#458

When it comes to play, the only analog game that really thrills and grips me is chess. Even pinball, which is basically a video game, merely diverts me for the most part. Besides that, by and large, I find manipulating board games, pencil-and-paper games, dice and card games and the like to be more of a hassle than anything else. I dunno. I just don't feel the spark, the galvanized, intent feeling that is so free and instantaneous when I've got a controller in my hands. 

Used to play around with kind of a specially carved wooden chess set and board that my dad had as a children's toy--the pieces were quite big and blocky--and the old man started teaching me around the same time I was learning to read, so like, two and three years old. Chess is one of the first and only tabletop games I ever learned, and I only started getting really serious about learning it when, predictably, my dad found the right book for me to learn out of, allowing me to make studying it and defeating (killing) him a project I could work on in my own time and through my own imagination.

Though I technically learned to play Super Mario World first, and video games are therefore my first love, as I beame older and more capable, chess took over my ideation and sense of the world in a way that few video games--indeed, few worldly phenomena or cultural apertures--ever have. 

That's the crazy thing about chess. So powerful that it is all games, all puzzles, all contests. It is even all stories. 

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Around when I started becoming proficient at chess, so, seven and eight years old, my dad had me start reading Plato and Aristotle, and a text intended to enrich and supplement called Ética Para Amador, by Fernando Savater, a Spanish philosopher who wished to create a philosophical primer for his collegues to use with new students, an intimate instruction in ethics for his son, and a modernized, slimmed-down work in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, also a text that has been of great importance in my life. Though I did not complete any of these books cover to cover until I was about ten, they put quite a lot of grist into my little mill right away, more than enough to grind on.

Why bring this up? You know me, dear reader--simply reflecting on my childhood. One of my passions, eh? Plus my chess set is near me.

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Also I blame my inability to perform in the modern academy and indeed modernity itself on this early instruction. Once again, like Oskar Matzerath, I had everything I needed early on, and it stunted me profoundly.

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Guess I'll probably read The Tin Drum again sometime soon. It was a really big deal to me when I read it as a teenager. One of the deeper oceans of those years, like East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 

One crazy thing I did book-wise was taking my second-ever recreational Adderalls and staying up all night to read  Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways from cover to cover. Doing this changed my brain permanently. That would have been in college, at age nineteen, which feels at this advanced age like relating some Shakespearean apocrypha; like nineteen-year-old William Blake was in the next dorm room lying on his bed, staring at his ceiling in the dark and weeping silently. 

Another crazy book thing I did was read The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales and The Hobbit every single year. Now its's every few years. Funny how the landscapes change. 

A final crazy book thing is how if I'm having anxiety I might just read like eight thousand pages of George R.R. Martin's words. It is a  warm comfort to me, you see, how very many of them there are. The pleasure of their arrangements and their construction is soothing on top of that, and of course, we circle back to chess--very comforting, the chess of his writing, his books, his mind.

With soothing anxiety, a different remedy is listening to Patton Oswalt routines. Something about that voice of his--he just makes me feel calmer, even when he's agitated.

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Good bet a lot of this post is repeating myself. Well, one is bound to, on occasion. That, too, can be comforting to an anxious turn of mind.

--JL

#186

Made use of my offensiveness yesterday, like I do sometimes. Let us all meditate briefly on how offensiveness is the most transparent defensiveness there is, then, meditate briefly on how important a tool it is to retain if you are to keep something of yourself intact in the extremely polite meat grinder that is getting the fuck by in society. Then, once our meditations are complete, we will be prepared to take the next step in our lives. Take my hand. Flying is as simple as missing the ground.

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Due to a combination of travel anxiety, guilt, free-floating stress, and a complex about the whole thing that would take several post's worth of narrative to unpack, I stayed in the house alone with the dog instead of going out to Chicago for my youngest brother's commencement ceremony. This was of course designed exactly to compound and add to my feelings of guilt, but I did a lot of math and this was the bearable outcome.

I see how some men are able to use their pride to overcome these problems that I allow to essentially rob me of life. This is a kind of pride I lack. Speaking hierarchically, that mode of pride is above my station; it is the pride of the noble, the father, the head of the clan. I have access to modes of pride that this type of man could never understand, but you would never in a million years stick me at the head of a parade, nor would I allow you to. 

The difficulty for me does not involve shame, though, which can be confused with guilt. My problems are manifold, but the main one for concern is that attendance at crowd-gatherings is entangled with a demonstration of love and filial feeling, which I have trouble with. My feelings on the matter are peripheral, of course; you show up for your people. That is basic. So if you don't, you did fail to show love, you shot down a window for it, you have to own that you put your wrecked nerves ahead of showing your love, you can call that selfish or call it self-care; I call it a missed opportunity, which I understand could be perceived as very trendy in the holistic psychoanalysis circles, but I am as usual thinking phenomenologically in order to protect myself (a useful defense against these practitioners, incidentally), like a coward, just as Heidegger taught me. I will learn from this missed opportunity and try not to miss the next one, and I will create an opportunity through action to account for, though not make up for, the missed one.

It is selfish, though. Rationalize away, by all means do not punish yourself, lie, whatever, but for my part, it is selfish. I admit this.

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Speaking of, I can't believe I wrote about "Bohemian Rhapsody" and talked a bit about its subtext and omitted that it also brings up the problem of being able to consider not having been thrown into existence after the fact. I listened to it again just now, with headphones on and my eyes closed. I hadn't done that in years. Gotta figure out this music trauma, gotta learn what has happened to me while I was trying to just survive and apparently missed it as things fell away from me, as dissolution had its way.

Also I cannot believe I wrote about "Bohemian Rhapsody" without talking about THIS ONE TIME AT BAND CAMP when five buddies and I whipped up a brass quintet arrangement of the song with a drum part and performed it for everybody in lieu of "Taps" at Senior Taps. One of the buddies was not just a buddy but my brilliant and longtime partner in distinguishing deeds ranging from something as completely dorky as what I am right now describing to sneaking beers into High School and totally drankin' before class. We considered ourselves gentlemen, and talked about James Bond a lot. It was him did the bulk of the arranging and editing, which I was more than happy to let him do because that writing that stuff down in my bad notation penmanship bores me to death and using computer programs to do it sucked really bad back then. 

Many laughs we shared and many terrible and crass names we called one another as we prepared the arrangement in dusty basement practice rooms, computer speakers hooked up to an iPod so we could replay sections of the song over and over to, sharing Blistex and telling lies and awful jokes as we hammered it out between us. The trombone players were assholes, of course. That's just something you live with in a trombone player; I love both those dudes, they were good dudes I had known for a long time and shared much with, especially as one of them was also a wrestler, but they are trombone players, and therefore pricks of a category all their own. The drummer was, as is proper and correct, hardly there.

Played the tuba that year (band directors have this skill for cornering me into playing the tuba for them though I kinda prefer the trumpet), so I got to do the bassline. It was definitely worth learning to play brass instruments and dealing with all the crap that being in a school band throws at you in order to have done this with some dudes, all breaking the rules and whipping out a banger in front of the director and four years of band geeks all ringing you round and loving every second as we did our thing full and complete start to finish, well-played and a good show rolling without a thought off your lips, easy under sure fingers, all huge smile on the director's face as he stands there arms crossed as the people (nerds, bless my people) went wild. 

A little later in life my brothers, attending the same band camp under the same director, let me know that the seniors always play "Bohemian Rhapsody" for Senior Taps; every year since they'd been there. My middle brother's first year was my last, and some seniors played out their class with "Bohemian Rhapsody" the year my youngest brother graduated, four years after the middle one did. Not just five horns and a percussionist on a snare, a hi-hat, and a ride cymbal; up to fifteen people, depending on the year, playing all manner of instruments, some of the drumline folks using the drumline shit, there is an actual electric guitar, a true Thing. My middle brother actually thought my friends and I were embarrassingly unmemorable, since obviously it could only go up from our humble breaking of the ground; neither had any idea that no one had ever played anything but "Taps" before we came along.

Dunno if they're still doing that, as it has now been four years since my brother left, but I don't at all care; that should be more than enough for any dude, I figure.

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Keep yourself alive! All you people, keep yourselves alive. The show must go on.


--JL