Where are the Snowdays of yesteryear

The snow melted in Dallas today, the snow that fell all day Friday.  After two days on the ground, it was slushy and grey.  It had lost its luster.

There is something pathetic about snow that has stuck around for too long.  It melts and re-freezes, changes texture and color, becomes something entirely different.  Little brown tips of dead grass begin to poke through like hairs on an unshaven crotch.  It gets even worse on that last day, when the last bit of white gives way to mud, to dirty puddles.  There are a few hidden spots of ice on the road still, and a few dashes of white in shady, sheltered places, that only serve to magnify the changes all around them.

It may seem strange, but some of my happiest memories as a child were not birthdays or holidays, but snow days.  I remember cold, breathless nights as snow began to fall, watching local news to see if tomorrow would be one of the two or three days a mild amount of winter weather would grind North Texas to a halt.  That pure expectation gave way to pure joy when I woke up in the morning to a blanket of snow.  Going back to bed, to sleep a few more hours before building a snowman, that is as happy as I can recall being.

Even in college, I loved snow days.  The fact that I probably was going to skip class anyway did little to temper my excitement at class being cancelled.  It was that same excitement, only with sex, alcohol, and hundreds of people looking for snowball fights.

But things change.  I hear people say that adults feel less than children, usually with a metaphor about thickness of skin.  I have never believed that.  Maybe they feel in a different way, but not less.  But I do know that when I woke up Friday morning to fat flakes of snow falling, I wasn’t excited.  I felt nothing.  I lost the ability to taste the strongest flavor of joy I have ever known.  Maybe something will come along to replace it.  I’m sure something will.  But today, I’m just feeling cold.

Video Games

I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a new video game console for Christmas this year.  I wanted one, I really did.  But I just couldn’t.

I was embarrassed about it, and embarrassment is not something I often feel.  Suddenly, this year, there was something about being a college graduate, with a job and a car payment and all that, which made me feel like video games were no longer something I could defensibly spend much time on.  I’ve spoken out so often against my generation’s extended adolescence, how can I justify laying out hundreds of hours and dollars on the Mario brothers?

At the moment, I think, video games are in a deeply awkward transitional period.  Like Pinocchio, the form is a toy aspiring to become real.  Because to a large degree, video games are toys.  That is how they started.  Pong, for example, is a toy just like a table tennis set.  And to this day, many games still are toys: Super Smash Bros, Left 4 Dead, or Street Fighter don’t pretend to be something they aren’t.  But now that technology has progressed, game designers have the capacity to tell meaningful stories.

It is easy to think of video games which are works of art.  Some are solid, middlebrow experiences, as serious as any Oscar-nominated film or bestselling novel. The strong voice acting and gradually unravelling backstory of Shadow of Mordor springs to mind, or the long, self-important narrative arcs of the Metal Gear series.  Other games are high art pure and simple, saying something true and beautiful in an unexpected way, or playing with the limitations and expectations of the form as masterfully as Jean-Luc Godard or Richard Brautigan.  The haunting, stark aesthetics and ever-deepening sense of desperation of the Dark Souls games, or the mix of tenderness and absurdity in When the Bomb Goes Off are easy examples.  (When you are done reading this article, click that link and play When the Bomb Goes Off.  The whole game only takes a few minutes, and it’s deeply moving.)

But video games, as a form of art or entertainment, still aren’t at the level of books, films, or even TV shows.  They have yet to reach a large enough or respected enough audience to gain real cultural cache.  When a game like Grand Theft Auto faces censorship, gamers all unite to say that video games are a form of artistic expression, and deserving of first amendment protection.  Yet when a nascent generation of critics arises to begin interpreting that art, the gaming community collectively loses its mind.  Anita Sarkeesian, who dared publish some astute and widely-shared feminist critiques of video games, had to flee her home after receiving death threats from outraged gamers.  Imagine that happening to a professor offering a critique of Tolstoy.

You only have to glance through the bullshit carnival that is (or was?) Gamergate to understand why so many people still consider video games mere toys.  It’s because many people who play them act like children.

But maybe I will get a new game console.  In fact, I think I’ve talked myself into it.  Because here is an opportunity unlike anything critics have seen for over a century: the birth of a new storytelling medium.  Surely audiences watching The Great Train Robbery in 1902 must have understood this, a new art form for telling stories that could not otherwise have been told.  That doesn’t happen every day.

I’d like to watch this happen.  So that, in 40 years, when interactive, game-based storytelling is established and respected as an artistic endeavor, I can look back on years of careful criticism and say “I watched video games grow up.”  And maybe I will grow up with it.

Sea of Grass

I'm not sure we will ever get over the ocean.

It's the limit, I believe, of our imagination as human beings.  Sure, we understand that our planet is bigger than the ocean, or that the sun is bigger than our planet, or that the vastness of the cosmos contains orders of magnitude beyond measure.  But we can't ever grasp those sizes the way we can grasp the ocean.

I've been thinking about the ocean here, in the prairie.  I'm ranchsitting for some friends right now, taking care of their herds of bison, longhorn, and llamas.  Zipping across their fields, with miles of grasses waving in the Texas breeze, there is no other metaphoric vocabulary with which to describe something so big and open.

It's almost beyond cliche to talk about the prairie as a sea of grass.  Covered wagons were called schooners, after all.  I always think of Gregory Peck's character in The Big Country, a retired Navy captain who came west because the land reminded him of sailing.

I've heard outer space described in these terms ("The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" was an episode of Sagan's Cosmos).  And God, too, I have often heard is an infinite ocean of light and love.

So, as I said, I don't think we'll get over it.  It's oceans all the way down for us.  Anything bigger than an ocean is an ocean, too.  It's the biggest big our ape brains can handle.

This is a strong example of the disconnect between thought and language, though an aspect of that problem we don't often consider.  Lots of us writerly types get all flustered over the fact that we have thoughts which have no appropriate words, but with anything bigger than the sea, the opposite is true.

We have a word for universe, but we can only think ocean.

The Heart Reader

I met a guy the other day, about my age, went to school with my girlfriend.  He said he had just quit his job not too long ago working for a company that read cardiographs.

People all across the nation go through tests for abnormalities of the heart, and that raw data, all their hours and hours of heartbeats, get sent to this nondescript office building here in Texas.  There, people like this guy spend all day looking at computer screens, reading what information there is to be found in those peaks and valleys.

And this guy, he said he hated being a cardiograph technician.  He said he couldn't stand going to the boring, stuffy office building, sitting in a depressing little cubicle under the harsh florescent lights, staring at a screen for eight hours.  He said that kind of work is not for him.

Now, he works at an organic grocery store in Dallas, making smoothies and sacking kale for yuppies.  He says he is happier.

But if we consider the heart to be the source of all things, the seat of our truest self, I think there is a strange poetry to his former job.  He read, and people in that building continue to read, heartbeats.  As if they were laying their heads on the chest of a stranger a thousand miles away.  Surely the heart is too intimate and powerfully personal to be turned into pure data, just lines on a screen.

But no, it did not hold him.  The divide of the depersonifying computer screen was a gulf too great to be crossed.  He never came to know the people whose hearts he read, except in a superficial medical sense.  He learned, for example, if they suffered from arrhythmia.

But reading a heartbeat does not mean you know someone's heart.  And if the pulsing, unfiltered language of our innermost self is no longer powerful enough to inspire wonder and understanding, how can the black lines of the words I type claim to be worth more?

Chartreuse: semiotics

My Christmas tree is chartreuse.  It says so on its white cardboard box.

I was eighteen years old when I got this tree, and I didn't know what color chartreuse was.  I thought it was some kind of magenta or maroon.  Now I know better, but only because of this tree.

Just like that, a word gains meaning.  I had seen chartreuse things before, surely, but I did not recognize them as such.

It is a miracle, the miracle of language, writ small by my Christmas tree.  The meaning exists without the word, but it is not quite understood.

Dead Reckoning

Blogging is a stupid word.  Vlogging is even worse, but I haven't ever done it.

Now, log is an okay word on its own.  It has a great physicality to it, it it comes out of times when people worked aboard ships.

You use a device called a log (which, a long time ago, actually was a log, like, a part of a tree) to measure how fast your ship is going.  You take those measurements regularly and keep them in a logbook.  It's important to keep track of your speed like this, because it lets you know how far you've traveled in an age before GPS.  For centuries, an accurate logbook was the only way to determine your position on the open ocean.

Over time, "logbook" became "log," and it began to include lots of other information as well.  Then "web logging" was invented, and it needed a special name instead of just "writing a diary for internet strangers to read."  So blogging entered the lexicon, even though it sounds more like something they would do to heretics during the Inquisition, or a step in the process of cheese production.

The thing is, though, a log used to be important.  In 1707, Admiral Cloudesley Shovell and around 2,000 other members of the British Navy drowned in the English Channel, because they didn't know where the hell they were.  Their logbook was off, and they couldn't figure out the position of their fleet.  They struck rocks near the Isles of Scilly.  Four ships sank.  Bodies washed up to shore for days.

This log doesn't carry the same weight.  My world is not without a landmark or two.  But nonetheless, maybe writing here can help me get my bearings.  Someday, although I'm not sure how, I would like to be able to navigate from this log.  To read my longitude in the line of words.

I'm not sure where I'm heading or how fast.  And I don't know how to change course.  But maybe if I can locate myself on the map I'm drawing here, I can at least be prepared when I get there.  I have this log, and I have the stars at night: people have crossed oceans with as much.

And you, internet strangers, if you are skilled in trigonometry, maybe you can find my position, too.  Trace it out on a map, and divine our distance by walking a compass across the table.  If you can chart my course, try to meet me somewhere in the open sea.

If you see me, throw me a line.