”, “Vinegar Tasting”, and

“Henrietta and the Headache”.  Jeanne

died when she tried to change lanes on

westbound I-10, lost control of her Saturn

convertible, hit the guardrail, and was

ejected.

(Baton Rouge, Louisiana ~ 2011)

4/20 Patricia Meehan, 37, crashed into another

vehicle on a remote stretch of Highway

200.  She climbed out of the wreckage,

looked dazedly at the other driver, and

disappeared into the countryside.  Patty

had strawberry blonde hair, green-gray

eyes, and freckles.  She spoke very softly

with a mild eastern accent.  She was never

heard from again.

(Circle, Montana ~ 1989)

4/21 Toni Lynn Vincent Berchtold, 40, cooked

for her local school district and was loved

by the students.  She was the first girl to

play little league hardball in her area.  She

was known to have a great sense of both

humor and clarity.  Toni died when the

Ford pickup she was riding in hit a tractor-

trailer that had jackknifed in the slush on

Route 299.

(Big Valley Summit, California ~ 2003)

4/22 Massimiliano Ossari, 24, was returning

from a celebration dinner with his football

team, Thiene, when his Mercedes

collided with a truck and crashed into the

central grid separating the highway lanes.

Massimiliano died at the scene.

(Vicenza, Italy ~ 2002)

4/23 Chaneka Fenetra Stroud, 32, died when

her car flipped over on Worth Hinton

Road.  Four of Chaneka’s six children

were also in the car and sustained

injuries that were not life-threatening.

The cause of the crash was not reported.

(Zebulon, North Carolina ~ 2011)

4/24 Tessa Anne Harris, 27, crossed from the

westbound to the eastbound lanes of I-64

and struck a car carrying Debra Minor

Samples, 46, head-on.  Both Tessa and

Debbie died as a result.  Police have yet to

determine what caused Tessa to lose

control of her car and veer into oncoming

traffic.

(Bath County, Kentucky ~ 2010)

4/25 Lisa Lopes, 30, allegedly tried to swerve

around a truck and then swerved again to

avoid an oncoming vehicle.  Her rented

Mitsubishi Montero Sport rolled over

several times, and she died instantly after

being thrown out the window.  The front

passenger videotaped Lisa’s final

moments, but the cause of the wreck

remains unclear.

(La Ceiba, Honduras ~ 2002)

4/26 The third Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche fled

China after the 1959 Tibetan Rebellion.

Later, he was actively involved in the

search for his reincarnated successor.

His Eminence, 37, died in a car accident

near his school for young monks and

orphans before the search could be

completed.

(Darjeeling, India ~ 1992)

4/27 On highway 175 at the Neches River

bridge, Pastor David Wilkerson, 79, died

after he crossed into the opposite lane for

unknown reasons and collided head-on

with a tractor-trailer. In his final blog entry

earlier that day, David wrote:

You will soon hear the Father whisper,

“I am with you. I cannot tell you why right

now, but one day it will all make sense.

You will see it was all part of my plan.

It was no accident.”

(Anderson County, Texas ~ 2011)

4/28 Erin and Andrew Ehrbar died after they

were broadsided while pulling out of their

driveway to go to school.  Erin was 16 and

Andrew was 13.

(Granger Township, Ohio ~ 2010)

4/29 The brakes failed on a truck carrying

hazardous chemicals in the Longquan

mountain tunnel of the Chengdu-

Chongqing expressway.  The runaway

truck crossed into the opposite lanes and

collided with four other vehicles.  Seven

people died but the Chengdu Municipal

Party Committee Propaganda Department

would not release their names.

(Longquan, China ~ 2011)

4/30 It seemed just like any other day.

(2012)

May

5/1  car between place

5/2  start kept enough

5/3  yesterday made everything

5/4  dreams know running

5/5  point look course

5/6  no right kind

5/7  fact still day

5/8  seem long afraid

5/9  could real today

5/10 end asked far

5/11 whether sure seems

5/12 can’t being myself

5/13 what I’m like

5/14 thing things one

5/15 then something that’s

5/16 words ago happen

5/17 read reaction together

5/18 any little always

5/19 as at if

5/20 we get out

5/21 go see can

5/22 here yeah an

5/23 in but is

5/24 or have so

5/25 wasn’t same only

5/26 just don’t my

5/27 to that you

5/28 be with he

5/29 yes father tell

5/30 call life exactly

5/31 I and the

~ Charles Bernstein, “I and The”

June

6/1  Once more you hover close,

elusive shapes

my eyes but dimly glimpsed

when I was young.

Shall I now try to hold you captive?

Do these illusions still attract my heart?

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I (dedication, trans: Stuart Atkins)

6/2  Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray

yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things

that can’t be counted.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

~ Don DeLillo, Underworld (Prologue: The Triumph of Death)

6/3  I am a Broken Shoe

My Crime Deserves Death

~ Ha Jin, “In Broad Daylight”

6/4  Vengeance will be upon you.

The all is bigger than you.

~ Aeschylus, The Eumenides (trans: Richmond Lattimore)

6/5  you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

~ Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

6/6  He did not know that he was being

paraded round the streets as a public

example.

~ Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q” (trans: Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang)

6/7  Now we have Sony and Panasonic; we

have Proctor & Gamble, Johnson &

Johnson.  We have imported movies in

which men and women hold hands freely

in the street, and they even kiss each

other without a trace of fear in their eyes.

~ Yiyun Li, “Immortality”

6/8  And then there is our Main Street

that looks like

an abandoned movie set

~ Charles Simic, “Driving Around”

6/9  Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.

~ Michael Robbins, “Alien vs. Predator”

6/10 and at the end of the hall come back to

exactly (corporeally) where they had just

been, but in another country, a tourist, a

marveling visitor, to a street that shared

the latitude-longitude of their own

address, a street they had never visited

before, whose architecture they had

always unseen

~ China Mieville, The City & the City (Chapter 6)

6/11 .00000098 miles to cornea from retinal

wall

~ Dan Graham, “Exclusion Principle”

6/12 The apparition of these faces in the crowd

~ Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

6/13 He wondered what they’d do if the Toyota

suddenly became haunted.

~ Kelly Link, “Stone Animals”

6/14 Shit, the ship said to itself.

~ Philip K. Dick, “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”

6/15 moving its slow thighs

~ W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

6/16 A way a lone a last a loved a long the

riverrun

~ James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

6/17 Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.

~ Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (line 999)

6/18 Stil I wunt have no other track.

~ Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Chapter 18)

6/19 when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into

it, head down and heels up, and I’m even

pleased that I’m falling in such a

humiliating position, and for me I find it

beautiful.

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

(Book III: The Sensualists, Chapter 3: The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse; trans: Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

6/20 No one else could ever be granted

admission here, as this gate was just for

you.  Now I am going to close it.

~ Franz Kafka, “Before the Law” (trans: Donna Freed)

6/21 What enemy do we now perceive

advancing against us, you whom I ride

now, as we stand pawing this stretch of

pavement?  It is death.  Death is the

enemy.

~ Virginia Woolf, The Waves (final section)

6/22 Very quickly he stepped on the gas and

with his stump sticking out the window he

raced the galloping shower into Mobile.

~ Flannery O’Connor, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”

6/23 untrodden, unwilted, unpleasing,

unrestingly, unmentionable, unpoetical,

uncleanliness, unknown, unspeakable,

unwittingly, unrecorded, unworthy, until,

uncounted, undiscovered, unreasonably,

undone, unreasonable, unless

~ Judith Goldman, “dicktée”

6/24 Talaria: A winged sandal.

Tale: A story.

Talipot: A coconut palm native to the East

Indies.  Trunk from 50 to 100 feet in height,

leaves used for umbrellas, fans, hats, etc.

Blooms once in 70 years…

~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Life of a Stupid Man” (trans: Jay Rubin)

6/25 Stagecoach.  Stallion.  Statue.

Sticks.  Stones.  Stop.

Strangle.  Stream-of-Consciousness.

~ Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

6/26 Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled,

mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,

Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by

men, rejected by men,

They go! they go! I know that they go, but I

know not where they go

~ Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

6/27 McDonald’s

Burger King

Taco Bell

Home Depot

Gap

Dunkin’ Donuts

KFC

J. Crew

Home Depot

Staples

Sunglass Hut

Wendy’s

Kmart

Wal*Mart

~ Robert Fitterman, “Metropolis 16”

6/28 Sweet tarts!

Kevin Turner

The funky chicken!

All sour gum flavors!

Big eye pictures of sad dogs!

Peace!

The song if you’re going to San Francisco

People with giant hind ends

Ballerina outfits!

The gorgeous smell of gasoline

~ Lynda Barry, It’s So Magic (“Super Right On!”)

6/29 I am what is around me.

~ Wallace Stevens, “Theory”

6/30 I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak

and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of

America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the

center of a black pyramid; I saw a

splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw,

close up, unending eyes watching

themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all

the mirrors on earth and none of them

reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler

Street the same tiles that thirty years

before I’d seen in the entrance of a house

in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes,

snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I

saw convex equatorial deserts and each

one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman

in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I

saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw

the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of

baked mud in a sidewalk, where before

there had been a tree; I saw a summer

house in Adrogué and a copy of the first

English translation of Pliny — Philemon

Holland’s — and all at the same time saw

each letter on each page (as a boy, I used

to marvel that the letters in a closed book

did not get scrambled and lost overnight);

I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed

to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I

saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet

in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two

mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw

horses with flowing manes on a shore of

the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the

delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw

the survivors of a battle sending out

picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in

Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards;

I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a

greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons,

bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants

on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I

saw in the drawer of a writing table (and

the handwriting made me tremble)

unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters,

which Beatriz had written to Carlos

Argentino; I saw a monument I

worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I

saw the rotted dust and bones that had

once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I

saw the circulation of my own dark blood;

I saw the coupling of love and the

modification of death; I saw the Aleph

from every point and angle, and in the

Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the

Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my

own face and my own bowels; I saw your

face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes

had seen that secret and conjectured

object whose name is common to all men

but which no man has looked upon — the

unimaginable universe.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”

(trans: Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with the author)

July

7/1  Add $10.04 of eligible items to your order

of Collected Fictions (Jorge Luis Borges;

Paperback) to qualify for FREE Super

Saver Shipping.

7/2  By placing your order, you agree to

Amazon.com’s privacy notice and

conditions of use.

7/3  Enter your free gift note for this item here:

(Max. 240 characters–about 10 lines of

text. Be sure to include “to” and “from.”)

7/4  Don’t print prices on packing slips

regardless of what I enter above.

7/5  Shipment has left seller facility in

Lexington, Kentucky and is in transit.

7/6  Customers who bought Collected Fictions

also bought:

Hopscotch

Cosmicomics

Against Interpretation

Ulysses

7/7  Don’t forget some of our most loved

products of last year:

Beauty: NARS Orgasm Blush

Jewelry: Tungsten Carbide Comfort Fit

Flat Wedding Band Ring

Baby: Fisher-Price Rainforest Jumperoo

7/8  Or our most gifted:

Video Games: Just Dance 3

Watches: LEGO Kids’ Star Wars Darth

Vader Mini-Figure Alarm Clock

Baby: Vulli Sophie the Giraffe Teether

7/9  Amazon.com delivers to penitentiaries,

but we strongly suggest you contact the

prison first.

~ amazon.com (7/1-9)

7/10 Our American fulfillment centers are

located in:

Bellevue, Washington

Breinigsville, Pennsylvania

Campbellsville, Kentucky

Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Coffeyville, Kansas

Fernley, Nevada

Goodyear, Arizona

Hazleton, Pennsylvania

Hebron, Kentucky

Irving, Texas

Lewisberry, Pennsylvania

Lexington, Kentucky

Lexington, South Carolina

Louisville, Kentucky

Nashua, New Hampshire

New Castle, Delaware

North Las Vegas, Nevada

Phoenix, Arizona

Plainfield, Indiana

Sterling, Virginia

Sumner, Washington

Whitestown, Indiana

~ wikipedia.org, “Amazon.com”

7/11 The United States has the largest freight

transportation system in the world, an

extensive physical network of

infrastructure and entities that provide

transportation services:

- 4 million miles of public roads,

- 140,000 miles of railroad tracks

operated by freight carriers,

- 25,000 miles of navigable waterways,

- 9,800 coastal and inland waterway

facilities, and

- 5,200 public-use airports.

~ Freight Transportation: Global Highlights 2010

(RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics)

7/12 Today, U.S. households can buy fresh

fruits and vegetables in mid-winter, expect

fast and reliable next-day deliveries of

Internet purchases, and use electronic

appliances manufactured thousands of

miles away, often in other countries.

~ Freight Transportation: Global Highlights 2010

(RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics)

7/13 The United States is the world’s largest

importer of goods. Crude oil, petroleum

products, passenger motor vehicles,

electrical machinery, and electronics are

among the top imports by value.

~ Freight Transportation: Global Highlights 2010

(RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics)

7/14 The top exports from China to the United

States include finished goods such as

computer equipment, electronics, toys,

apparel, furniture, and other household

goods.

~ Freight Transportation: Global Highlights 2010

(RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics)

7/15 Busiest seaports in the world by cargo

tonnage:

Shanghai, China

Singapore, Singapore

Rotterdam, Netherlands

Guangzhou, China

Ningbo, China

Tianjin, China

Qingdao, China

Qinhuangdao, China

Hong Kong, China

Busan, South Korea

~ AAPA World Port Rankings 2010

7/16 NOTE: The cargo rankings based on

tonnage should be interpreted with

caution since these measures are not

directly comparable and cannot be

converted to a single, standardized unit.

~ AAPA World Port Rankings 2010

7/17 Busiest seaports in the world by container

traffic:

Shanghai, China

Singapore, Singapore

Hong Kong, China

Shenzhen, China

Busan, South Korea

Ningbo, China

Guangzhou, China

Qingdao, China

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Rotterdam, Netherlands

~ AAPA World Port Rankings 2010

7/18 Busiest airports in the world by cargo

traffic:

HKG – Hong Kong, China

MEM – Memphis, United States

PVG – Shanghai, China

ICN – Incheon, South Korea

ANC – Anchorage, United States

CDG – Paris, France

FRA – Frankfurt, Germany

DXB – Dubai, United Arab Emirates

NRT – Narita, Japan

SDF – Louisville, United States

~  ACI Airport Rankings 2010

7/19 The U.S. Department of Transportation

defines hazardous materials as belonging

to one of nine hazard classes:

Class 1 – Explosives

Class 2 – Gases

Class 3 – Flammable Liquids

Class 4 – Flammable Solids

Class 5 – Oxidizers & Organic Peroxides

Class 6 – Toxic Materials and Infectious

Substances

Class 7 – Radioactive Materials

Class 8 – Corrosive Materials

Class 9 – Misc. Dangerous Goods

~ RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics

7/20 Common Items that May Be Hazardous:

Aircraft Parts

Bull Semen

Chain Saws

Dental Equipment

Frozen Food

Perfume

Vaccines

Venom

Weather Equipment

~ ups.com

7/21 This is only a sampling of trigger terms

which should prompt further questions

about a shipment. There are many more,

and it is hoped that seeing these will lead

you to think about other general terms that

may warrant further investigation.

~ ups.com

7/22 An intermodal container is a standardized

reusable steel box used for the safe,

efficient, and secure storage and

movement of materials and products

within a global containerized intermodal

freight transport system.  “Intermodal”

indicates that the container can be moved

from one mode of transport to another

(from ship, to rail, to truck) without

unloading and reloading the contents of

the container.

~ wikipedia.org, “Intermodal container”

7/23 Top commodities by weight, U.S.

container imports:

– Furniture and parts

– Bananas and plantains, fresh or dried

– Parts & accessories for motor vehicles

– Worked monument, stone, art, granule

– Oil, not crude, from petroleum and bitum

mineral

– Seats (except barber, dental, etc.) and

parts

– Beer made from malt

– New pneumatic tires or rubber

– Glazed ceramics flags and paving and

hearth tiles

– Coal, briquettes, and ovoids from coal

~ RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics (2010)

7/24 Top global supply chains:

Apple

Amazon

McDonald’s

Dell

P&G

The Coca-Cola Company

Intel

Cisco Systems

Wal-Mart Stores

Unilever

~ The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2012

7/25 Some difficult supply chain locations:

Easter Island

Alice Springs, Australia

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

Kabul, Afghanistan

~ supplychaindigital.com

7/26 The Office of Foreign Assets Control

(“OFAC”) is issuing this Advisory to alert

the maritime industry that IRISL (“The

Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines”)

has recently been operating vessels

despite their flags having been revoked.

~ treasury.gov

7/27 Sorry, your search “maritime shipping

flag” did not return results.

Please try one of the following:

- Try a new search

- Check our Product Index

- Call Customer service or contact us

online

- Learn how to find a part number from the

old AmazonSupply.com paper catalog

~ amazonsupply.com (beta)

7/28 Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you

immediately—as soon as a few hours

after you hit Buy.  Order something in the

morning and get it later in the day, without

doing anything else.  Why would you ever

shop anywhere else?

~ Farhad Manjoo, “I Want It Today,” slate.com

7/29 (Disclosure: Slate participates in Amazon

Associates, an “affiliate” advertising plan

that rewards websites for sending

customers to the online store.  This means

that if you click on an Amazon link from

Slate – including a link in this story – and

you end up buying something, Amazon

will send Slate a percentage of your final

purchase price.)

~ Farhad Manjoo, “I Want It Today,” slate.com

7/30 You entered: C0LL3CT3DF1CT10N5

Delivery status information is not

available for your item via this web site.

A return receipt after mailing may be

available through your local Post Office.

~ usps.com

7/31 Sorry we missed you!

Your item has been returned to its point of

origin.

August

8/1  Traffic accidents are the leading cause of

death for people age 45 and younger in

China.

~ “Study: China traffic deaths higher than police say,” chinadaily.com.cn

8/2  China has about one-third as many

vehicles as the United States but twice as

many confirmed traffic deaths per year.

~ Keith Bradsher, “Road Safety Problems Pose Dire Threat in China,” nytimes.com

(figures from end of 2010)

8/3  Chinese and Western traffic safety experts

say that while the U.S. figures are

extremely reliable and take into account

virtually every death, only a small fraction

of all traffic deaths in China show up in

official figures.

~ Keith Bradsher, “Road Safety Problems Pose Dire Threat in China,” nytimes.com

8/4  The inaccuracies may be due, in part, to

deliberate under-reporting by traffic

officers, who are rewarded with a higher

performance ranking if fewer accidents

occur within their jurisdictions.

~ Ted Alcorn, “Uncertainty clouds China’s road-traffic fatality data,” thelancet.com

8/5  More than two-thirds of traffic fatality

victims in China are vulnerable road

users — pedestrians, bicyclists, and

motorcyclists.

~ Ted Alcorn, “Uncertainty clouds China’s road-traffic fatality data,” thelancet.com

8/6  Li Qiming, son of the director of the local

public security bureau, hit two young

women with his Volkswagen on the Hebei

University campus.  Chen Xiaofeng, 20,

died as a result.  Li fled the scene and

dropped off his girlfriend at her dorm.

When finally stopped by security guards,

he shouted, “Charge me if you dare!

My father is Li Gang!”

8/7  “My father is Li Gang!” became an ironic

catchphrase among Chinese netizens

despite government attempts to suppress

the story.

8/8  Chinese granny ties sex doll to tree to

stop motorists from speeding

~ Tycho de Feyter, carnewschina.com

8/9  BUILD ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER

PLANTS TO GENERATE FUNDS FOR

MORE ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER

PLANTS

~ Dongguan Museum of History, Economy Exhibit

(in Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang)

8/10 China produces 50 percent of the world’s

cement—the next largest producer, India,

is responsible for just 6 percent—to build

seemingly endless tracts of high rises,

railroads, parking lots, highways, airports,

and shopping malls.

~ Christina Larson, “China’s Energy Dragon Looks Tamer to One Forecaster,” scientificamerican.com

8/11 In factories, restaurants, construction

sites, elevators, delivery services,

housecleaning, child-raising, garbage-

collecting, barbershops, and brothels,

almost every worker is a rural migrant.

Together they represent the largest

migration in human history, three times

the number of people who emigrated to

America from Europe over a century.

~ Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls (“Going Out”)

8/12 Money sent home by migrants is already

the biggest source of wealth accumulation

in rural China.  Yet earning money isn’t the

only reason people migrate.  In surveys,

migrants rank “seeing the world,”

“developing myself,” and “learning new

skills” as important as increasing

incomes.

~ Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls (“Going Out”)

8/13 There was nothing to do at home, so I

went out.

~ Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls (“Going Out”)

8/14 Women make up more than one-third of

China’s migrants.  They tend to be

younger than their male counterparts and

more likely to be single; they travel farther

from home and they stay out longer.  They

are more motivated to improve

themselves and more likely to value

migration for its life-changing possibilities.

~ Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls (“To Die Poor Is a Sin”)

8/15 Surveys have shown that migration

makes a rural woman more likely to meet

her future husband on her own, marry

later, want fewer children, give birth in a

hospital, seek equality in marriage, and

view divorce as an acceptable option.

~ Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls (“Eight-Minute Date”)

8/16 The profound gender imbalance caused

by China’s one-child policy has helped

revive the practice of bride trafficking.

8/17 China’s culture of silence also plays a

role.  “In our hometown, when people buy

wives, no one says anything.  No one

talks.”

~ Charles Custer, “China’s Missing Children,” foreignpolicy.com

8/18 In China, it is common for trafficked

women to be disowned by their families

upon their safe return home.  Relatives

view the daughter’s trafficking as a loss of

face to the family and treat the incident of

sex trafficking as the fault of the victim.

~ Matthew B. Conaway, “The Trafficking of Women and Girls for Prostitution and Brides in China”

8/19 In China, kids are abducted not for

ransom but for sale.  Often, they come from

poor and rural families – the families least

likely to be capable of tracking their kids

down or fighting back.  Some children are

then sold to new “adoptive” families

looking for children.  Others are sold into

slave labor, prostitution, or a life on the

streets.

~ Charles Custer, “China’s Missing Children,” foreignpolicy.com

8/20 39-year-old mother Tang Hui was

sentenced to 18 months re-education

through labour for “seriously disturbing

the social order and exerting a negative

impact on society” after she repeatedly

petitioned officials in Yongzhou, Hunan

because she believed the sentences

given to the men who kidnapped, raped,

and forced her 11-year-old daughter into

prostitution should have been more

severe.

~ Tania Branigan, “Outcry in China over mother sent to labour camp after daughter’s rape,” guardian.co.uk

8/21 The Chinese government reports that

fewer than 10,000 children are kidnapped

each year, but the U.S. State Department

says it’s closer to 20,000.  Some

independent estimates put the number as

high as 70,000 (compared with 100 to

200 children kidnapped per year in the

United States).

~ Charles Custer, “China’s Missing Children,” foreignpolicy.com

8/22 Trafficking in persons is the most

profitable illicit activity in China, which

generates more than seven billion dollars

annually, surpassing the revenues of drug

and arms trafficking.

~ Matthew B. Conaway, “The Trafficking of Women and Girls for Prostitution and Brides in China”

8/23 The Government of the People’s Republic

of China does not fully comply with the

minimum standards for the elimination of

trafficking.

~ “Trafficking in Persons Report 2011,” state.gov

8/24 The Government of the People’s Republic

of China is however fully committed to

eliminating sensitive, subversive Internet

traffic.  It operates the most comprehensive

system of censorship in the world.

8/25 China’s censorship system is complex

and multilayered. The outer layer is

generally known as the “great firewall” of

China, through which hundreds of

thousands of websites are blocked from

view on the Chinese Internet.  Domestic

companies are the stewards and

handmaidens, the tools and enforcers, of

China’s inner layer of Internet censorship.

Why simply block content when you can

delete it from the Internet for good? Why

hire government employees to carry out

censorship and surveillance when

companies can be compelled to do it?

~ Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

8/26 Other countries that also censor Internet

content—Singapore, for instance, or the

United Arab Emirates—provide

explanations whenever they do so.  In

China, the connection just times out.  Is it

your computer’s problem?  The firewall?

Or maybe your local Internet provider,

which has decided to do some filtering on

its own?  You don’t know.

“The unpredictability of the firewall

actually makes it more effective,” another

Chinese software engineer told me.  “It

becomes much harder to know what the

system is looking for, and you always

have to be on guard.”

~ James Fallows, “The Connection Has Been Reset,” theatlantic.com

8/27 The presence of censorship, even if easy

to evade, promotes self-censorship.

~ James Fallows, “The Connection Has Been Reset,” theatlantic.com

8/28 Terms that have been blocked in China:

human rights
dictatorship
oppression
genocide
salt
blind man
ministry of truth
tofu construction
Nobel Peace Prize
fuck your mother
forced abortion
milk powder

baby soup
clitoris
cunt
4
6
8
9
today
mourn
never forget
speak the truth
teletubbies + instant noodles
great firewall
brainwash
freedom
evil

8/29 The complete and current list of forbidden

words is itself the ultimate forbidden thing.

8/30 “Citizens of the People’s Republic of

China enjoy freedom of speech, of the

press, of assembly, of association, of

procession and of demonstration.”

~ Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, Article 35

8/31 One World, One Dream

~ Official slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics

September

9/1  Like

And like

And the like

9/2  Like to like

What I like

What I’m like

9/3  Like this and like that and like this

Like me

Like with like

9/4  Add a Job

Add a School

Add Political Views

Add Religious Views

Add People You Admire

9/5  Edit Relationship?

9/6  To poke someone, go to their timeline and

choose Poke from the gear menu.

9/7  Don’t unfriend me, bro

9/8  You have a new follower

9/9  Follow follower?

9/10 Expand

Collapse

Reply

Retweet

9/11 Trending:

Ryan Reynolds

#September11th

#HoesIn2012

#WeAllHaveThatOnePerson

#thatsalie

Netflix

#neverforget

#WTC

#RAW

iOS

#WordsISayWhenImMad

9/12 I’m Feeling Lucky

9/13 Live from space.

250 miles above Earth.

9/14 Travel the world with 360-degree,

street-level imagery and stir up inspiration

for later.

9/15 Please note: Street View Images are not

real time

9/16 Individuals and license plates are blurred

9/17 when will

when will i die

when will the world end

when will i get my tax return

when will twilight be on netflix instant

when will the economy get better

when will i get married

when will i die quiz

9/18 why does my husband

why does my husband lie

why does my husband cheat

why does my husband ignore me

why does my husband fart so much

why does my husband wear panties

why does my husband treat me so bad

why does my husband not love me

9/19 can jes

can jesus sin

can jessica simpson sing

can jessica alba speak spanish

can jesus fly

can jesus heal me

can jesus save hollywood

can jesus microwave a burrito

9/20 :D

9/21 LOL LMAO LMFAO

BTW ILY IRL

IDK TMI NSFW

OMG WTF IMO

OMFG STFU IMHO

NP LYLAS BRB

9/22 troll at bridge

9/23 disable comments

9/24 search terms that led here:

ms. tevis thompson

weather updates china

everyone is someone’s secret

buried a jar in tennessee

mario warp zone

capamari

sonic the hedgehog lingering sensation

phenomenal field games

does glados have personhood

how to save zelda

9/25 search terms that also led here:

tevis thompson police report

hidden passages in cleveland

meaning of the crooked wand tom waits

sunset rubdown “gertrude stein” lyrics

“kill the chicken before the monkey”

free unused metaphorz!

skyward sword “fucking hand holding”

hug and surround

congratulations, mr. aonuma, you haven’t

real. pricess. castle. fum. mario.

9/26 Welcome unique visitor!

Where did you come from?

Where are you going?

9/27 The Internet may seem to be everywhere

– and in many ways it is – but it is also

very clearly in some places more than

others.  The single whole is an illusion.

The Internet has crossroads and

superhighways, large monuments and

quiet chapels.  Our everyday experience

of the Internet obscures that geography,

flattening it and speeding it up beyond

any recognition.

~ Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (“Prologue”)

9/28 In basest terms, the Internet is made of

pulses of light.  Those pulses might seem

miraculous, but they’re not magic.  They

are produced by powerful lasers

contained in steel boxes housed

(predominantly) in unmarked buildings.

The lasers exist.  The boxes exist.  The

buildings exist.  The Internet exists – is has

a physical reality, an essential

infrastructure, a “hard bottom,” as Henry

David Thoreau said of Walden Pond.

~ Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (“Prologue”)

9/29 An unfathomably long and skinny thing, a

singular path across the bottom of the

sea.  Undersea cables are the ultimate

totems of our physical connections.  If the

Internet is a global phenomenon, it’s

because there are tubes underneath the

ocean.

~ Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (“The Longest Tubes”)

9/30 The Internet is many things, in many

places.  But one thing it most certainly is,

nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of

tubes.

~ Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (“Prologue”)

October

10/1 I am a series of tubes.

10/2 The adult circulatory system is estimated

to be 100,000 miles long.  Enough to circle

the earth 4 times.

10/3 Some capillaries are so narrow that red

blood cells must pass through single file.

10/4 The average human heart beats about

3 billion times per life.

10/5 I’m afraid to feel my heart beat.

I know: what can beat, can stop.

10/6 Around 10,000 liters of air pass through a

person on a given day.  The actual amount

depends on variables such as age, size,

sex, health, and activity.

10/7 Air follows branching paths through the

lungs until it reaches the gas-blood

barrier, a superthin interstitial space

between the air sacs and capillaries.

10/8 I miss breathing in the first chill of autumn.

The lung shock.  Before the air submits to

my heat.

10/9 End to end, food usually takes between

24 and 72 hours to pass through the

digestive system.

10/10 My GI tract betrays me.  The locus of my

psychosomatic drama.

10/11 Coprastasophobia: the fear of

constipation.

10/12 The endocrine system uses chemical

messengers to regulate body functions

like growth and metabolism and mood.

Feedback loops are vital for maintaining

control.

10/13 Marriage lowers testosterone.

10/14 Laughter lowers stress hormones and

strengthens the immune system.

10/15 I feel pains within most days now.  They

gnaw or flutter or hammer or lock.  They

come as needles or waves or plain dull

aches.

10/16 The very thought of all this commotion

inside makes me sick.  Some animal

digging its way out.

10/17 Find reset button.  Press.

10/18 On a second quest.

10/19 Neurons are individual and non-

contiguous.  They are separated by gaps

yet make contact.

10/20 Some functions of neural networks:

Feature detection

Pattern generation

Universal computation

Timing

10/21 Unlike the wide net of hormonal signaling,

the nervous system is more specific.

Point-to-point rather than broadcasts.

It’s also much faster.

10/22 Relative speeds of nerve impulses:

Muscle position > Touch > Thought > Pain

10/23 The brain structures suffering.  But the

pudding itself feels no pain.

10/24 The shape of you in my head.

10/25 Pinpricks across my scalp.

A buzzing in my skull.

10/26 Along hills and hollers of cortex.

10/27 UAG UAA UGA

10/28 What was previously thought to be ‘junk’

DNA actually contains millions of gene

switches vital for controlling cell and

organ behavior.  Many complex

phenomena, like disease, can arise when

just a few hundred switches stall or flip the

other way.

10/29 DNA is so long that it must coil around

itself tightly, like a hairball.  If unwound, all

the DNA in a body would reach to the sun

and back many times.

10/30 Through tubes within tubes.

10/31 All this movement inside, in the dark,

upon which everything depends.

November

11/1 rigorously subjective

11/2 entangled in the snares of the world

11/3 dear and dirty

11/4 must wash my hands after touching food,

coins, doorknobs, anything outside,

anything that smells

11/5 the peculiar and touching smell of

other people’s houses

11/6 the sound of voices crashing on the shore

11/7 escape from noise

11/8 the wind against my body

11/9 the bite of coke from a can

11/10 red wall in light, red wall in shadow,

different reds

11/11 cold borders

11/12 faint music from a back room

11/13 crumbs and stains

11/14 costs per 10000 impressions

11/15 the feeling of being watched

11/16 taking off your shoes after a long day

11/17 rearranging the furniture

11/18 television voices through the wall

11/19 turning pages

11/20 bumps and ridges and furrows and clefts

11/21 all these fleshy surfaces

11/22 faces, face

11/23 when we crash I say you hit me

not your body hit my body

not your car hit my car

11/24 my phenomenal field

expanding and contracting

11/25 like breathing

11/26 unknown knowns

11/27 within sight

within earshot

within sniffing range

within reach

on tongue

11/28 no quale, only qualia

11/29 I am the intersection

11/30 a strange loop

December

12/1 the dream of eventually, the win, control,

place, my captive heart, free shipping,

accidents, the like, a series, the subjective

12/2 entangled in the adult, what I’m like,

China, conditions of use, the manyness of

things, enough, unknown reasons, the far,

you, delay

12/3 No passenger tricks a red light.

Everything broken deserves a “to” and

“from”.  Only a small fraction like me are so

narrow, dear.

12/4 Anything touching my average life you

admire.  Deliberate inaccuracies I print will

be upon you.  Dreams impact erratically

and fly on by any time.

12/5 you must git on

I can’t the wind

I’ll stop in

12/6 Collected Fictions of Li Gang

Hopscotch in a Lava Field

Cosmicomics with 10,000 Variables

Against Interpretation of a Zerg Rush

Ulysses Crashing on the Shore

12/7 Now we have Sony Superthin

Interstitial Space and Panasonic

Most Loved Bro Noise; we have

Fact Escape and Pothole of the Day,

Suppress Chinese Netizens Blush

and Gas-Blood Jumperoo. We have

an imported Orgasm Gamble

Tungsten Carbide Johnson & Johnson

Comfort Fit Trace of Fear Wedding Ring.

12/8 My body is an abandoned movie set.

12/9 A coke can on the sidewalk.  A carpool in

Scranton.  A trail of blood through the

digestive system.

12/10 Your reply struck me head-on.  That

unseen end.  China and Kentucky,

different reds, shadowing our every move.

12/11 Trending:

click

your every curve

clinging

Lexington

seems

retinal

inland entities

construction sites

#RAW

constipation

borders

12/12 In surveys, U.S. households rank

“maintaining control,” “I’m Feeling Lucky,”

“can’t being myself,” “Elysian Fields,” and

“go downtown and eat it like a vulture”

as important as increasing incomes.

12/13 Marriage crumbs and testosterone stains

and a haunted Toyota.

12/14 girls’ night out: laughter, apes, hormones,

shit, the 10000 things, inspiration for later,

life-changing possibilities

12/15 The feeling of being.  Stopping.

12/16 digging a lone a long a last a way out

12/17 safe rearranging smithereens

12/18 Last night I dreamt of a detour through a

basement in China.

12/19 straight Jesus

infectious Jesus

teacher and editor Jesus

U.S. Department of Jesus

soft dreaming unencumbered Jesus

12/20 seriously disturbing social networks and

exerting a negative impact on pattern

detection

12/21 I have ridden with the enemy and I have

kidnapped a stretch of shore and I have

crashed into this girl and we have

jackknifed on the floor.

12/22 hi-ho troll face yeah

12/23 unreasonably pneumatic unmentionable

weight unspeakable body unpoetical

suffering

12/24 Native censorship, lingering personhood,

the Coca-Cola sensation.  Yet I have

subversive gods.  And my head blooms.

12/25 fum!

12/26 Orphans of eminence, vessels of

unpredictability.  They go, rolling and

reincarnated.  They go, so fond and proud.

They go along hills and hollers to the

unknown refuge of crossroads.

12/27 Taco Ruins

Burger Pastor

Wendy’s Tongue

The Sunglass Hut Experience

UAA KFC UAG

The Final Gap

Why*Mart

12/28 Fuck your tofu construction.

We never forget.

We are going to get you.

12/29 Totems of our physical connections.

I am what is around me.

I am the intersection.

12/30 I saw the day; I saw sunset and nightfall

and daybreak; I saw silvery deserts and a

dark sea; I saw the reflected earth; I saw

the labyrinth up close; I saw my

unimaginable bowels; I saw my obscene

blood; I saw the coupling of death and the

modification of love; I saw the jump; I saw

my delicate hand; I saw my scrambled

handwriting; I saw the unbelievable object

multiplied endlessly; I saw this web site; I

saw the Internet; I saw America and I saw

China; I saw the conjectured freedom of

speech; I saw her go; I saw unending

tubes; I saw tubes within tubes; I saw the

strange loop; I saw the common universe;

I saw my secret name; I saw life exactly;

and I saw the exit.

12/31 Can we get back to the point of origin,

to the dream upon which everything

depends?  Sorry.  All this movement –

everything missed died returned inside

you world you – has been ok.  I will yield.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

*Published daily in 2011

January

1/1  some weather we’re having

1/2  visibility low

1/3  expect rapid fluctuations

1/4  partly cloudy with a chance of sun

1/5  partly sunny with a chance of clouds

1/6  clear

1/7  steady

1/8  watch

1/9  warning

1/10  advisory

1/11  alert

1/12  flurry

1/13  flakes

1/14  rime

1/15  snow day

1/16  wintry mix

1/17  fine particles

1/18  eddies

1/19  high pressure

1/20  turbulence

1/21  tempest

1/22  maelstrom

1/23  still

1/24  thaw

1/25  dense fog

1/26  local

1/27  scattered

1/28  50% chance of precipitation

1/29  100% chance of weather

1/30  100% chance of 50% chances

1/31  record set

February

2/1  it’s dreamy weather we’re on

you waved your crooked wand

~ Tom Waits, “Alice”

2/2  this strange old sunshine beats me senseless

~ Kristin Hersh, “A Cleaner Light”

2/3  bright and hollow sky

over the city’s ripped backsides

~ Iggy Pop, “The Passenger”

2/4  cloud shadow on the mountain

cloud shadow on the plains

~ Wolf Parade, “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain”

2/5  sky was a bread roll

soaking in a milk-bowl

~ Joanna Newsom, “Only Skin”

2/6  the rain falls hard on a humdrum town

~ The Smiths, “William, It Was Really Nothing”

2/7  the clouds come round again

nothing’s changed

~ Slowdive, “Country Rain”

2/8  sky bends

the moon’s dress slung low

slung low

~ TV on the Radio, “Stork & Owl”

2/9  can’t you see the poison moon?

it’s calling to you

~ Mary Timony, “Poison Moon”

2/10 she said: my sails are flapping in the wind

~ Sunset Rubdown, “The Taming of the Hands that Came Back to Life”

2/11 returned to sister winter

~ Sufjan Stevens, “Sister Winter”

2/12 all the girls here are freezing cold

~ Tori Amos, “Cloud on My Tongue”

2/13 the wrath has finally taken form

~ Joni Mitchell, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

2/14 oh such a perfect day

you just keep me hanging on

~ Lou Reed, “Perfect Day”

2/15 same as it ever was

~ Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

2/16 no alarms and no surprises

~ Radiohead, “No Surprises”

2/17 an indisguisable shade of twilight

~ Gillian Welch, “I Dream a Highway”

2/18 the moon is a lightbulb breaking

~ Elliott Smith, “St. Ides Heaven”

2/19 fluorescent and starry

~ R.E.M., “E-Bow the Letter”

2/20 ready to shape the scheme of things

~ David Bowie, “Word on a Wing”

2/21 the great winds of the planet spiral in

~ John Cale & Brian Eno, “Spinning Away”

2/22 I sense you in the trees

surrounded everyday

~ A Place to Bury Strangers, “The Falling Sun”

2/23 the sky darkened on time

~ Elvis Costello, “All This Useless Beauty”

2/24 daylight licked me into shape

~ The Cure, “Just Like Heaven”

2/25 don’t let the skyline fool you

~ Matt Duncan, “Beacon”

2/26 blue you radiant blue

~ Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “In this Home on Ice”

2/27 not forever

just for now

~ Uncle Tupelo, “Whiskey Bottle”

2/28 all the clouds turn to words

~ Brian Eno, “Sky Saw”

March

3/1  Winds!

lean, serious as a virgin,

seeking, seeking the flowers of March

~ William Carlos Williams, “March”

3/2  We’re strangers, spring wind and I.

Why is it here, slipping inside my gauze

bed-curtains?

~ Li Bai, “Spring Thoughts” (trans: David Hinton)

3/3  And why is the sky dressed

so early in its mists?

~ Pablo Neruda, “Book of Questions, LVIII” (trans: William O’Daly)

3/4  In spring rain

a pretty girl

yawning

~ Kobayashi Issa, “In spring rain” (trans: Robert Hass)

3/5  the dull thud of doom

~ Maurice Manning, “Moment of Self-Effacement”

3/6  The wild and wavy event

Now chintz at the window

~ Lorine Niedecker, “Untitled (The wild and wavy event)”

3/7  daylight lays its sameness on the wall

~ Sylvia Plath, “The Stones”

3/8  make room

for another experiment in materials

~ Jennifer Kronovet, “I Talk to Another More Than Myself”

3/9  First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black

~ Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

3/10 we don’t mind

or notice any more that the sky is green,

a parrot one

~ John Ashbery, “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”

3/11 The sky (Wait here)

is so much glass

passing over

~ Graham Foust, “Planetarium”

3/12 There was a sunlit absence.

~ Seamus Heaney, “Sunlight”

3/13 Each one other

is having different weather

~ Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass”

3/14 at the end of the sky

I weep for distant places

~ Du Fu, “Viewing the Plain” (trans: Mark Alexander)

3/15 The wind moves like a cripple

among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

~ Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor”

3/16 An artificial wilderness

And a sky like lead

~ W.H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles”

3/17 It happens like this: a kind of languor

~ Anna Akhmatova, “Secrets of the Craft”

3/18 A gust inside the god.  A wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Sonnets to Orpheus: I,3″ (trans: Stephen Mitchell)

3/19 the air is full of the shudders of things that

flee

~ Charles Baudelaire, “Le Crepuscule du Matin” (trans: William Aggeler)

3/20 all the world waking from its winter dream

~ James Merrill, “The World and the Child”

3/21 the world held

and rivering, a gleam

awakened and doubled

~ Mark Doty, “Description”

3/22 high and preposterous and separate

~ Philip Larkin, “Sad Steps”

3/23 All this foolishness

about moons and blossoms

~ Matsuo Basho, “All this foolishness” (trans: Robert Hass)

3/24 the common sky & sun,

or at night the moon & stars

~ Walt Whitman, “Beauty” (a series of comparisons)

3/25 Wind, flowers, and the day is aging

~ Xue Tao, “Spring Gazing” (trans: Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping)

3/26 skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

3/27 the hurricane of caution

~ Jennifer Chang, “Obedience, or the Lying Tale”

3/28 a torsion,

a cleavage, a stirring

~ Robert Pinsky, “Ode to Meaning”

3/29 for a moment I could feel the rhythm of

everything

~ Tyler Thompson, “Leslie Harrison Clem”

3/30 Below the incandescent stars

below the incandescent fruit,

the strange experience of beauty

~ Marianne Moore, “Marriage”

3/31 lighting one candle

with another candle –

spring evening

~ Yosa Buson, “Lighting one candle” (trans: Robert Hass)

April

4/1  roars from both armies

struck the high clear skies,

the lightning world of Zeus

~ Homer, The Iliad (Book 13, trans: Robert Fagles)

4/2  Joseph A. says, laconically or reasonably:

“The temperature keeps on changing.”

~ Lydia Davis, “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders”

4/3  The wind had blown open the shutters

along the gallery to make him feel rather

exposed.  He withdrew.

~ Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (Ch. 28, trans: Edward G. Seidensticker)

4/4  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks.

Rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples,

drowned the cocks.

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving

thunderbolts,

Singe my white head.

And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.

~ William Shakespeare, King Lear (Act 3, Scene 2)

4/5  “Storm just bleeeew me away,”

Pennywise the Dancing Clown said.

“It blew the whole circus away.”

~ Stephen King, It (Part 1, Ch. 1)

4/6  from the bottom of a well,

you can see stars in the daylight

~ Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Book 2, Ch. 9)

4/7  “But I, watching the movement of the stars,

cannot picture to myself the rotation of the

earth and I am right in saying that the stars

move.”

~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Part 8, Ch. 19, trans: Louise and Aylmer Maude)

4/8  So nicely adjusted was the system, so

independent of meteorology, that the sky,

whether calm or cloudy, resembled a vast

kaleidoscope whereon the same patterns

periodically recurred.

~ E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”

4/9  though the sun was shining and the sky a

harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour

in anything, except the posters that were

plastered everywhere

~ George Orwell, 1984 (Part 1, Ch. 1)

4/10 (picnic, lightning)

~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Part 1, Ch. 2)

4/11 But it was unlike other lightning I had

encountered: being slower, more silent,

more regular.

~ Robert Aickman, “The Inner Room”

4/12 Thunder splits the rift

where the sun floods in.

~ David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Ch. 26)

4/13 Outside it’s sunny. A regular day. A guy’s

changing his oil. The clouds are regular

clouds and the sun’s the regular sun.

~ George Saunders, “Sea Oak”

4/14 scudding wisps of cloud

~ Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber (Ch. 5, trans: David Hawkes)

4/15 the sky is an unnatural cobalt and the

sunlight is thin but hard, even with the

ultraviolet filtered out

~ Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang (Ch. “Homework”)

4/16 The cold grows, it grows, and your

Mother-eyes are growing, glowing. Soon

you will be alone with our children and the

warm will come again.

~ James Tiptree, Jr. “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”

4/17 She felt it was strange that, even with her

eyes closed, she could see the blue light

in the sky.

~ Can Xue, “Blue Light in the Sky” (trans: Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping)

4/18 The moon shone down on everything with

that simplicity and serenity which no other

light possesses.

~ Franz Kafka, The Trial (Ch. 10: The End, trans: Willa and Edwin Muir)

4/19 The daylight above the motorway grew

brighter, an intense desert air.  The white

concrete became a curving bone.

~ J.G. Ballard, Crash (Ch. 21)

4/20 the color of television, tuned to a dead

channel

~ William Gibson, Neuromancer (Part 1: Chiba City Blues, Ch. 1)

4/21 The sky is unusually pale – the color of the

dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.

~ Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh”

4/22 an impalpable iridescence, supernatural

phenomena of many colours, in which

legends were depicted as on a shifting and

transitory window.

~ Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Swann’s Way (“Overture”, trans: C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

4/23 But the stillness and brightness of the day

were as strange as the chaos and tumult

of night, with the trees standing there, and

the flowers standing there, looking before

them, looking up, yet beholding nothing,

eyeless, and so terrible.

~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Part 2: Time Passes, Ch. VII)

4/24 It is going to be a beautiful day.

~ Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Brief Lives (Ch. 1, 9)

4/25 toward the red demise of that day, toward

the evening lands and the distant

pandemonium of the sun

~ Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Ch. XIII)

4/26 the sun shines for you he said

~ James Joyce, Ulysses (Ch. 18: Penelope)

4/27 a wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust

particles, slanted over her

~ Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”

4/28 “As long as the air is heavy and dense,” he

says, “we burrow tunnels through the air

like worms, but then the wind will come

along and erase where we have been.”

~ Kelly Link, “Travels with the Snow Queen”

4/29 Maybe I just felt like looking at all those flat

fields of nothing and the huge grey skies.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Ch. 23)

4/30 unlimited but periodic

~ Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (trans: Andrew Hurley)

May

5/1  Neither from itself nor from another,

Nor from both,

Nor without a cause,

Does anything whatever, anywhere arise.

~ Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyanmakakarika (Ch. 1: Examination of Conditions, trans: Jay L. Garfield)

5/2  But one human being flaring up into

violence could open up a black hole, a

maelstrom that pulled in the sky.

~ Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman”

5/3  there prevailed in the air of these climates

some enervating influence which made

men think only of the present, careless of

the future

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Ch. 1: Physical Configuration of North America, trans: George Lawrence)

5/4  supposing that as a result of ingenious

consideration an able meteorologist were

to discover that the lightning must always

strike the places A and B simultaneously

~ Albert Einstein, The Special Theory of Relativity (Ch. 8: On the Idea of Time in Physics)

5/5  the wind was blowing the cold rain in

squalls across the muddied lawns and

against the lighted windows of empty

classrooms

~ Joan Didion, “The White Album”

5/6  Lifting one’s head, one could see up there,

between the top branches of the trees,

a river of sky flowing.

~ Jules Renard, The Journals of Jules Renard (May 1894, trans: Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget)

5/7  familiar and comfortable but quite

impossible-to-define abstract patterns

~ Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Ch. 13)

5/8  There is commonly sufficient space about

us.  Our horizon is never quite at our

elbows.

~ Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude”

5/9  the sky divided into horizontal bands – a

heavy purple at the bottom, separated

from the upper band of light blue by a

band of rose and orange.  Even the darkest

band was translucent.

~ Arthur C. Danto, “Rothko and Beauty”

5/10 it happens that atoms composing clouds

and flying storm-clouds also come into this

sky of ours from outside the world

~ Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (Book 6)

5/11 The wind blows over the earth:

The image of Contemplation.

~ I Ching (20. Kuan/Contemplation, trans: Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes)

5/12 The Great Clod belches out breath and its

name is wind.  So long as it doesn’t come

forth, nothing happens.  But when it does,

then ten thousands hollows begin crying

wildly.  Can’t you hear them, long drawn

out?

~ Zhuang Zi, “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” (trans: Burton Watson)

5/13 mausolean disburgeon

~ William Davies King, Collections of Nothing (Ch. 5)

5/14 The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover.

~ Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”

5/15 a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief

~ Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”

5/16 Rain can also spoil food supplies, wet

powder, soak bowstrings (making them

worthless until they dry) and destroy maps

and papers.  Most animals are

bad-tempered in the rain (-2 to

controllability).

~ Steve Jackson, GURPS (Generic Universal Roleplaying System, Basic Set, 3^rd Edition)

5/17 The attainment of enlightenment is like the

moon reflected on the water.  The moon

does not get wet, and the surface of the

water is not broken.

~ Dogen, Shobogenzo (Ch. 4: Manifesting Suchness, trans: Norman Waddell and Masao Abe)

5/18 A front is pulling the huge sky over me,

and from the dark a hailstone has hit me

on the head.

~ Gretel Ehrlich, “The Solace of Open Spaces”

5/19 the storm that seemed in its fury, as it was

experienced, to sum up in itself all that a

storm can be

~ John Dewey, Art as Experience (Ch. 3: Having an Experience)

5/20 not transcendental or sublime but material

and concrete

~ Briony Fer, Vija Celmins (Focus: Night Sky #19 (1998))

5/21 It is night and one is expecting a visitor.

Suddenly one is startled by the sound of

rain-drops, which the wind blows against

the shutters.

~ Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book (Ch. 16: Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster, trans: Ivan Morris)

5/22 Nature is a Haunted House

~ Emily Dickinson, letter to T.W. Higginson (1876)

5/23 The human environment has always been,

to some degree, artificial.

~ Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground (Ch 1: The Underground As a Vision of the Technological Future)

5/24 It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative

language elements

~ Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Introduction)

5/25 The world’s been turned upside down.

~ Anne Frank, Diary (May 25^th, 1944, trans: Susan Massotty)

5/26 Although we live in a hollow of the earth,

we assume that we are living on the

surface, and we call the air heaven, as

though it were the heaven through which

the stars move.

~ Plato, Phaedo (trans: Hugh Tredennick)

5/27 the sky stops being a ‘visual perception’, to

become my world of the moment

~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Part 2, Ch. 1: Sense Experience, trans: Colin Smith)

5/28 Happening and have it as happening and

having it happen as happening and having

to have it happen as happening

~ Gertrude Stein, “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story”

5/29 How much more evocative and pleasing it

is to think about the spring without stirring

from the house, to dream of the moonlit

night though we remain in our room!

~ Kenko, Essays in Idleness (Ch. 137, trans: Donald Keene)

5/30 It is sullen and grey if the party is

quarrelling among itself, bright and

springlike if everyone is happy.  It is also

very susceptible to MAGIC.

~ Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (Section W)

5/31 churning out 3D graphics with ease

~ Jeremy Parish, Gamespite Quarterly 5 (Section 6: The Apocrypha of NES)

June

6/1  cornflower blue skies and stationary

clouds

~ Super Mario Bros. (World 1-1)

6/2  A cool tropical breeze at your back.

Interrupted.  Out of the blue.

~ Sonic the Hedgehog (Green Hill Zone)

6/3  clear sailing for your airship, above a tilted

planet

~ Final Fantasy IV

6/4  Scattered clouds, bloodstains on the

square.

~ Street Fighter II (Chun Li’s stage: China)

6/5  The Biosystems and weather control

systems suddenly became useless.

~ Phantasy Star II (text after defeating Mother Brain)

6/6  air full of riot

~ Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

6/7  Beware a rain of eggplants.

~ Kid Icarus

6/8  drowned world: light swells and false

choices

~ BioShock

6/9  Aching just to blow aside

~ Red Dead Redemption (lyrics to “Far Away” by Jose Gonzalez)

6/10 arcs up and over

a ribbon of sky

~ Halo: Combat Evolved

6/11 slow, orderly, alien precipitation

~ Space Invaders

6/12 a steady horizontal rain

~ Thunder Force III (the doubleshot)

6/13 Lumbering shapes on the horizon, august

and doomed.

~ Shadow of the Colossus

6/14 A light descends and I’m unpetrified.

~ ActRaiser

6/15 morning light from an upper window –

it’s finally over

~ Super Castlevania IV (‘death’ of Dracula)

6/16 curlicued winds, woken, still charming

~ The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

6/17 Prankster Comet detected!

~ Super Mario Galaxy 2

6/18 In the rain or in the snow

I got the funky flow

but now I really gotta go

~ PaRappa the Rapper (lyrics to”Full Tank” (Bathroom Song))

6/19 wind to the north, west, south, west

~ The Legend of Zelda (The Lost Woods)

6/20 hazy, puffed-up clouds, prose

~ Braid

6/21 in thick 2D: textured but untouchable

~ Kirby’s Epic Yarn

6/22 cloudy with a chance of doom

~ World of Goo (intro text to Chapter 5-3: Weather Vane)

6/23 nublado, despiadado

~ Resident Evil 4

6/24 Calamity from the Skies

~ Final Fantasy VII (Jenova)

6/25 In your empire, there’s no time for the

daily, for ‘weather’.

~ Civilization series

6/26 thirteen floors of maze and spell between

you and the sky

~ Dungeon Master (the bottom)

6/27 No windows but many glass doors leading

to long, dim corridors, and the air was

slightly damp.

~ Metroid

6/28 artificial light and a roomful of recirculated

air

~ Portal 2

6/29 Metaphysical storms.  No problem.

Everything’s fine.

~ El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

6/30 White petals falling up, and down.

Press the button.

~ Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (killing The Boss)

July

7/1 red

7/2 faked

7/3 territorial

7/4 treasonous

7/5 lapsed

7/6 feckless

7/7 forgettable

7/8 localized

7/9 sublimated

7/10 precipitating

7/11 relevant

7/12 stark

7/13 glaring

7/14 arbitrary

7/15 rerun

7/16 systemic

7/17 undeniable

7/18 shitstorm

7/19 unwinking

7/20 metempsychotic

7/21 spottieottiedopaliscious

7/22 ephemeral

7/23 photoshopped

7/24 notwithstanding

7/25 here

7/26 unmoored

7/27 whether

7/28 subjunctive

7/29 palimpsest

7/30 worded

7/31 moot

August

8/1 sun + air

8/2 wind + wind

8/3 color + field

8/4 cloud + ontology

8/5 cumulus + home

8/6 chemicals + reactions

8/7 hysterical + useless

8/8 gods – guanxi

8/9 pattern – recognition

8/10 moon – pull

8/11 storm – affect

8/12 stupid – contagious

8/13 fog + quarantine

8/14 transition + transmission

8/15 empty + stranger + dwelling

8/16 ceiling + shadow + between

8/17 cloudless + pressure + passage

8/18 continuous + cling + rage

8/19 drivel + geometry + echo

8/20 space + time + soup

8/21 lightning + code + entelechy

8/22 monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad +

monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad + monad

8/23 knowns + unknowns + combinations

8/24 perfect + bananafish

8/25 periphery + attrition

8/26 guerilla + monsoon

8/27 event + another

8/28 now + here

8/29 is + if

8/30 a + the

8/31 what + where + when – why

September

9/1  visibility: 2.0 miles

       (Chengdu, Sichuan ~ 2010)

9/2  dew point: 68°F

       (Mianyang, Sichuan ~ 2007)

9/3  average humidity: 65%

       (Iowa City, Iowa ~ 2003)

9/4  minimum humidity: 16%

       (Santa Fe, New Mexico ~ 2002)

9/5  maximum temperature: 91°F

       (Lexington, Kentucky ~ 1999)

9/6  maximum wind speed: 18 mph

       (Chicago, Illinois ~ 1995)

9/7  precipitation: 0.00 inches

       (Nicholasville, Kentucky ~ 1987)

9/8  mean sea level pressure: 30.13 inches

       (Lancaster, Kentucky ~ 1983)

9/9  snow depth: no data

       (Beijing, China ~ 1976)

9/10 conditions: clear

       (New York City ~ 1973)

9/11 eclipse: solar

       (15.6N 114.1W ~ 1969)

9/12 moon: waxing gibbous

       (Houston, Texas ~ 1962)

9/13 wind speed: 15 mph (south)

       (Waco, Texas ~ 1956)

9/14 begin civil twilight: 5:03 am CET

       (Berlin, Germany ~ 1930)

9/15 sunrise: 5:47 am KST

       (Pyongyang, Korea ~ 1894)

9/16 duration of daylight: 12 hours 37 minutes

       (Dublin, Ireland ~ 1893)

9/17 end civil twilight: 6:47 pm LMT

       (Sharpsburg, Maryland ~ 1862)

9/18 end nautical twilight: 7:21 LMT

       (San Cristobal Island ~ 1835)

9/19 at 3:15 pm: 75°F, rain

       (Monticello, Virginia ~ 1776)

9/20 dawn: rosy-fingered

       (Athens, Greece ~ 399 BCE)

9/21 wu wei

       (State of Chu in the late Spring and Autumn Period)

9/22 stabilized

       (Mesopotamia ~ 8000 BCE)

9/23 contemplated

       (Africa ~ 40,000 BCE)

9/24 a new star in the sky, temporarily

       (Yucatan Peninsula ~ 65,000,000 BCE)

9/25 oxygen catastrophe

       (Earth ~ 2,400,000,000 BCE)

9/26 bang

       (universe ~ beginning of time)

9/27 maximum entropy

       (universe ~ end of time)

9/28 variable

       (across the multiverse)

9/29 cold, dry, empty

       (a random point in space ~ a random point in time)

9/30 warm, wet, full

       (womb ~ 1976)

October

10/1 postpone the wedding

10/2 a perfect day for Erinyes

10/3 bad hair day – take precautions

10/4 wind in the trees, rumors of you

10/5 what are you waiting for?

10/6 senseless, still

10/7 you won’t remember later

10/8 someone said:

Onion skins very thin

Mild winter coming in;

Onion skins thick and tough

Coming winter cold and rough.

10/9 someone else said:

O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of

the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of

the times?

10/10 as above, so below;

as below, so above.

so they say.

10/11 Libra sun, Aries moon

The culmination of a long courtship

10/12 Venus in Scorpio

It’s all or nothing

10/13 Uranus still retrograde

Best day to wean animals or children

10/14 Gamma Cassiopeia never sets

Watch words with W

10/15 Mars leaving the Beehive Cluster

You don’t have to stay where you are

10/16 Tail of Cygnus the Swan directly above

The end to a friendship or romance

You choose

10/17 Auspicious conditions for:

Grand openings

Haircuts

Lawsuits

Brewing wine

10/18 Inauspicious conditions for:

Tailoring

Pest control

Sending a dowry

Consulting fortunetellers

10/19 a lull

a Rabbit year day

10/20 the lightning-struck Tower

earth above, sky below

10/21 the Hanged Man

surrender to the elements

10/22 the Fool

neither and otherwise

10/23 they say:

climate is what you expect;

weather is what you get.

10/24 dud

my favorite

10/25 you know where you are with

10/26 new moon

tide coming in

10/27 a mess of stars

10/28 that’s a satellite

not a star

10/29 could this be the one?

10/30 careful what you wish for

10/31 you cannot hide

it’s at the door

November

11/1 Supersaturated mental Fog blanketing the

entire State of Mind, unlikely to affect

residents of the Negative Zone.  Regular

multitaskers should proceed slowly and

with caution.

~ Daniel Lee (Lexington, Kentucky)

11/2 fuck this shit

~ David Austin (Lexington, Kentucky)

11/3 Cold rain.

Meanwhile, the leaves keep fluttering.

These are your astonishments.

~ Carrie Ann Welsh (Lexington, Kentucky)

11/4 The sunshine is back just in time for the

weekend and Breeders’ Cup.

~ Christie Dutton, Wave 3 TV (Louisville, Kentucky)

11/5 Clear Sky

2°C

Wind: 7 mph

Humidity: 59%

Pressure: N/A

Visibility: Very good

~ Luo Jiali (Sheffield, UK)

11/6 cloud ceiling low, visibility bad, mostly

foggy

~ He Jianping (Guanghan, Sichuan)

11/7 rowdy with a hint of pain

~ Janani Sreenivasan (Brooklyn, New York)

11/8 Darling! Today is November 8th, 2011.

I’m your Tuesday girl, Esse. Come on, baby!

(dances over cities and temperatures)

Do you love my new look?

I want to be…sexy for you.

Don’t forget, I’m your Tuesday girl, Esse.

Meow!

~ Weather Girls (Youtube)

11/9 it is an infectious grey pregnant with

deferred winter. we had a snow storm and

now we are sitting between many future

snow storms and the possibility of

springtime’s resurgence. it is, in a word,

uncanny.

~ Scott Combs (Queens, New York)

11/10 beautiful blue skies

high wispy clouds in the distance

golden sunshine

a slight breeze

seventy degrees Fahrenheit

twenty one Celsius

~ David Lynch (Los Angeles, California ~ November 10, 2009)

11/11 Wrong in all predictions

~ Henry Darger (Chicago, Illinois ~ November 11, 1966)

11/12 Crystal clear, brisk.

Chance of dragons.

~ @kirkhamilton (Skyrim, Tamriel)

11/13 All jets grounded.

Everything blurred under the leaden sky

full of smog and dust.

~ Zhou Zhengyuan (Chengdu, Sichuan)

11/14 Blue-grey vistas in the eyes of Evangeline

~ Byron Holz (Atlanta, Georgia)

11/15 Perfect day for a drive through the French

countryside and a feast of foie gras,

boudin noir, and loads of wine with

friends.

~ Tessa Thompson (Hong Kong, China)

11/16 mussels unease in their own poop in the

sea water, old worn socks soaked in the

rain water, how about lying by the window

nibbling a lemon pie, visualizing the

worms partying among the pacific roses

~ Li Sha (Blenheim, New Zealand)

11/17 Same weather. Different day.

~ @WeathersKwirl (Mobile)

11/18 half feels quite whole

~ Kate Ware (Nonesuch, Kentucky)

11/19 Thick fog and maybe 8 degrees C