Last night I was having a conversation with Cynthia (or pinkhairedcyn) and we wound up on the topic of vegetables.  I told her that I grew up in a fairly archetypal Irish household, meaning that steak and potatoes were a constant at the dinner table.  That lead to me saying that potatoes are most likely my favourite vegetable. 

After a second of shock and bemusement, Cyn said "But, Michael, potatoes aren't vegetables.  They're a starch."

Most people, it seems, come away from a conversation with me having the impression that I'm a fairly smart guy.  I like to think that I'm somewhat well-read, witty (but not to the point of being "smarter than you!"), and able to convincingly argue my opinion on any given subject.  Then stuff like that comes along, something that most people learned in the third grade, and I'm left coming off as quite dumb. 

I moved around more than a little bit as a child.  At last count I've had fifteen different places that I was supposed to call home at one point or another in my life.  I lived in ten of those places between the time I was born and when I was 10.  That's one new home every year, on average.  Considering that I lived in two of those places for more than one year each, that means that there's at least two places that I lived at for less than a year. 

It was never a problem for me, the moving.  I grew to quite like it.  New town, new friends, new start.  It always gave me things to discover as a child. 

There were certain things that slipped through the cracks, though.  My early, formative education was terrible.  Skipping from school to school, curriculum to curriculum every six months or so lead to me missing out on a good number of things that you're supposed to learn as a child.  Never learned the four food groups, didn't get the fifty capitols until I was in the eighth grade, missed all of those books that you read as a child (Treasure Island, the Red Badge of Courage, Last of the Mohicans, what have you) that informed your current reading choices and habits.  Hell, that's why I love comics so much; they were the only thing that I could reliably get my hands on as a child. 

I long ago stopped caring if I came off as stupid for lacking knowledge of some of these things.  I've become accustomed to people having strange reactions to the skills and bits of information that I do and don't have.  I must have had fifty people tell me that they would teach me how to ride a bike. 

It's actually become kind of fun to discover these things that I missed out on.  It seems to feed into that part of me that tries to hold onto the childhood that I never really remember having.  When Cyn told me that potatoes weren't considered vegetables, my first reply was "Really?!  Well, does corn count?  'Cause I really like corn." 

I have this problem with filters.  Or so I have percieved.  I really don't have one.  I say what's on my mind for the most part.  While that does include oppinions, I find that it normally gets me into trouble when I'm describing images that I grow in my brain.  Many have noticed that I'm a visually-minded person (haha, Star), which would make sense given my background as an artist.  In truth, I have a better tactile memory than anything else, but that's not the point here.  Stack the lack of filter and visually-tuned brain on top of a  pretty high tolerance for things most people would find disgusting and it's a recipe for trouble.  Mostly trouble for other people. 

Case in point, the Shadow of Yesterday Zombies game in that I'm playing in on Sundays with crowyhead, harrytheheir and some people that don't have LJ accounts.  (By the way, I shall forever refer to this game as Shadow of Zombie.  This is because that title is undeniably awesome.)  The game is modernish, a post-undead-apocolypse thing like the Stand or Dawn of the Dead.  I'm playing a character named Carmen "Southpaw" Navarro.  Navarro is a woman in her late twenties that was born just after the zombie apocolypse.  Having been raised in such a terrible time, she grew to reflect it.  She became a "ranger", a person that goes outside of her community and patrols its borders for undead incurrsion, gathers supplies, etc.  While out on the range, Navarro and her patrol were attacked by some undead.  The rest of the patrol were killed but Navarro was able to get away, though she had been bitten on her left arm during the battle.  She was able to wrap her belt around the top of her arm and cut off the circulation which has led to poor Carmen having a terrible, twisted, monstrously powerful left arm. 

Navarro, like so many characters that I play when I'm on the other side of the GM screen, started as an image in my head.  She began her life as a picture of a woman with a twisted, leathery, overly-muscled left arm stuck on the body of an athletic hispanic woman.  Kinda like this...



Things got worse from there.  I started imagining what the zombie arm meant for my character, what it could do.  Super-strong made sense, but wouldn't it be cool if it had a little bit of a mind of its own?  And what if I couldn't feel anything through that arm at all?  No sensation.  The thoughts chrystalized a little more when I realized that the arm was a bit violent and for Carmen to sleep she needed to literally nail her hand down in order to keep it from trying to attack her while she rested. 

Not much was discussed of the state of the zombie and undead world outside of our sheltered community of Sulphur, OK.  During gameplay Dan, the GM, revealed more and more that the undead weren't just slavering roving hordes.  They had community, they had memory, they had society.  This made the bite that my character recieved a much different ballgame.  I had orriginally envisioned the zombie bite to be the equivalent of a bite from a rabies-bitten dog.  With this new information, and the knowledge that my character would have known about the presence of zombie culture, it seemed obivous to me that things needed to get much deeper. 

On our first excursion outside of town my character runs into a character named Tottenkoph, a lich from the undead community and a bit of a diplomat.  (I think I spelled that right.)  Dan tells me that Tottenkoph was there when I was attacked and asks me to fill in the blanks.  I immediately decide that my character hates and distrusts this guy.  He was there when I was attacked and he did nothing to help me, so of course I hate and distrust him.  The problem was, of course, that he had already gained the trust of two other members of the group, which ostracized me in turn. 

Dan and I talked about Carmen and discussed what I thought happened.  I had a hard time trying to discribe to Dan the violation that had been done to Carmen and how it would hurt her so much on a psychological level.  His arguement, which extended through the character of Tottenkoph, was that the undead don't just attack for no reason, so I must have been doing something to get them riled up.  And since I've been bitten I am undead too.  I should just embrace it.  I hated the arguement but couldn't really frame a rebuttal. 

It was after a session of the game that I realized how to describe it.  I told Dan that Carmen was a rape victim.  I hated to say it, and I hated to make it a character point, but it was the only correlary that made sense in my brain.  Something had been done to her, against her will, and it was beyond intimately physical and it left her both physically and emotionally scarred. 

It was during the next session that things got worse.  Dan and I had talked about Carmen actually being undead, unlike the "not quite undead" that I'd been thinking about when I first envisioned Carmen.  I liked it, but I needed to make it terrible for her.  Part of my character's point was to show how truly awful, how horrifying the undead were.  And I was willing to go the distance. 


With these images in my head I knew that Carmen was not going to be going good places.  She was changing into the thing that had attacked her, that had killed her friends, and she had no control over it.  She was angry.  She was vengeful. 

During the next session I shot Tottenkoph in the face with a shotgun the first chance I had.  He was a lich, I knew he was coming back, but he needed to be shot becaue of what he did. 

The players were floored.  They didn't know why I did what I had done.  After a couple of scenes they were able to question me in character.  And once again I felt like I couldn't get the other people around me ti understand what I had thought Carmen had gone through.  One of the other player's characters had been going around in the undead community and was taking a liking to it.  The others found them to be inoffensive mostly.  I felt like my character had been neutered.  So I said that only thing that I could that I thought would bring them around to the horror of my character's life.

"They raped me."

This time I meant it literally.  My character became a rape victim.  I hate it.  I really do.  I don't like that she's become another one of those female victim characters.  I wanted her to have more dimension than that, to be deeper.  I didn't want to be the male writer that uses rape, the most horrific fucking thing that can be done to a person, as an excuse.  But so much of gaming is about the exact opposite of subtlety and I saw it as the only way to communicate what I had wanted to, to make the other players at the table to feel it like I did. 

Okay, I'll admit it.  I made Carmen to feel powerless and alone at the outset of character creation because that's the way that I feel too.  After Star, well... I couldn't really wear a character that wasn't feeling the same fucked-up, painful feelings that I was.  I wouldn't be able to relate.  And over time Carmen's become more self-loathing and I've made her more fucked up.  She's become more violent and angry and cut-off and I can relate to it. 

I'm trying to think of a way to make her okay but I really can't.  In a scene from last session I came across a character that was on Navarro's trail for some vengance against her.  We tussled and I cut his achilles' tendon and put him down.  I stood over him with my knife in my hand and I asked him what he wanted me to do.

"I don't care," he says and spits. 

I dropped the knife on the ground by his hands and turned to walk away.  I said over my shoulder "Use it on yourself.  Use it on me.  Either way, use it in time."

In that moment, that one bried excahange, Carmen became the  weathered, beaten down soldier; the broken, weary gunslinger from a western just waiting for that one guy to come along and kill her because she can't think of any other way out. 

I don't know what to do next as a player.  I like Navarro and I like the game.  I want to keep playing, but I feel like I've bullied myself in to a corner and I don't know how to get out.  I didn't feel like I could talk to the rest of the group before as I've been felling distant and I found it hard to communicate.  Maybe I don't have a choice anymore. 

Oh, Ron Edwards, rescue me!

Today started with me being down.  Deep down.  Woke up, couldn't get out of the depths of it.  I dream about Star.  Alot.  And sometimes when I wake up I just want to see her and I can't.  There was a time when I woke up to her laying there next to me, snoring quietly, and now I can't.  I used to wake up before her and I'd lay in bed and curl up next to her and put my hand on her hip or reach around and press my palm flat against her chest right over he heart.  I would lay there and just feel her breath and now I can't. 

Waking up isn't easy anymore. 

Got up and threw on the 360, downloaded a couple of episodes of Veronica Mars, and lit up a cigarette.  Burned through four episodes before it was time to leave the apartment and meet up with people.  The strangest things will make me cry now, like a moment in an episode of Veronica Mars, a scene in the Hustler, or a part in Smokin' Aces. 

I left the house after watching Veronica Mars and went to Dan and Neil's for some sunday gaming with harrytheheir and crowyhead.  I had fun.  Some good laugh-out-loud moments.  After the game we just walked around town, Dan and Kirsten and I.  Walked down to South st., over to Chestnut, stopped in some stores.  Snow was drifting down in fat, lazy clumps that tangled in my hair and my beard.  I love the snow, the way it blankets things and makes the world look different.  The way it makes the outside look like I feel on the inside.  We joked more and talked more and I was having fun. 

We came back to my place, the group of us, and watched some movies.  The Color of Money and Rufifi if you must know.  Played some video games, cracked jokes.  Fun.

And now it's three in the morning and I'm getting ready to go to bed and just twenty minutes ago I was wracked with sobs while I was watching Out of SIght.  Deep, body-shaking wracks of them moving through my body like tremors.  I don't cry much anymore, not the regular kind with tears.  Now these things just punch their way out of me.  One minute I'm fine, the next I'm doubled over, my chin turned up and my breath quavering. 

And it's always for the same reason.  I miss Star.  I just miss her.  I love her and I miss her. 

My friend Lucas was out here from Hawai'i for the last week.  He was going to be moving out here but as soon as he touched down he got a call from his mom saying that his dad had been hospitalized.  He was heading back. 

We got to talking for a little while, Luke and I.  A couple of friends were visiting and we were all talkign and he was saying how scared he was over his father and how fucked up he felt over a lot of personal stuff in his life.  He said that I was strong, he thought, for me to have been through Star's death and be able to function.  I don't think that I'm strong.  I don't know what I am, but I don't feel strong.  I think maybe I'm just good at putting up a strong face for others.

At my last party a good number of my guests said the same thing when to me as they were leaving.  "Take care of yourself."  Is it really that obvious that I'm not doing that?

I've become a smoker. 

I'll admit to it.  I am now a smoker.  I smoke cigarettes on a regular basis.  I don't smoke them in social situations.  I smoke them when and how I can.  I breath in the smoke, let it roil in my lungs, then let out a soft breath of cool grey. 

It started off innocently enough.  There were many people over for a party and there were smokers amongst them.  A cigarette looked so right, so appealing at that exact moment.  I'd smoked before, very occasionally.  So I asked for one and it was supplied to me. 

Oh, the slippery slope. 

I found that the regulated breathing, the slow inhale/exhale of the process of smoking was calming.  I would get adgitated, angry, irate, nervous, sad, and taking a moment and forcing myself to breath slowly with the help of that cigarette took the edge off of me. 

I bought a pack and it lasted me a week.  The next pack went over a couple of days.  The one after that was gone in forty-eight hours. 

At first I said it was because I just needed to calm down every once in a while.  The smoking reminded me of my mother, a habitual smoker for as long as i can remember.  The smoke of a cigarette always seemed inviting, relaxing to me.  Now it's a habit. 

I had a dream friday night, after the birthday bash that I threw for myself.  I guess i should be calling it a nightmare, as it most definitely fell into that category.  Strange, terrible, scary-as-fuck. 

In the dream I was in a commune that manufactured drugs.  Heroin, cocaine, hard-liner shit.  The commune looked a bit like a college dorm, it even existed in the middle of a city, and was populated with people that looked like they belonged in same college dorm.  Young, friendly, bright-faced twenty-somethings, wearing fashionable CW-ready clothing while they boil down the cough syrup and mix in the amphetamine in the bath tub, causing that terrbile burning tire smell. 

I was there, working the commune.  People around me smiled, and I smiled back.  We were co-workers, all living here together and working together.  Except I wasn't working the commune; I was infiltrating it.  And I was busted.

Somewhere, somehow, I found out that the commune learned of my status as a cop.  I stopped working and I walked away from my station, my steps getting faster and faster as I went down cramped hallways and through dorm rooms decorated in bunk beds and swimsuit calendars.  I knew they were on to me.  I could feel it. 

I climbed out a window and dropped to the ground below.  I looked across the yard and into the building opposite, another commune.  I could see people inside talking, drinking, fucking, all through the windows of their building.  A woman in the middle of having sex turned toward her window and locked eyes with me.  I recognized her then as some ex-girlfriend.  Not an actual one, just a dream ex-girlfriend.  She pointed and shouted out my position, after which more and more of the neighbors saw me and did the same thing. 

I scrambled, looking for a place to hide or a quick way to get away.  There was none.  I was made and spotted.  Something hit me on the head and the camera went blurry, then faded to black. 

My hands were bound to the chair I was sitting in when I finally came around.  I was bound and could barely make sense of things.  My mind was groggy from getting hit.  It might have been a concussion.  There was someone standing in front of me.  He was slowly pacing and he had a plate in his hand.  He looked like an Abercrombie and Fitch model. 

He saw that I was coming around and asked how I was feeling.  I didn't answer.  I knew he had been torturing me, it just hadn't hit me yet how.  I didn't want to start talking now and lubricate my lips in to giving up information later.  I would remain stoic.

He asked again if I was okay.  He asked if I wanted to eat anymore.  I noted that I wasn't hungry.  Hell, I was pretty stuffed.  He waved the plate around and I smelled the smokey aroma of fresh bacon. 

"We were worried about you," he said.   "We didn't know what to do with you.  We thought that you might be hungry though, so we cooked you up something."

He looked down at my leg and I could feel it then.  He lifted up a sliver of my skin from his plate, golden brown and glistening with grease.

"And we've been feeding this to you for a while now."

I woke up then.  Started awake like you see people do in movies.  Eyes snapped open, body slimy in sweat.  It was four a.m. and I couldn't sleep because I know if I did I'd just go right back in to the same damn dream, the same situation.  I stayed up for a little while, my mind replaying scenes from the dream.  I called Cyn then, because I needed to talk to someone and she's a good someone to talk to.  I still didn't get to sleep until five a.m.

The dream isn't with me anymore.  It's not like those occasional dreams that reccur every time you go to sleep.  But those images are still in my head during my waking hours. 

Okay, I feel like an asshole, posting about my own personal shit when so many people are all fucked up and sad and distraught over the same thing as me.  Debbie and Robbin and the Fosters and Amy and Dan and Jill and Cyn and everyone has their own shit to deal with, and here I go, spouting off with my own. 

 But, the writing helps, and the putting it in a public place helps me confront it.  So, what follows next is whiney and self-important.  It also has to do with me coping with the death of Star.  Much like most of my other posts. 

The process of getting to sleep has gotten easier.  I still have to exhaust myself a little, but it doens't mean that i have to force myself to stay awake until I nearly pass out.  Instead, when I feel like I'm ready for bed I just lay down, read a book for about a half an hour and finally just drift off. 

Waking up has gotten worse.  I'll have these half-asleep dreams about Star, just her laying in bed next to me, doing her cute little happy dance.  Then i'll come around completely and... well, I won't feel very good.  I even woke up with heart burn today, which is totally weird.

My cat, Nola, can tell that something's wrong with me.  She sleeps in my bed wth me, taking up residence on my legs.  She sits with me at my computer desk while I'm typing these posts and such.  She's rather perceptive, my little cat. 

I tihnk I'm going to try eating something.  More later.

My father was telling me yesterday about trying to keep busy.  That assigning a task to yourself and then attempting to accomplish it gives your subconcious the space it needs to process the big emotions, like this terrible aching baleful fucking grief inside my heart. 

Sarah and I were talking the other night over at the Sarcas-family home.  She was saying how, in times of stress she likes to go out and shop.  Buying silly little knicknacks can take her mind off of things, or at least help her through the bad shit.

I'm going to try that out for a little while.  I'm going to head down to a book store and buy some books, or maybe a board game or something.  Because i don't know what to do with myself today. 

Tonight my roommate and I buy a new television.  Big and widescreen and showy, plenty big enough for people to come over and watch movies or play video games if they felt so inclined. 

hint.  hint.