I don’t know if it’s a function of my age or my social circle, but these days, when my friends get together for a “game night,” it’s usually for a party game like Apples to Apples or Celebrity. They’re fun enough, I guess, but they’re not really my thing. The combination of alcohol and lots of shouting makes people overly competitive, but it’s a subdued, unacknowledged competitiveness. The games are short on rules so that they can mesh with a social, casual atmosphere—“We’re just having fun, guys!”—but this only leads to people being uncomfortable when they’re fired up about winning, or when they’re disappointed about losing. The result is a lot of passive-aggression and playful trash-talk that goes just a little too far.

I like games, and I like my friends, so I’m happy to participate, but I do so knowing that there are better ways to play. If we want to compete, we should break out Diplomacy or Risk and fucking compete.  And if we want to be social, friendly, and cooperative, there are better games for that, too.

Like, say, Dungeons & Dragons, maybe?

I stopped playing D&D somewhere in the middle school–junior high range. The desire to one day see a girl naked had recently become my guiding light. I figured out that if I ever hoped to make that happen I would need to make some drastic changes to my lifestyle, the first and foremost of which was to stop being such a nerd. I didn’t succeed entirely, but I did my best. I ditched the Star Wars t-shirts, stopped reading books that had grandiose-sounding nonsense words in the titles, and shut my d20s away in drawer to be forgotten.

Now years have gone by, and in that time I have indeed seen a girl naked (more than one! Believe it!). I’m pretty sure I made the right decision–naked girls are awesome. My interest in the game never fully evaporated, though. I would periodically stop by RPG blogs to see what was going on in that world. If I passed a game store on the street and had no pressing engagements, I would have to duck in and poke around. Every few years, I’d even pick up a copy of a rulebook or some supplement, not with any serious intention of playing, but simply to look through. The colorful illustrations and inscrutable tables made me happy.

I’m not sure how it happened—a series of semi-related conversations culminating in a group decision, I guess—but recently, some of us started playing Dungeons & Dragons again. At first there were only four of us, but as word diffused, other nerds who’d been passing as socially competent human beings outed themselves as former players who wanted in as well. There are seven of us now: five men and two women. I realize that doesn’t sound like the picture of gender balance, but considering the absence of any girls when I used to play as a kid, we’ve come a long way, baby.

We’ve played maybe half-a-dozen sessions by now, using the recently released 4th Edition rules. The decision to start playing again may or may not have been ironic, but right now I’m having an absolute fucking blast. Much more so than I ever did before. I think that’s because when you’re a kid, you’re never far from utterly ridiculous behavior. I don’t necessarily think of myself or my friends as being particularly self-conscious or deliberately cool, but when you’re in your late twenties/early thirties, it’s difficult to not “act your age.” Even when we go to a video game arcade or shotgun beers between innings at our softball games, we do so as older people acting like younger people. It’s difficult not to.

On the other hand, it’s virtually impossible to be anything but utterly ridiculous when you’re speaking with a horrible Scottish accent, because that’s what dwarfs sound like, right? There is simply no way to be thirty years old when describing the vehemence of your cleric’s devotion to Bahamut, god of justice, nobility, and honor. You just have to act like a jackass. It’s been great to see my friends, people I’ve known for years, embrace the jackassery over the past few weeks. It’s been great to embrace it myself.

Typing that, I realize that there’s an important distinction I need to make; I’m not talking about the freedom of behaving like a child, but of behaving like a fucking weirdo, and of taking being a weirdo very seriously, at least for a few hours. It’s been great to play a game where the goal is not to win, but to make the game as awesome as possible, and to get to engage in thoughtful conversations about how to achieve that goal (the conclusion seems to be, more often than not, be more of a weirdo.)

I’m not fully sure what the point of this post is. I think I just felt compelled to come out of the closet.

My name is Brady Golden, I’m twenty-nine years old, and I play Dungeons and Dragons.

I guess it’s good to get that out there. Still, I’m frustrated that I’m not comfortable letting that statement stand, that I’m compelled to add “and I’m still cooler than you.” Even if it’s true, it’d be nice to be free of this feeling of defensiveness. Oh well. One step at a time, I guess.

I imagine that, either because of a homework assignment or out of personal curiosity,  my kids or my grand-kids (assuming that either ever exist) will one day come to me to ask what it was like when Obama got elected. I’ll tell them about the sense of connectedness that my friends and I all felt, about being able to see racism and history in a way that I never had before, about capital-H Hope, about how even as every shred of cynicism within me screamed not to, I broke down and cried during his acceptance speech.

And then I’ll remember how 2008 was that year when I had that unbeatable ass-kicker of a cold for three goddamned months.

Three months. I hadn’t quite realized that until typing it just now. A three-month cold. How fucking depressing is that?

It (almost) only manifests on the weekends, and then disappears just long enough for me to think that I’ve gotten over it, usually about five or six days. It’s unlike any cold I’ve ever had before. If I’m doing anything more active than lying flat on my back, I go into uncontrollable fits of sneezing. These sneezes are brutal and body-wracking. I get buffer in the chestal region with each one. It makes me wonder if I should give up on lifting weights and just start railing ground pepper. I have dreams about a dwarf in my skull going at the inside of my sinuses with a warhammer.

I picked this gem of a virus up in October, which happens to have been when I quit smoking. I’m pretty sure that my respiratory health is supposed to have improved since then. Otherwise, what was the point? If my lungs weren’t so filled with garbage, I might just start again.

I’m going to assume that this will finally be gone by the New Year. I have no reason to believe it, but I’m going to anyway. You can’t live without hope.

After three months and four hundred pages, I’m giving up on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I don’t want to go into my problems with the book. There are plenty of places on the web where you can read about why people don’t like things; it shouldn’t be too hard to find one for this. I decided when I started this blog that whatever it ended up being, it would not be a place to post negative reviews. I still haven’t figured out what the hell this blog is, but I’m standing by that initial decision. And anyway, I don’t really have many problems with the book. Reading it, I was never not aware of its goodness, if not greatness.

I’m giving up because I just. can’t. be. arsed.

When my friends tell me that they’re not enjoying the books that they’re reading, I always encourage them to give up. I have a whole spiel stolen from half-a-dozen other people about life being too short, about there being too many books in the world, about how reading is supposed to be an act of joy, not one of tedium, about how a person’s free time is too precious to be spent doing things that he or she doesn’t enjoy. I always say it, and I’m pretty sure I believe it, but I definitely don’t practice it.

I love reading, of course, but I also love having read. Well-readness is a quality that I admire in other people, and that I’d like to see in myself. I keep various little lists of all the books I want to read–classics, contemporary fiction, biographies of people I’m interested in, cheap horror paperbacks–and I enjoy crossing titles off. I get that it’s vanity, but so what? No one’s going to look down on a marathon runner for feeling a sense of accomplishment for the races she’s completed, so long as she’s not going around bragging about it. I don’t mean to aggrandize the act of reading, but when you get to the end of a book like, I don’t know, War and Peace, or some shit, you feel like you’ve come a distance. It’s not like I’m going to bring it up at parties–”Ooh, that anecdote your telling reminds me of something that Tolstoy said”–but if someone asks, I’ll answer honestly. “Yes, I’ve read War and Peace.“

To be clear, I’ve never read War and Peace. But it’s on the list!

Anyway, the point of all this is basically that An American Tragedy is a book that I’ve wanted to read and to have read for while. It’s pretty high up on the Modern Library’s Top 100, it was considered smutty at the time, Dreiser himself was kind of a badass, and for fuck’s sake, it’s called An American Tragedy. That’s so ballsy! It might as well be called The Great American Novel. Only not, because that’s sissy shit. This is a tragedy.

But I couldn’t get through it. I started it in October, and since then have manged to put about 400 pages behind me, with another 400 or so to go. I think hitting the halfway point is what made me decide to give up. And maybe that’s where the marathon analogy breaks down (as if it ever held up)–don’t marathon runners usually hit the proverbial wall at mile 20? I didn’t make it that far. I got halfway over the course of three months and realized that that meant I had another three months to go. Unless my rate changed, I wouldn’t be done until March. That’s a lot of time to leave my lists collecting dust.

It’s not even that I didn’t enjoy reading it. I did, and like I said, I was struck by its quality while doing so. It’s that I never wanted to read it. The parts of my day that I usually spend reading–during my commute, on my lunch break, before going to bed–started to get occupied other ways. I listened to my iPod a lot. I joined Twitter. I spent more time than usual staring dumbly into space. Since I started An American Tragedy, I’ve read six other books, simply because I didn’t want to be reading that. Only one of them was as good.

So I’m taking my own preached-but-unpracticed advice. I’m acknowledging the shortness of my own life and moving on. I keep trying to tell myself that I’ll give it another shot later, but it’s bullshit and I know it. If I can’t convince myself to read An American Tragedy when I’m reading An American Tragedy, I sure as shit am not going to be able to convince myself when I’m not.

Sorry, Theodore. Look at it this way: the way I’m leaving Clyde and Roberta, there’s still a chance, albeit a slim one, that things might end up okay for them. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they do.

I hope you’re celebrating.

Check out my friends’ new food show. Learn all about the House of Chicken and Waffles. That place is fucking delicious.

The part of me that’s been looking forward to this show for the past four weeks, the part that set the Tivo and then watched the premiere as it aired anyway, is about fourteen years old. They had him at “Hellboy rides a motorcycle.” I don’t know how old the part of me that the show called up to watch it is. Older, anyway. It’s the part that’s capable of keeping track of labyrinthian plots that move at breakneck speeds, and of seeing the humanity in and engaging with deeply flawed characters. It’s the same part of me that obsessed over The Wire for the past five years. I’m glad he’s finally got something else to watch.

In the pilot of Sons of Anarchy, FX’s newest drama, we’re introduced to the titular motorcycle club/biker gang, and at its center, to Jax Teller, son of its late founder and heir apparent to the presidency. The Sons are based out of the fictional town of Charming, California (whose geographical whereabouts are still a point of contention in my apartment), turf that they have to protect from neo-nazi meth dealers and rival motorcycle clubs. They keep themselves in leather and denim by running guns for Oakland street gangs (OAKLAND!).

Early in the episode (but not early enough to prevent a sizeable explosion and the first of several deaths), Jax discovers a manuscript written by his father, who bemoans the Sons’ fall from their noble beginnings into violence and chaos. Reading his father’s words starts something in Jax, not necessarily a desire to see the club reformed, but an openness to the possibility that it could be. The openness sets off warning bells for his mother, and for the Sons’ current president, to whom she’s married.

No points for seeing the Hamlet comparison. I mean it. None.

The first thing that excited me about this show was its faith and me. Complex characters and situations aren’t so much introduced as they are preexisting, and its up to the viewer to figure them out. I can’t stress how important this is, or how many shows get it wrong. The inclination seems to be to tell me everything there is to know about a character in the first episode–So-and-so is this person’s dad, has such-and-such job, and can be summed up with the following three adjectives–so that I have a sort of ground-zero understanding of him or her from which I can track any development that occurs over the course of the season/series/whatever. People just aren’t like this. At no point are we foundations upon which experiences can build our future selves (except at infancy, I guess; maybe that would work for a series premiere. Everything you need to know about this character is that she’s a baby!). We are always a hundred different things at once, and the best art not only acknowledges but explores this. The joy that we get from great characters in books/movies/tv shows is not just about watching their journeys, but also discovering them throughout.

That paragraph is both pretentious and incoherent. I don’t know how to rescue it, so I’m going to move on.

The pilot’s main strengths were the characters, specifically Clay Morrow, Sons of Anarchy prez, and Gemma Morrow, his wife (old lady?).

I just learned that in the original pilot, Clay was played by Scott Glenn, but got replaced later on by Ron Perlman so that his scenes had to be reshot. Obviously, Glenn can act, but after seeing Perlman in the part, it’s impossible for me to imagine it any other way. The dude is the very definition of ”screen presence.” It’s got something to do with his size, something to do with his subdued bellow of a voice, and a lot to do with that indescribable other thing. I’ve been captivated by this guy since City of Lost Children. He fills the screen both literally and figuratively. Every threat, command, or idle observation he utters seeps with the power he’s accumulated, hardened by the strength that it took for him to get it. As of yet, we know next to nothing about Clay’s history (cofounded the gang, married his late partner’s wife), but at the same time, thanks to Perlman’s performance, we know so much about the Clay’s history.

Katey Sagal plays Gemma. Lazy thinking says that Sagal’s defining role was Peg Bundy on Married with Children, but in truth, it’s she who defines roles, not the other way around. What about Leela? Hell, what about John Locke’s doomed love interest on Lost? Gemma’s a rough character. By the end of the pilot, we’ve seen her do some despicable things, but they come from a fiercely protective place within her from which she guards her son and the life she’s built for herself. None of this is said. It’s all conveyed through Sagal’s tough-as-nails performance. The show’s a total sausage-fest, which makes it all the more exciting that its shining star is an amazing female character.

There were only two problems with what I saw last night. The first was the cast-and-crew-names-as-tattoos opening credits. I imagine that they were one of those things that maybe sounded cool as an idea, but in practice could have gone either way. The way they went was corny. That’s all I have to say about that.

The second had to do with the show’s undercurrent of dark comedy. The world of the show, or at least what we’ve seen of it so far, is both bleak and melodramatic, the world of Shakespeare’s tragedies (I said no points!) wiped over by The Road Warrior. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be humor there, or even moments of absurdity. But when those moments get goofy, it’s kind of jarring.

The example that comes to mind has to do with the club’s prospective member Half-Sack (so-named because of a disfiguring war injury; that joke works, by the way) beats down an Elvis impersonator in his dressing room. In and of itself, that’s kind of funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but smirk-inducing, at least. The problem is, while the victim is getting stomped, he stays in character, calling out for his “mama” and “mercy” with a silly Elvis Presley accent. As a joke, it’d be more at home in something like Smoking Aces than the grim, severe world that the show does such a great job of building.

It’s a small point, certainly not worth as much time as I’ve devoted to it, and I’m ready to chalk it up to the show trying to find its voice.

The first job a pilot is to provide the show’s mission statement: this is who we are, this is what we’re doing. The second is make me want to see more. Sons of Anarchy accomplished both. I make no predictions about how the rest of the season’s going to go, but I’ll be coming back for a few weeks at least. If the quality level stays this high, I’ll come back until they’re done with me.

With Oakland’s murder rate climbing steadily every night, and the hot new craze of restaurant takeover robberies, I’ve been feeling pretty frustrated with my beloved city lately. I always feel like I need to defend it when my family or my non-Oakland friends accuse my home of being a crack-ridden murder-hole, but it’s been getting harder for me to think of responses, and fantasies of small town life in some Big Sky state have been playing inside my head with increasing frequency.

Fortunately, the good people over at the decor8 blog have taken it upon themselves to remind me of a few of the things that make this city great. I don’t even necessarily like everything that they listed (I find the existence of the Art Murmur kind of irritating), but I like that they like it. I like that there are things about Oakland to list, and that different people will have their own lists, with some overlap, and some shit that’s unique. I’d add Dark Carnival Books, which is just one of the weirdest, most fun shops I’ve ever been in.

Anyway, point being, thanks, dudes, for restoring some faith. I do hella heart Oakland, even if I hate “I hella heart Oakland” t-shirts.

Vinyl snobs are always saying that it’s a bad idea to stack your records.

Now I know why.

Last night, at the At the Gates concert at the Fillmore, some guy patted me on the back and shook my hand. Between the dark and the occasional flash of the strobe, I didn’t get the best look at him, but he appeared to be a few years younger than me, bearded, and very happy to see me. I could barely hear him over the music, but I think our conversation went mostly like this.

SOME GUY: Dude, what’s up?

ME: Hey, how’s it going?

SOME GUY: Do you know who I am?

ME: I have no idea who I’m talking to right now.

SOME GUY: You don’t recognize me?

ME: No.

SOME GUY: (something unintelligible)

ME: What?

SOME GUY: (something that sounds like “Ned”)

ME: Ned?

SOME GUY: (something that sounds like “Ned Bananas”)

ME: What?

At that point, fed up with the whole exchange, Ned Bananas stormed off into the crowd, leaving me feeling perplexed and a little bit guilty. Well, mostly perplexed. I am notoriously bad at names and faces. As more than a few people who are now actually good friends will tell you, I usually have to meet a person four or five times before they stick in my memory. I hope he didn’t take it personally, but people usually do. It’s also possible that this guy had me mistaken for someone else (although a friend said that she thought this unlikely; I am, in her words, “pretty distinctive looking”). If so, I hope he one day finds the man he’s looking for.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry, Ned Bananas, that our interaction didn’t go as you’d hoped.

That said, I do want to mention that the moment that this guy chose to approach me was in the middle of a performance by one of the greatest heavy metal bands of all time. They broke up, what, a decade ago? Barring a miracle, they will probably never tour again. I can’t imagine anyone having anything to say right then that I’d want to hear more than the band onstage. I’d probably have brushed off my long lost twin brother if he’d found me on the floor of the Fillmore last night.

The promised follow-up to yesterday’s post.

5. Pennywise the Clown - It (Stephen King)

It was my first venture out of the Children/Young Adult section of the bookstore. I was ten years old. I think I bought it because I was enamored with the cover (the old one, pictured above); I can’t think of any other reason.  I haven’t reread it since then, but that first scene of George Denbrough’s fatal encounter with Pennywise is still vivid for me two decades later. That book pretty much changed me as a reader. Everything I’d read up to that point (a lot of Roald Dahl and Lloyd Alexander) suddenly seemed so safe, and, as a result, silly.

Scary clowns were well-worn territory in 1986, and, with Heath Ledger’s Joker, it looks like they’re still going strong. For me, Pennywise will always be the clown touchstone (not to be confused with Touchstone the clown).

Conversely, for an example of a monster that DOESN’T work, see the giant, immobile rubber spider at the end of the miniseries adaptation.

4. Sandworms - Dune (Frank Herbert)

I didn’t even like this book, but the sandworms still impressed me. They themselves might not be that interesting, but the whole culture built around them is so deep and textured. I guess that’s another aspect of what makes some monsters work: characters’ reactions.

3. The Terror - The Terror (Dan Simmons)

(that’s not him)

I feel weird putting something so recent on this list, but I’m very excited about this book and what it effect it’s going to have on horror literature. It would be dishonest of me to exclude it. There are so many fears and anxieties getting twisted in Simmons’s Arctic survival epic: man v. nature, rich v. poor, rationality v. the supernatural, intellect v. instinct. Simultaneously lurking outside and sitting pretty in the center of it all is the polar bear demon that comes to embody just about everything that has ever been frightening to everyone ever. It’s a heavy load to expect a scary bear to carry, but he does. I can’t recommend this book enough.

2. Smaug - The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)

There are thousands of dragons in the whole of fantasy literature, perhaps more, but there’s only one that matters. Vain and petulant, Smaug is the king of dragons because of his human qualities more than his monstrous ones. You can have any opinion you want about Guillermo del Toro’s two forthcoming LOTR prequels (mine: excited about the first, dubious about the second), but nobody does monsters like that guy, and I don’t doubt for a second that he’s going to give us something outstanding with Smaug.

1. Azathoth - The Whisperer in the Darkness, Dreams in the Witch House, other stuff (H.P. Lovecraft)

Just about any of HPL’s eldrich sanity-blasters could go on this list. The man is simply unparalleled when it comes to creature creation. I’m going with Azathoth instead of Nyarlathotep or even the Big C because of three words: Blind Idiot God. I love that. The idea that the most powerful, molevolent force in the Universe is also a simp is just chilling. Doubly so now that we’ve endured the past eight years of politics in the US.