Reading is dead. Long live reading!

Once upon a time, in a galaxy very much like ours, there lived a boy. More than anything else, this boy was a dreamer. He dreamed of many things, but mostly he just liked magic. Many a day found him curled up in the almost amniotic warmth of his own imagination, wistfully braving quests of incalculable magnitude in endless daydream. It might not surprise the reader to learn this boy was a great fan of books.

At first, there was no stopping the boy. His appetite for the greatest fantasy was boundless. More than once he found himself carelessly adding each unknown tome on the shelf beneath the fantasy sign to his basket, pausing only momentarily to consider that he had not, in fact, already read that one. Life was very exciting for the boy! He craved the creativity and power each story held, and relished in adding bits of each one to his own imaginative wonderland.

But that ceased as the boy found other hobbies. Games, in particular, enthralled the boy. Games of fantasy. Games that let the boy be a part of the very things he read! The boy allowed his interest in the books to die, in part because the boy found it hard to justify time spent in books versus time spent in games. The games, after all, continued to live and flourish in endless fantasy. The books ended. There was always a pang of regret when the books ended. It was hard for the boy, and he chose the games.

At least, that's what I thought at the time.

There was more to it than that. Fantasy was dead. Who gave a shit about magic? There were adolescent things to worry about. Never mind none of us were really adolescents. But we believed we were, and we believed the problems teenagers faced in sitcoms were our problems.

Oh, I clung to the old ways a little. One moment in particular, I think, put the entire tragic tale in context. Call it my coming of age story, or at least the story where the protagonist would be expected to come of age then and there or risk losing the audience. We had an assignment in class to watch a television show we were familiar with, with the stipulation that we must watch this show without sound. Another, a family member perhaps, would watch the same show unfettered, and after conferring you would know what you had missed. I cannot quite place the meaning of this assignment just now, though I can imagine it had something to do with compassion for those with disabilities, but that is irrelevant to the thrust of this tale. When our results were presented to the class, I discovered to my dismay every other person had chosen some serial vehicle of teenage angst and waxing sexual frustration. I had chosen Tiny Toons.

The games, though I still played them some, lost their fury and splendor shortly after. I had been reading seldom by this time as it was, and now I completely relinquished the long hours spent living vicariously through my heroes indefinitely. Though magic was there, it was lifeless. The world had turned away and grown up.

Several long years went by. Sure, I was happy. Indeed! Please make no claim to emo, angsty, or any condition but bliss in this tale! I may have missed my magic from time to time, but it was a happy memory. An excitement the boy had known and loved in distant times past.

Then...she came.

She wrote a story. A children's story. About a boy. It was a fantasy story, to be sure. There was magic in this story. I was leery. Once I would have taken any excuse to read the tale about the Boy Who Lived, but not now. Fantasy had abandoned me, I felt, and I was not about to rejoin my long lost love in this...this fairy tale. I had loved her, and she had gone. Let the happy memory remain! I was taken aback at first by the enthusiasm with which the book was met, but confident that in time it would abate and things would be as they always were.

And little by little, it began. The groundswell. The movement. It did not abate but pressed on slowly, like a tiny leak in a dam. It wasn't just Harry Potter now, now they were remaking the Lord of the Rings! I was outraged. How dare they soil my love with personal gain! Fantasy was a fad and they were wringing it for all it was worth. I felt haughty. People were just discovering the magic and I, I had been there from the beginning. I had loved it and it was MINE. I refused on principle to read this "Harry Potter," though there was little danger of that. I had not read in years, after all.

The dam began to crack more noticeably now. I ignored it. The books were tantalising, to be sure. I started to envy the readers and their discoveries. "Why, just this week I finished a book you've never heard of," they would say. And their eyes would be so filled with the distant wonder that accompanies the genre that I would have to look away.

And then the dam broke, the people and their excitement poured forth, and in the ensuing flood the house I had built was destroyed.

-------------------

So here we are, nearly seven years later, and Harry Potter is officially fucking amazing. I hadn't been this excited for ANYTHING in so long, I didn't know what to do with myself before the book was released. Read them all over again? Done and done. Chatter with friends about the newest theories? Of course. I listened to Harry Potter podcasts for fuck's sake! And it hasn't ended there, of course. I have just finished the stunning His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and I can't wait to read them again. The Boy Who Lived turned out to be a gateway drug, a vehicle for the socially-enabled web generation to take their love of knowing what the hell everyone else was doing all the time and use their powers to create a meme so powerful and absurdly pervasive it slapped the face of all the English bigwigs that had declared the language and its aging tomes dead, among whose number I counted myself until very recently.

And it is here that I make my impassioned plea:

Friends, don't let this happen again. Harry Potter is over. The ship is sailed and now we're all standing on the shore trying to figure out whether to swim or travel deeper inland. When next we read, tell everyone. Let it be known. Make it public; scream it from the roofs and hilltops. Just because the books are alive and well now does not mean they are not still in mortal danger! More than that, we cannot let the fiction die. Without it, that child in all of us is lost.

I'll start. Read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It's fucking brilliant.

Ramblings of a Fool

The sun is streaming through the tiny gap in the curtains. This is notable, as during an English winter, it is not uncommon to have no sun for days on end. Except if you're hungover, in which case there is always glorious technicolour. The spelling checker thinks I should put polytechnic in there, it has obviously never seen Joseph. I am trapped. No-one is up, they are all better at sleeping off their hangovers than I am, and I can't get into the living room. The door is jammed, and I am weak. The kitchen and living room are one room, so I have no food or water. Hopefully my making this post will save me from a long, painful death and eventual eating by alsations. Do you have to capitalise the name of a breed of dog? I don't think so, spell checker. AH. The dullest post ever!! And you're all going to think it was Mike and look forward to it with that childish hope that it is going to be both clever and funny. Fooled! I'm going back to sleep.

Skirts are winter clothing items. Fact.

So I have to apologize for the lack of pictures contained herein. It's not a question of ability, mind you, there are photographs, contained in the convenient digital medium of a standard camera memory card. However, you must understand the camera itself is in my coat pocket, which is not in the same room as this laptop. There is a staircase. I knew you'd be sympathetic.

Having just indulged in a meal composed of fish and also chips, I feel I have become cognizant of exactly everything to do with the English lifestyle. To contrast it directly with the American equivalent, the lifestyle I mean, would be complete folly. Sure, there are similarities, usually in the visual style i.e., it may look like chocolate, and the texture may be very chocolatey indeed, but to say that American chocolate and English chocolate are the same is, as they might say, proper retarded. For your information, English chocolate is better. It's like the Americans had a vague notion of what chocolate should be like, even mixing the correct ingredients, but before they could create the product a massive earthquake sundered the very ground beneath them, and instead of making chocolate they ended up making complete shit. I'm not really sure how exactly the earthquake came to adjust the results, but seriously, the gulf is so vast it would surely take some climactic near-apocalypse to replicate the same monstrosity.

For the record, I used to think chocolate was OK. Not great, and not worth having in any regular fashion. I now eat chocolate after every meal. It's like sex in your mouth. I have absolutely no fathomable idea why English people stay thin. One comment I have made, which confused Christine greatly, was my befuddlement (fun fact: I had originally written "dumbfoundedness," but apparently the British English dictionary extension I've installed refuses to acknowledge its wordliness.) at the idea that English people are unafraid to eat. And by that, I mean eat crap. Are you aware of what a (full) English Breakfast is? It's fried eggs, fried bacon, fried sausages, fried beans, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, and buttered toast. Fried. Sometimes, you may also get hash browns. It's a particularly violent way to dine the morning of a particularly violent hangover, which is every morning.

Anyway, while any self-conscious American female (heh) would never be caught dead eating anything fattier than raw broccoli in public, no such restriction exists here. There are always long lines leading away from take-away curry houses at all times of the night, and the German Christmas market swarms with people carrying bratwurst and other coronary atrocities.

Oh...Christmas.

I used to think a month of insipid Christmas music in every store was a difficult cross to bear. Recall Thanksgiving is not a recognized holiday in, well, any other part of the world. A damn shame, to be sure, but not just because others do not have holidays in which the entire idea is to indulge in ridiculous gluttony. No, because without Thanksgiving, Christmas starts November 1st. It simply cannot be described. We have been, for several weeks now, in full-on Christmas Advertisement Mode (tm). Lights, music, the whole bit. It's not even as if the good folks of Great Britain with whom I have spoken believe otherwise, or have become so steeped in tradition as to herald this holiday's explosion into existence the beginning of the eleventh month and the commercial horror it brings.

Worse, it's totally working. I am well aware that continuing exposure is going to get me really excited. But, thanks to my internal Christmas clock being completely fucked, my brain is simply not aware of how long I have to resist the siren's call. At this rate, I'll hit holybatshitit'salmostCHRISTMASOMGOMG right around December 7th.

So, if I start singing along before December 24th, you have my permission to slap me in the face. Or, you know, um...sing with me.

Love you all! More comin.

So I'm in Leeds

It's been far too long, I know. When we last left our hero, he was still in America. A place where, as I understand it, there are states.

The uni is a city campus, so the old and graceful architecture of the university is entirely indistinguishable from the old and graceful architecture of the city of Leeds. In fact, there is at least one libary here which has since been converted into a bar. Called, oddly enough, "The Library."

On one side of the city are a number of very large and ill-lit (in the perpetual night of northern England) parks. These parks are gorgeous if solely for the matter of their cleanliness, a fact which remains a mystery to me. It has nothing, I've decided, to do with the CCTV cameras which now number 1 for every 14 people living in the country, nor the 500 pound (that's more than 900 US Dollars for those keeping track at home) fine levied for the egregious infraction of littering.

I've compared the fashion-obsessed city of Leeds to sort of an English Montreal. Only, the city is quite old, and the persons therein tend to speak English, rather than French. Indeed, this confused me utterly (and still does occasionally), as I am now present in a foreign place, and I am able to understand the native inhabitants. It often surprises me, sometimes mid-conversation, that listening to the words being spoken will produce understanding. The idea that I would be able to conversate in the common tongue, while sound in theory, becomes further alien to me whenever I hear the jarring tone of my own accent being produced.

Communicative issues aside, the city is beautiful and I'm loving every moment of being here. Expect further updates from the front line in the very, very near future.

:)

"Yar." - A pirate

You're at a TOOL concert and the skies have been thoroughly unkind, erupting in a torrential downpour upon the entire outdoor arena where hundreds of fans wait in eager anticipation of the events to come. Suddenly, the band takes the stage to a deafening roar of applause! As the music tears through the night, one by one there can be seen a small beacon shining in the place of every soul facing the wall of brilliant sound.

It is a cell phone.

If there exists a top ten list for "Signs you work at a cell phone company," this would be about eight of them: And all at once, you feel a great disturbance in the force! It as if a million voices suddenly cried out in unison, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T REPLACE MY PHONE IT NEVER GOT WET I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU CAN'T JUST GIVE ME A NEW ONE I MEAN I NEVER DROPPED IT IN WATER OR ANYTHING WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS IT CAN'T BE WET I DON'T UNDERSTAND"

But seriously, it was fucking great. We were cold and tired and very, very, very wet, but TOOL is simply unbelievable. As a band it is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of their excellence, and every inch of it was relayed in concert. My friends...you missed a show.

And the mud moshing.

The set list, for anyone who cares, looked something like this:

Stinkfist
The Pot
Something I forget
Lost Keys
Schism
Rosetta Stoned
Lateralus
10000 Days
Vicarious
I forget this one too

Till next time!

::sniff sniff::

Smell that? THAT is the smell of fall. The crisp air of impending seasonal depression is upon us, and I think we can all agree it smells awesome. I have a number of wonderful things to inform you, readers that I might call my own (and I guess christine's as well), so let's get right to it.

First and most importantly, I have quit my job as of the end of this month. Yes, this is sad and terrible and will usher in a new age of eternal woe and misery upon the hapless other workers at the big V, or so they tell me. Usually in high-pitched whines, or whinges, as it has now come to be known. Sucks for them. My final day with the cellular monstrosity occurs All Hallow's Eve this year, hence the dark (read: cliched) theme I fully intend to abuse in this here blog thing until such a time as Oct 31st passes. Then I can write with a food theme perhaps? Or just ignore thanksgiving and write snowy for two months. We will, as the wise men say, cross that bridge when we come to it, which burns down, casting its contents into a firey chasm of unknown horror.

Halloween is fucking great.

Annnnyhoo. So I'm gonna geek out a moment, as the all-important First Paragraph has been past, and thus I can reasonably assume anyone reading this either cares, or is quite bored. The other day, working late and dicking around in the back with some coworkers, a distraught girl wandered up to the counter, wishing to know if there was any way we could transfer the phone contacts from her old phone to her new one, as this would take bloody ages to do by hand. Being the champion of distraught girls everywhere, I boldly took the phone from her hand and went to work. The contacts wouldn't transfer, of course--having the data port torn from the phone in what I can only imagine was a violent (losing) battle with a pair of needle-nose pliers will do that--but as I handed the phone back, I opened the phone absentmindedly to appear as if I was attempting to solve the problem in a handy sort of way despite the circumstances. I closed the phone. Then I opened it again, lest my eyes deceive me. There, in all its backlit LCD glory, was the image of a rather menacing-looking dragon. A...Magic: The Gathering dragon. A Niv-Mizzet, to be precise. And like the incredibly silly geek that I am, I got really excited and bantered with her about magic for a while. I was quite certain that, had Christine been there, she would have laughed hysterically for perhaps hours. And then maybe disemboweled her, after she came back in to chat again. Had to get the halloween part in there somewhere, right?

Either way, this was all strikingly relevant, as days later I went to a tournament for the game with my dear friend (hot) Paul. All I can say is...



Me: Wow, what are the chances of that?

Paul: About one in twenty.

Until next time, my dear readers. Tool concert Thursday. You bet your ass I'm writing about that.

whirred.

poetic, natch

"the complicated thing about buttons, is not the buttons, but rather the button holes."