The Saga of the MattressMobile

I wrote this for an email to convince a house of 20-somethings to let me live with them, but I got carried away and it turned into blog post-fodder. Yes, this is totally true; I do this kind of ridiculous stuff.

June, 2009. I stayed in San Diego after school finished because I wanted to find a job there, and while most of my friends had gone back up north, I was still closer to my San Diego friends than my hometown friends. I budgeted a week and a half to find a job and a room; by the end of that, still with no job, I called it quits and got ready to fly up north. Before that, I had to get everything to storage.

When everyone else moved out, we had a jeep and a van to haul mattresses. The jeep was gone, and I assumed I could borrow the van. Assumptions aren't a good idea, and the day before I was supposed to fly out, I had nothing to move with.

Cue my brilliant insight: the mattress frame had wheels.

A Musical Counter-Point, re:Nerd Rock

Last night, I was procrastinating going to bed – checking comics, flipping through blogs, checking comics, nuking a bowl of Rice-a-Roni, checking comics – and came across a link to this, by Something Awful user Daryl Hall. I was going to do my standard shrug, I think you’re wrong but it’s whatever, kinda thing — but I changed my mind; I wasn’t just going to accept this.

First off, because I believe in disclaimers: It might be that we’ve listened to entirely different bands and have different ideas of what constitutes nerd rock; I follow BrentalFloss religiously, but because it isn’t aimed to be music, I don’t count it in the genre. That being said, I’ve listened extensively to the only band that he name-drops (The Protomen), so I think we’re on roughly the same page.

Second, because I believe in theses: Nerdcore is not as one-dimensional or lazy as Mr. Hall portrays it.

Marvel's Civil War began when I was just out of high school. It didn't age well.

Thought-Provoking Comics Comments!

I’ve been out of the loop with the Marvel Universe since Civil War, and it’s been a while since I revisited that. I’ve read enough to hate Brand New Day, but my Bay Area libraries didn’t stock much more than that. Up here, though, I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign – the whole shebang, and it’s reminded me what I love and hate about Marvel.

Entry: Janc Limm.

Something a little different today. It owes a debt to Eclipse Phase; I went to the library today, but couldn't find any transhuman sci-fi. Instead, here's this, formatted as a Wikipedia-style article, a bit of an experiment.

Janc Limm

(Jack Lamark redirects here)

(The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.)

Janc Limm (born Jack Lamark January 23, 2258, third-generation sentient) was an actor on the vidcast Prospect. One of the first Uplifted octopi to become a celebrity, he was seen as a vanguard of a growing Uplifted subculture. He quit the show abruptly in 2269, becoming a radical spokesman for the creation of octopus societies separate from humanity.

Limm is currently awaiting trial for the 2271 murder of human Chris Johnson.

Almost six months after mourning.

This spring, my high-school drama teacher, a surrogate father for some of his students and a friend and inspiration to me, died of a heart attack. We’ll call him Tim, because if I called him Timothy Marie, you wouldn’t get the joke.

Last week, I was visited by Tim.

Disclaimer: I’m not a superstitious man; I don’t believe this was a visitation by anything but my subconscious. Nevertheless…

I’d been having trouble sleeping, despite trying to wake up by 8 each morning. This was around when I posted the Chinese Democracy post, which I finished at 6:30 a.m. after pulling myself out of bed at 3 a.m., never having actually slept. Other nights were much the same, with me hopping into bed early and hopping back out an hour later. This was also when I was reaching crunch time for finding a job — two weeks until the end of the month, probably two weeks before I could get paid, and judging by the lack of replies, Safeway was prominent in my future. This night, I think I’d been drifting between exhaustion, hyperactivity, and self-loathing in my bed for an hour.

For some reason, I thought of Tim, and I heard his voice in my head.

I’d spent enough time around Tim that I could imagine him saying about anything — most of my friends and I spent lunch in the drama room — so I assumed I was just putting words into his mouth. But I was curious, so I tried to turn off my brain.

His voice started to sound echoed, with only a moment’s delay; the source was distant and indistinct, and the echo was like a subtitle. The subtitles were perfectly clear, and my conscious brain — the part that was trying to find patterns or make sense of this — was only involved in the subtitles. The original was coming from somewhere else.

I don’t remember what Tim said, and it’s possible that I’m jumbling up even the pieces that stuck in my head. I remember the word “job”; I remember that he was stern; I remember feeling supported.

My best guess is that my conscious brain was drowsy and silent, letting my subconscious through, so there wasn’t any supernatural significance to this. I don’t know if this was the night before I woke up at 8 a.m. and got myself a job, so there’s dubious fiscal significance.

No matter what, for a little while, Tim was the voice of my conscience; I can’t decide whether I’ve been honored or if I was honoring him.

Would Seattlites even notice rain on a wedding day?

I’m reading on the front porch during rush hour, with the I-5 groaning on the other side of the street. A guy, long-sleeved green sweatshirt and shaggy beard, starts to walk by with a dog. I nod hello and go back to the book.

Then he starts up the stairs. “You got any…” — I’m caught between shrugging that I’ve got no change and flinching away from the intrusion — “… nugs of ganja here, man?”

I suppress a laugh. Nah, nothing man, sorry. He pulls out his medical card; I pet the dog; he talks about the dispensary he’s planning. The dog decides to move on.

He starts down the steps, sees the book in my lap. “Study hard. Cheat if you have to – everyone else does.”

“Nah, I’m graduated, I’m just reading this for fun.”

He pauses. “Cheat anyways.”

You have my permission to cite this as an example, because this is a Mirriam-Webster-class example of dramatic irony: when a middle-aged stoner, living in an illegally-parked mobile home, who most definitely never saw the cover of your book, gives you permission to skim-read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Everything you wanted to know but I forgot to follow up on.

Roundup time!

There Was A Time

I’ve got songs, albums that’ll always be tied to a particular time in my head. The Bravery’s “Believe” is summer depression ’07; “Bohemian Rhapsody” on infinite loop is freshman year of high school; “Rock You Like a Hurricane” is Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri; “Mustapha” will always make me wince with the memory of saying I liked Night at the Opera more than the just-gifted Jazz.

Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy is one of the few free radicals, tying together four years of college and the rise and fall of Camelot — however overdramatic that might be, it’s true.

So vanguard-ish that he preceded the party.

Sometimes, sandbox games lead to... interesting word combinations.

EDITED to fit the page. Also, I realize that Microprose probably designed this joke into the game (Civilization 2), but one of the benefits of playing games from my childhood is that I actually get the references. If anyone out there used to read the Sonic comics between 3D Blast and Sonic Adventure, they're well worth a reread for the pop-culture references.

//I went into high school thinking that Brave New World was about post-humans going to a nuked city because of Ken Penders, that magnificent bastard.