The Best Car (2012)

     This is some real-life inspired fiction.  While there is much about this that resembles my life, it is far enough from the real truth that it would be an unrecognizable accounting for anyone who was present to the era for me.  But the car was real.

The Best Car

     I avoided getting my driver's license at sixteen.  There were several factors that contributed to that delay – I didn't want to take driver's ed at school, and quickly quit the Len Scaduto course in which my father enrolled me; I knew I wouldn't have regular access to a car, at least not until my mother replaced her rapidly aging '86 Ford Tempo with something reliable; I had no means of income for gas or insurance, and I was thoroughly uninterested in working to acquire money; I had friends who could and would drive me places – but none of them were the real reason I didn't get my license.  I avoided it because having one would have meant I could be pressed into service at any moment, wholly subject to my father's whims and his imagined state of health.  I bore witness to my older brother being awakened in the middle of the night – anytime from midnight to four a.m. – for a not so emergency trip to the hospital because our father had a headache and wanted drugs to make it go away.  By the time I was old enough to understand his need for injectable medication to combat his maladies I was also aware that he was being administered doses that would kill a regular, healthy person.  Moreover, he needed such treatment at irregular times; whenever was worst for everyone else would perfectly fit his schedule.  My father lived a life that was, without question, wholly about himself.
     Living in fear of having a strange dictate – to drive my father to the hospital or his doctor's home, which meant that he would be getting a dose so large that it couldn't be recorded without alarming hospital staff – was something that I knew was abnormal.  Every part of it, really.  I have to assume that most children, even in the heady years of adolescence with a need to establish independence from their supervisory adults, would not be alarmed by the call to be of service.  Children are supposed to love their parents, sons to love their fathers, and so there should not have been a reason for my very real need to not be made to serve as courier to wherever the drugs were stored.  Still, there it was.  I knew that if I could avoid the license I couldn't be forced to take him, and I should then have been able to get my license without any need of driver's ed once I turned eighteen.  I drove occasionally without a license, in the parking lot of the apartment complex and once to a job interview – a job in which I lost all interest once it was clear they wanted me to work forty hours a week while I was still in school – so I wasn't wholly unfamiliar with the operation of a motor vehicle.
     My father only tried to get me to drive him to the hospital once after my brother moved on to college.  He woke me up at one a.m. and told me I needed to get dressed and take him for some relief.  I was told that he had waited hours before deciding it was so bad that he couldn't possibly sleep, apparently unaware of the fact that if we had left at 10 p.m. we could have been back to the apartment by 2 a.m., and that would have allowed for some sleep.  Waiting until one was essentially a type of sleep deprivation, so long as one allows that the thirty minutes of sleep I may have gotten to that point would effectively be worthless.  To this day I think of it as a kind of terrorism, and I had no desire to bend to the will of a terrorist.  I told him that he had plenty of options other than me.  He could call a cab – roundtrip fare would have cost less than twenty dollars.  He had a friend in the building next door that he could have called and she probably would have taken him.  If he felt so bad that he had no choice but to go to the hospital, he could call for an ambulance – we had learned that the insurance United provided would cover the cost of the ambulance if he spent at least a night in the hospital and be a little more than one hundred twenty five dollars out of pocket if he didn't – and spend the night there. 
     Whatever it took to allow me to try to get some sleep, something that never came easy back then, that is what I suggested.  He pleaded his case for about fifteen minutes upon which time he must have realized I was not going to drive him; he had no winning counterargument to "I am not driving without a license" and so he simply went back to bed.  When I saw him the following afternoon, he was fine.  More than that, he never got so sick that he needed to be taken to the hospital or his doctor from his headaches.  His condition was, as I suspected without any cause, was wholly dependent upon his ability to have others service it.  I did not want to be tethered to it, made to serve without any attention directed back at me, and thus I decided to similarly rely on others when it came to needing to be driven places.  To be fair, if I couldn't get a ride I would usually walk or ride my bike.  I appreciated the efforts others made for me, but I was sure as hell not going to be helpless without them.  And I wasn't going to make it all about me.  Not always.
     That was a lesson learned while without a license.  In an effort to retrieve a hastily mailed letter, I got a friend to drive me to its intended destination where I could steal it from the mailbox.  When it wasn't there, I told him we would have to try again the next day.  He smiled and said, "Not going to happen.  You had your chance to get it.  If it that important, find another way to get there before anyone gets the mail."  Well, there was no way I could walk or bike there in time unless I ditched school to do it.  I missed a lot of days of high school, but never so I could commit a crime.  The letter got delivered, and the consequences of it fell much more lightly than I would have thought.  Still would have liked to have had the chance to get it back before it was read, but that is a bell that cannot be unwrung.
     The only reason I ended up with a driver's license before I turned eighteen was that my father got demoted at work and couldn't afford to keep us living where we were.  In actuality, that pay cut served as his chance to hand me off to my mother while – unbeknownst to anyone – he started squirreling money away for a Harley.  He went to live out in Winfield and I was shipped up to Oak Park.  Rather than transfer to the local high school – mine was so familiar with my brand of bullshit that I got away with most of the things that would cause them to expel other students – it was decided that I should finish where I started.  The first week my mother drove me to and from school every day, three hours sucked right out of her day; she tired of that by Tuesday.  The second week I was allowed to sleep at a friend's house but not really fed, and that was about as bad as anything I had experienced to that point.  The next week school was on break, but it was also when the road work for my driver's ed started. 
     Knowing that I was to be moved twenty five miles north, there had been a real push to get a license in my hands.  I cruised through the classroom sessions, and the school decided to cut how much practical experience I needed because I would often be inaccessible.  I had four days of driving over two weeks time before the school said i was ready to get my license.  What did they care?  The check had cleared months ago.  I didn't feel especially confident, but I knew that I could not rely on a mix of commutes from my mother, accommodating friends, and simply not going to school to make it to graduation.
     My father cleared a day so he could be there when I took my test.  He had some work he had to do on the car, an '84 Subaru GL Wagon – the last of the non-boxy wagons – that had been handed down from my brother.  The red wagon had been replaced with a blue one, this time a stick, which made it somehow more masculine in my brother's eyes.  They were both little station wagons, so I can't imagine either dripped with masculinity.  And he traded the near burgundy red one for powder blue.  I didn't care, because what I needed was a car that would handle the sixty to seventy miles a day that I would put on it.  My father gave it a tune up, replaced the brakes, and properly inflated the tires before I arrived.  The car was at our old apartment where my father continued to rent garage space.  He wasn't going to abandon his collection of tools, but he also couldn't bring himself to package them up and not be accessible.  His tools were different from his son.
     He drove us over to the facility in his Jeep Wagoneer.  I'll never understand why he didn't want me to take the test in the car I would actually be driving, but in retrospect I imagine it was a sense of ownership that he needed to impress on me.  He would be fully in charge because it was his vehicle.  Anyway, there was almost no wait at the testing facility.  I got one question wrong on the written – I don't know which and it still bothers me that I don't know – and sat patiently waiting for a chance to go out on the road.  I was assigned a man who looked like he could have been my guidance counselor's ugly, angry older brother, which meant that he was thoroughly unpleasant all the way around.  He started off by barking "Horn singal!" at me, which apparently meant that he wanted me to sound the car horn to prove that it worked.  I lost points there, in parallel parking, and the three point turn, but was still set to pass.  Unfortunately, when I pulled into a space to park I was about a foot into the neighboring space.  So that was a fail.
     What to do?  I had a car sitting and waiting for me.  I needed a license so I could go to school and graduate and do something with my life.  Jesus, without the license I might have to actually finish at a different school and meet new people.  The horror of it all.  Normally – or so we were told – I would have to wait a week before any possible retest.  Fuck that.  My father and I pled my case, my need for a license.  Never mind if I might actually be a danger to others on the road, I had places to go and a means to get there; I just needed a license in case I got pulled over.  A younger, less angry man came out and agreed to let me retest right then.  I passed with no problems and got the damn laminated piece of paper.
     My father took me back to the garage.  He had to run a quick errand, but he would meet me up at the school and make sure I made it to my mother's in one piece.  That was fine with me.  I was young and stupid and eager to prove that I could handle unsupervised driving even though I had almost no experience and absolutely none with the car with which I was entrusted.  I pulled out of the parking lot and was pulled over about a minute later.  The officer said I had failed to signal and I pointed out, very politely, that I didn't signal because it was a bend in the road and there was no other way to proceed on it; who the hell wouldn't know where the car was going?  He grumbled a little and told me to "be more careful". 
     About a quarter of a mile later he pulled me over again.  "I ran your plates.  You aren't from around here.  Your car is registered up in Oak Park."  To him that meant I lived near black people and therefore crime.  I must be some kind of criminal.  I pointed out to him that I had lived in his sad little retail-reliant village for four years, my father maintained his garage there and it was where I had to pick up the car.  Furthermore, I went to the high school about five blocks west and one block north.  I showed him my school ID.  I had every right to be there, but officer asshole wanted to prove something.  He grumbled again and then said he was going to write me a ticket for the illegal turn.  I laughed at him and said something along the lines of suing him for wrongful prosecution – or something similar I could have borrowed from Ghostbusters – and waited for my ticket.  About a minute later he came back and gave me license and told me to get back to where I came from.  At least I didn't get that ticket.
     My father showed up about thirty minutes after I got to the school.  We headed north, me following him because despite making the trip innumerable times I had never paid attention to which streets I needed to use.  Somewhere after I exited on 1st Avenue I lost him.  Shit!  I crept along, terrified both by the prospect of being lost and the other, more confident drivers flying by on my left.  I made a wrong turn on Madison and thought for a moment that I had crossed the border with Chicago – instead of it just being Forest Park – because of all the signs for liquor stores and bars.  I got myself righted and made it to my mother's.  My father showed up about twenty minutes later.  He decided to stop and get something to eat.  Not a lot of concern about it, either.
     From that point on, the car was mine.  I owned that car – actually, my brother owned it until it spent a winter in an O'Hare employee parking lot letting its underbelly get salted away – and made myself powerful among my friends by being able to drive places.  More than that, I had to drive places.  I took the opportunity to give pretty underclass girls a ride home, girls who never would have spoken to me otherwise, and learned the dangers of treating parking lights as headlights.  I got to spend almost every Sunday with a girl I was in love with – never mind that she was dating my close friend with whom I would help work stuffing Sunday Tribunes on Saturday night – because I had a car and he had destroyed his.  The car allowed me to feel as though I were a real person and not subject to the threats and whims of others.
     It was, without question, the best car I will ever have.  It isn't just about its primacy.  I kept a bag of clothes in the back so that I could spend the night wherever I wanted – there wasn't any insistence that I needed to be home.  With the seats folded down it was like a miniature covered pick-up; it certainly could carry a heavier load than my best friend's truck.  While I was aware that it could also double as a fantastic 'fuck wagon', I had nowhere near the confidence to test it out in such an endeavor.  My relationship with that car was about me, and I don't think I would have wanted to invite anyone else into something so intimate and risk how I felt about the beast. 
     And it was a beast, a might monster hidden in a partially rusted out and neglected body.  That wagon drove over a tree and a mailbox in one motion.  It didn't even damage the car.  Never mind that that tree was about six inches in circumference at its thickest or that the ground was so saturated with rain that the wheels sunk three inches into the ground, tearing up the lawn like it was only an ephemeral covering for the soil.  It took some hasty work – and a pair of baseball bats wedged under the rear wheels – to free the wagon from that muddy mess.  As I drove my friends away from the scene of the crime – conspicuously close to where I had tried to steal a letter only a few months prior – me grinning and they in near panic, I excoriated them for not keeping their eyes on the road.  They knew my attention would be elsewhere, yet not one of them said anything until we had already laid waste to the tree en route to the mailbox; some twenty five feet of non-road and none of them felt the need to say a damn thing. 
     We were muddy, and scared, and exhilarated.  My car – utter perfection in a compact, unassuming form – had inflicted damage and remained unharmed.  It was beyond perfect for the feelings of an empowered adolescent; it was freedom to do anything, yet it never occurred to us that there was much more to do than use the car to drive.  Driving was both a necessity and an expression of freedom, and we were free.  When relating this story to the acquaintance who lived near the scene of the crime, she could not keep herself from bursting into a near hysterical laughter.  Apparently, all her neighbor had said when seeing the damage the next morning was an exasperated "teenagers".
     That wagon drove a thousand miles one weekend trying to keep a relationship together, and not one in which I was directly involved.  It made a trip to a Boy Scout camp just to rescue a friend to see the premiere of Jurassic Park on the big screen – but the friend blew me off – on my birthday.  It made two trips out to Iowa City while I was scrambling to get courses and a place to live, and three more while I was there for a year (not attending those courses).  It was my means of being something other than trapped.  My father was disengaged from my life for the most part and there would be no threat to be his driver as he saw fit.  My mother was content enough to let wander around with it so long as I kept her marginally informed and made appearances at home. 
     That '84 Subaru GL Wagon in near-burgundy will forever be the best car I will ever have because it was the only one that gave me a sense of freedom, a sense that I was something other than trapped and small.  No other car – and most that followed were absolute pieces of shit – can be that for me again.  Like the car, life has worn me down.  Instead of freedom, a car has become a responsibility, a necessity to travel to places not accessible by the CTA or Metra.  The subsequent cars became the beasts that bore me to and from work, which immediately lessens the value one can assign to it.  It was the freedom to continue to go to the school where I had a small band of intensely close friends.  It became the means to access pretty girls in high school, and if I had any confidence back then it could have been so much more.  It became to embodiment of what I wanted to be able to see in myself.  Small but tough, reliable, versatile, and efficient; with over one hundred fifteen thousand miles on it, the wagon still got about twenty seven miles to the gallon.  Neglected for a winter, it was destroyed.
     I would like to say that the lesson is that one cannot neglect oneself in a similar manner.  That is how time gets away from people, they get busy living the workaday and miss the moments that we think should define us.  It isn't, though.  I simply miss being able to sit behind the wheel of a vehicle and know – or be astonished by – it survive a run-in with a sapling and a mailbox and be no worse for wear.  I want it to be the metaphor for how the seemingly small shit that comes down on me like rain is nothing that I can't overcome, with nary a scratch (or smelling fine if I want to be consistent in mixing my metaphors).  I know better, though.  The little things are the ones that will kill you.  They will eat you away, piece by piece when you aren't paying attention.  They will die like that wagon, a victim of the services that made the lot accessible to those moving their cars in and out on a daily basis. 
     That wagon is the best car ever because at the time I was driving it, I was still full of potential and promise.  Never mind that it was well past its prime, it was new to me.  It was the vehicle that could help carry me forward, but it died an inglorious death.  And whenever I notice that its promise is gone, I feel somehow despondent over how I have accorded myself.  I have recaptured none of what I felt with that car.  That freedom is somehow gone forever.  The road is dark.  The trees are tall and healthy.  The mailboxes are wrapped over in brick and mortar.  There will be no second coming of that old hope, but the smallest remnant of its flame resides within me because I had experienced it and done so well.
     Even if, in the full accounting, it was just a car passed down to me because my brother had moved on to something better.

Civ III Update – Dragonrealm

     This is mostly just pictures.  But I thought I would give an idea as to what the units that will be in the game will look like.  None are really based on Knaak's setting, but I think most will end up working.  Except for the horse they have for Darkhorse.  That just doesn't look right (but how could it?).
     I made NONE of these.  I downloaded all of them from Civfanatics.com.

The Skink Settler (Warhammer Fantasy...I think) serves as the Drake Settler.

The Skink Worker likewise stands in as the Minor Drake, which is Dragonrealm's replacement for the Worker.

Also stolen from Warhammer Frantasy, the Cold One Chariot stands in for the Drake Chariot, which replaces the Chariot.

Another Skink.  This one becomes the Drake Archer, replacing the Archer.  By this point you can tell that I am not particularly interested in original names.

Another Skink (they keep coming).  The Drake Spearman replaces the regular Spearman.  This is how it looks in Ancient Times.

After the Ancient Era, the Drake Spearman looks like this.

The above unit animated.  See him run, attack, attack again, fidget, roar in victory, and die.

This looks much better in game, but Dragonrealm can make a Dragonrider (if one can believe a dinosaur can stand-in for a dragon), and uses the Triceratops Rider unit.

Slightly more Dragonrider-y (though not an air unit in the game), the Dragonrider looks like this from the Medieval Era onward.

In the Ancient Era, the Drake Swordsman (actually a Sword Saurus) looks like this.

The Pike Saurus becomes the Drake Pikeman, which replaces Pikeman. 

 

The Red Duke replaces Medieval Infantry.

Maybe not as cool as the mace and chain wielding regular unit, but the Red Duke sells a little of the menace of a land dominated by magic-using dragons.

The Black Duke, if one ignores the gender inconsistency, makes a rather nasty Foot Knight for Dragonrealm.

The Rider from Zuu (a city-kingdom known for its excellent mounted warriors) replaces the regular Knight.  I used the Norman Knight for it.

A Skink on a dinosaur becomes the Dragon Knight.  There is a better unit to use, but it stands in for Cavalry.

A Skink with a musket (and a tiny skink) becomes the Drake Musketeer.

The Cold One Knight should have been the Dragon Knight, but it becomes the Drake Knight and replaces Cavalry.

The Blue Duke replaces the Marine.  Sure, charging up a beach against machinegun fire sure seems suicidal, but the Blue Dragon is the master of the Eastern Seas and his clan operates on both land and in the sea.

Sure, there is no Bone Dragon in the Dragonrealm, but the animation is just so cool.  The Bone Dragon is the Paratrooper for the Civ.

The Ghost Dragon serves as the animation for the Bone Dragon in the Modern Era.  It used to be used as something else, but then Tom2050 went and made more dragons available.

One of the newer dragons.  This Red Dragon is much better than the old  one (from the early 2000s).  It replaces the Tank.

This Black Dragon replaces the Main Battle Tank, the Cold War era Tank category that fills the void between the Tank and Modern Armor.  I wish he breathed poison gas, but I'm not going to argue with free.

Lord Ice, master of the Ice Dragon clan.  So, the Ice Dragon becomes the Modern Paratrooper.

The Gold Dragon will either be a King Unit (since the Dragonrealm is ruled by Emperor Gold) or their Special Forces unit.

The wholly unacceptable stand-in for Darkhorse.  But there isn't a lot of demand for the big, sleek, magical horse-like "demon" with blue eyes.  But it is a dark color and a horse, so it is the best I have.

Can't do the Dragonrealm without spellcasters.  This is the Mage, the weakest of the three stages of magic-users (equal to a Wizard).

This is used as The Lady of the Amber (Gwen Bedlam).  She becomes a class of spellcasters (the equivalent of the Archmage setting).

This Wheel of Time animation stands in for a Vraad, a race of all-powerful spellcasters.  Vraad are insanely powerful in the game; there is no range limitation on their bombardment and no other spellcasters match their might.  This is the best unit Dragonrealm receives, effectively making it their Unique Unit (UU).

Farscape: The Beginning of the End of the Beginning (2009)

     I used to go to Star Trek conventions.  Not a lot, and I never made it to the big one in Anaheim – this would have been around 1991 – that had the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), but I guess I felt some need to express my fandom for Trek.  I read a few of the books.  I read the novelization of "Encounter at Farpoint" (1987, the pilot for TNG) was staying home from school one day.  I read Star Trek: The Next Generation – Survivors (1991), which I want to say was #4 in the series, but largely because I wanted more Tasha Yar.  My family bought some hard cover Trek novels – I remember only Star Trek: The Next Generation – Dark Mirror (1994) – that I never bothered to read.  I read 14 of the first 15 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), I assume in another effort to prove my level of fandom.  There were some good DS9 novels, and Peter David introduced a notion in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Siege (1993, #2 in the series) that was a rewarding running gag.  But even as I attended the conventions, I was much more interested in the Robotech and Star Wars merchandise I could not possibly find anywhere else...because there was no eBay or the like.
     I bring this up because I, at some point, moved beyond needing to prove how much I liked Trek.  I don't own all of the movies and have picked up none of the TV series (though that has as much to do with the original pricing than just deciding that I didn't need them).  I gave up on following the books, though that had a lot to do with the knowledge that I would always be well behind the curve if I wanted to start from the beginning.  I came to terms with accepting that I didn't need to be into the entirety of something in order to appreciate it.  And once I was aware of what it meant to be a fanboy, I was sure I was on the right path.
     One of the reasons to stick with the main product is because it is the most accessible.  The more compelling reason is because, unlike novels or comic books, the TV episodes, mini-series, and feature films are much more collaborative projects and seldom are giant departures from what made you love the show in the first place.  I was – and continue to be – a huge fan of Farscape (1999-2003).  But I could so without the comic books/graphic novels that I have read.
     Farscape: The Beginning of the End of the Beginning (2009) takes up the story soon after the end of the mini-series that was supposed to be the end of the story.  I've gone over most of this just a few days ago.  But instead of growing the story, The Beginning of the End of the Beginning seems to be an attempt to force as many of the characters into an overly complicated story.  There is something compelling about seeing Rygel prove that he has some skills, and that he may have some respect for his shipmates, but that is not enough to salvage this product. 
     First of all, the artwork is substandard.  Neither John nor Aeryn look like the actors who played the roles, and that is a problem (one that did not continue in the second comic series/graphic novel).  The action is so poorly portrayed that it would be utterly confusing without the characters commenting on what was happening.  And the detail is lacking.
     Second, the notion that characters need to be forced in to the story is getting very frustrating.  In this volume, Scorpius ends up working for Dominar Bishan.  Why?  I'm not asking for the story that Rockne S. O'Bannon put together to justify this, but why even introduce the idea?  On the TV show, it made sense to have aliens show up repeatedly, but in a galaxy or universe full of trillions of sentient beings, O'Bannon feels a need to keep the interactions tied-up in established characters.  That makes sense only if he is selling a product to fans who want to revisit these characters.  He should be moving the story forward, but I have a feeling such a notion would not be greeted as eagerly by the fans.  And by fan, I mean fanboy. 
     The Farscape graphic novels do little to no justice to the TV show.  They seem to exist as a means to draw money away from people who have a need to prove that they loved the show enough to buy them.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with that – support the things you love – but it feels like O'Bannon is abusing the goodwill of those who felt that there was something left unsaid when the planned Season Five was turned into only four hours of mini-series.
     If you are going to read one Farscape graphic novel, I would not recommend this. If you are going to read them all, then the quality won't matter.  That is the ultimate lesson for the fanboy.  That, at some point, quality needs to matter; it needs to be bigger than any sense of personal ownership of a property.  And The Beginning of the End of the Beginning is lacking in quality.

Heart of Darkness (1899)

     For some reason, I cannot seem to warm up to the writing style of Joseph Conrad.  It isn't just that he is obviously in love with the relationship between man and ship (or boat, if the waterway is too small to accommodate a ship), though having not been raised in the Victorian Age of the British Empire – or a contemporary witness to it – the Sea and its ways holds little mythic power over me.  It seems to be more in relation to his needing to spend too much time to make too subtle an allusion to the point he is desperately trying to make.  And like with "The Secret Sharer" (1910) – the short story that was bundled with Heart of Darkness (1899) in the Signet Classics book I purchased half a decade ago – Heart of Darkness spends too much time being about man and ship instead of the nature of man.
     That is not to say that Heart of Darkness is without point.  There is something pure in Conrad's exploration of the nature of colonialism, especially in Africa.  However, he wrote the story at the tail end of the 19th Century, before the machinery of real destruction could be brought to bear on the Dark Continent.  I read it in the 21st Century, after having taken a post-Colonial period Africa history class (taught by an honest-to-God African who was wounded in a civil war largely created by the actions of the English while lording over the locals).  The book is not going to mean the same thing to me that it would before the Colonial Period came to an end.  Add to that the fact that I have Apocalypse Now (1979) as a competing format of exploring the same concepts.
     Lets face it – the absurdity of a benevolent war is a far riper target than the criticism of treating Africans as property at the beginning of the 20th Century; I would wager most Europeans didn't regard the Africans as people, per se.  Having Colonel Kilgore herding scared villagers into an amphibious APC – a metal monster of sorts – while the announcement, in English, repeats that the US Army is there to return the people to the bosom of the government of South Vietnam.  For good measure, the Army is going to burn the village to the ground just to show how serious they are about saving the people.  That scene captures the madness of what is going on (for Apocalypse Now) better than anything Conrad could craft for Heart of Darkness.  Yes, he has Marlow describe disparate scenes that show how enterprise is not directed in a proper European fashion, but he seems to walk away from the underlying point so that he can ruminate more on boats.
     Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, isn't even really a character.  He is an objective.  There is no reason why Marlow comes to imagine him as a voice dwelling at a native temple upriver (but it is good imagery).  What is much worse, Kurtz's famous last lines – "The horror!  The horror!" – don't have nearly the depth of meaning that they should, and that is because there is no real interaction with the man.  Kurtz's story becomes lost in the fretting over a new breed of morality that may have taken root back in Europe and Marlow is seen in country as a threat of things to come.  But nothing is ever to come.
     There is something profound in the grave concern over the letters and such of Kurtz being tied directly to gaining access to his strategy to better exploit the region.  Conrad hints at what Kurtz had been up to – certainly it would not be an easy topic of conversation amongst the men who thought of themselves as civilized – but he doesn't let the terribleness of it sink in, immediately shifting focus to the effort to leave the area, and for Marlow to get back to London.
     Oftentimes I complain about how a movie will take excellent source material and ruin it because the writer(s) and director are sure that they (or he or she) can do better.  In the case of Apocalypse Now, I think John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola exceeded the source material.  That is not to ignore some of the indulgences of the film, or how it is essentially tied to the war instead of a prevailing view towards others who live on the land you want to despoil; Heart of Darkness is more timeless, but its understanding of its own underlying economy seems wanting.  Where Conrad does not give his Kurtz his due in explaining how he fosters a cult of personality, Apocalypse Now sets the stage so that there could be no other conclusion of Kurtz being cut-off from command.
     Okay, I'm aware that I am being a special kind of ass when I purposely conflate the novella and the film.  I would prefer the reason be that Conrad simply was unable to convey the true depredations and inhumanity of European colonialism (especially in the Congo), but it is much more likely that the imprint the film had on a much younger me predisposes me toward favoring it.  The Colonel sending soldier out to surf during combat speaks more of madness to me than the aimless blasting away at the cliff face or recklessness with material supplies of the novella.  Then again, the movie is from my culture.  It should speak directly to me.
     Of the literature I've read in the year and a half of the Reading Projects, Heart of Darkness was probably my least favorite (though it is nowhere near as difficult a read as Beowulf was).  I am certainly in no hurry to read any Conrad in the near future.  Still, I have heard good things about both The Inheritors (1901) and Nostromo (1904) – the former a collaboration with Ford Madox Ford, whose The Good Soldier () is currently on the to read list – so I cannot rule out more Conrad altogether.  But I do know that there is something in the style that doesn't sit right with me.  Maybe I have been spoiled by the short, strong, masculine sentences that Hemingway helped usher into fashion.

Farscape: Strange Detractors (2009)

     Farscape (1999-2003) was a good, if underfunded, space opera show that ran on the SciFi Channel.  It had several hiccups during its four season run (including an ongoing one because the producers wanted to show a particular bad guy was a threat even when he wasn't there), but it was entertaining and engaging.  It had heart, humor, handled the action much better than its contemporaries, and managed to be internally consistent.  Because it didn't get its promised fifth season (though Executive Producer Brian Henson makes the case that SciFi cannot be faulted for this in the DVD commentaries because Farscape was a show they always lost money on), many fans felt cheated.  I know I was one of them (see my very first post – as mothygamer – on IMDB).  But the two part mini-series Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars (2004) left me feeling the story had been wrapped up.  If there was anything more to be handled in the story, it would have to be big enough to justify it.
     Seems that was not the case for creator Rockne S. O'Bannon.
     Like Joss Whedon resurrecting his dead television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer () and Angel (), O'Bannon turned to comic book/graphic novel format.  It is here that I want to take issue with most people who believe that the graphic novel is as legitimate a source of storytelling as actual prose, because the shortcuts are almost always out in full force in illustrated storytelling.  I'm getting off topic.  Like Whedon, O'Bannon does not seem to want to let the story be over.  One could callously assume that this is like George Lucas re-releasing the Star Wars (1977-2005 for live action films) movies – now in 3D – because there is always more money to be made from them.  At least Whedon and O'Bannon are putting something new out there for fans, even if it means messing around with the presumed end of the programs.
     Strange Detractors (2009) is essentially an episode of Farscape told over the course of four issues (in comic book form) or chapters (in graphic novel form).  It follows shortly after the first collection of Farscape comics (which I have yet to read), which means that it is mere months after the official old ending.  Part of this really bothers me.  Farscape was over for me when D'Argo got killed and the threat of Scorpius had been eliminated.  The story was complete, with just enough wonder left for there to be the possibilities of future adventures.  For some reason – though it is entirely consistent with how the show was done – O'Bannon decided that those possibilities had to become eventualities, and eventually always means now.

Sikozu in comic book form.

     Worse, O'Bannon feels the need to bring back as many recognizable characters as possible.  In the case of Sikozu, I didn't mind; I felt that she had been badly handled for the second half of Season Four and reduced to a means for exposition to be spoken at, and then had her backstory scrambled for the miniseries (to be fair, apparently all of that was planned from the beginning and would have played much better over a whole season rather than in a few scenes).  For most of the other returning secondary and tertiary characters, it felt like pandering.  Come see the characters you saw on TV.  Rygel, who had been returned to his throne – and thus should be largely absent from all future Farscape adventures, gets dragged into the story.  Note to O'Bannon: you don't have to put the puppet in the comic book if there isn't a compelling reason for the character to be involved.
     The story is rather simple.  Something is making people go crazy and attack those around them.  Farscape did an episode with a similar theme ("Crackers Don't Matter"), but on a smaller scale.  Crichton once again finds a way to keep it together well enough to find a cure for the plague and save his shipmates (including his wife and child).  The artwork isn't bad; one can easily recognize all of the characters because they look very much like the actors or puppets that portrayed them.  But there isn't enough of a story here to make it worth while.  I certainly don't want an episode played out over four issues, nor would I want to pay the cover price of the graphic novel ($24.99).  I would want something bigger and more considered if O'Bannon wants to keep Farscape alive, but what I really would prefer is for one of his new projects to be picked up so he can let Crichton, Aeryn, Chiana, and Pilot be undisturbed for a long while.

Dreamers (Original Text - Part Thirteen) (1997)

     The original "ending".  Well, actually there is another section that was started after this one, but is is very weak and gives an unfortunate happy ending to Jason and Melissa.  Then in 1998 I started a sequel of sorts to "Dreamers" that meant to explore the relationship between Jason and Stacy Andrews, his ex-girlfriend.  That was abandoned because it was poorly conceived (and not just because I knew nothing about the kind of relationship I was trying to describe).
     Anyway, Part Thirteen.

XIII

     Dave Burke left the group first.  He didn't have any choice, but he was the motivation for the rapid deterioration.  There were other reasons, the are always other reasons for everything, but nobody would deny that it was Dave Burke's murder that orchestrated the collapse.
     The days afterward were as destructive as the actual crime.  Sean didn't seem to shaken by the murder and that grated on Vicki.  Larry Pudenski argued two sides, with Burke not being too great a loss and Sean being the most likely killer.  Dave Burke didn't have a philosophy, wasn't a great contributor to society.  On the other hand, Sean would want him dead for not only being white but also because of the relationship with Vicki.
     The funeral was hard for everyone.  It was Burke's cousin who had to give the eulogy, but asked Jason to write something to express Dave's involvement with the group.  That wasn't easy.  Jason and Melissa had already begun the process of removing themselves when Burke was killed.  Still, Jason wrote how important someone can be when they are simply willing to be there for everyone else, whenever needed.  And that was how Dave should have been remembered.
     Vicki sold her house and moved back to New Jersey.  She found a better job closer to home, to her family.  She said goodbye to everyone, but spent more time with J.B.  The two had known each other longer than she had known the others, and it was to J.B. that she had a real attachment.  They swore they would stay in touch.
     Sean moved out before she sold the house, angry that she took Burke's murder so personally.  He never liked Dave Burke or Jeff Binghampton, and he thought it would be a good thing that there would be no group to distract Vicki from him.  Unfortunately, he found out that it was that very group that gave Vicki the strength to be with him.  He moved on, though with some regrets.
    
     "Four weeks.  Maybe you are psychic."
     "Jason," Nancy said in a soft voice, "it was a robbery.  And nobody knows what is going to happen to us.  I was just being childish."
     Jason, Melissa, Nancy, and J.B. had gathered at a restaurant after the service.  Unlikely as it seemed, everyone was taking care of Jason, not the other way around.  Larry Pudenski and Mike Carver couldn't even make it to the funeral with work keeping them busy.  That may have been what was affecting  Jason.  Their mellow conversation was interrupted by a striking blonde in a plain black dress.
     "Excuse me.  Are you Jason?"
     Jason offered a weak smile and nodded.  He offered her a seat at the table and she accepted.
     "You don't know me.  I worked with Dave.  My name is Anika."
     "The infamous Miss Lang.  Dave mentioned you more than once."
     "I didn't know if I should have been at the funeral or not.  Dave and I only went out a couple of times.  He was a really nice guy.  I really liked him."
     "He was a great friend.  He was better than any of us gave him credit for.  I never gave him credit."
     Anika didn't seem to have heard Jason.  "I think I could have loved him."
     "I'm sure you could have, Anika," Melissa said.  It pained her to see two people in pain from the same source but unable to see it as clearly in the other.
     There was some more conversation and Anika stayed to share a meal with them, but she could not bear to stay there with them.  They had a stronger relationship with Dave and she felt like an intruder.
     "That's the kind of girl you should be with, Jeffery."
     "Well, her obvious pain and loss aside," J.B. quickly countered.  "Yeah.  She's got the looks.  She's nice, and intelligent enough."
    "What would Brad do?" Jason asked.
     "He'd go after her and get her."
     "He's a hell of a brother, isn't he."
     "Don't give me that, Jason.  I'm not going to use Dave's death to get laid."
     Jason shrunk back, hurt.  That wasn't what he thought he was suggesting.
     "It is an unfortunate circumstance, how you met her," Melissa said.  "But you can try to make something out of it.  Something that involves more than you trying to fuck her.  You actually shared a person in common, and you can approach this from a more emotionally healthy place."
     "I thought I told you I don't do that."
     "Well, apparently life is short.  And it wouldn't hurt you to change before it's over."

Big Eyes, Small Mouth (1998 revised) & Big Robots, Cool Starships (1999)

     Once upon a time, roleplaying games didn't feel the need to define everything and use the rules to constrict ideas and possibilities.  It wasn't that long ago, actually.  But looking back at one of the better experiments in an 'open system' – one that lets the players and GM (gamerese for Game Master, or the person who adjudicates the rules and plays "the world" instead of one character) craft their tales of adventure, intrigue, and so on without the need for everything to be detailed in the game mechanics – that came out of the late 1990s, I was surprised at how much roleplaying games have seemed to change.  At least for me.
     Now, Big Eyes, Small Mouth (1998 revised printing) wasn't interested in setting up a system that would define anything; that was up to each individual group.  No, what Mark C. MacKinnon appears to have been after was just a simple set of rules to allow for some balancing of the imaginative playground for those who wanted to play anime or manga styled stories out as a roleplaying game.  At the time, he still hadn't dubbed it the Tri-Stat system (a move I'm convinced was motivated by concerns for marketing the licensed products that would later be published by Guardians of Order).
     The idea behind it is insanely simple.  The core mechanic is just rolling 2d6 (or two six-sided dice, for those who don't read gamerese fluently) and trying to get a low total.  That is somewhat counterintuitive, but it makes sense within the framework of the rules.  What there are that amount to rules, at any rate.
     There is a system for building a character, distributing points among the three stats – Body, Mind, and Spirit – and how some values derive from how those points are spent.  There are suggestions as to what the levels purchased might mean in a given setting or game, but nothing is hard and fast.   Because BESM was designed to be used in any conceivable setting, it doesn't have chapters on skills (instead, a character can do most things that they should  be able to do, and can make a check against the stat that best fits the situation.  Combat is handled slightly differently, invoking a couple of derived values and characters can vary widely in ability.  Again, because it is written to accommodate any setting or story, there are allowances for giant robots and spaceships as well as magic and strange mental powers.  That last one is the only part where the rules get somewhat concrete, as mental combat is handled differently than normal, physical combat.
     By itself, the BESM doesn't feel like an RPG rule book.  Instead, it seems like the guidelines to allow players to break free from the restrictive chains that lock characters into a game-defined type or class or O.C.C. (instead of an anime defined type, which players are somewhat encouraged to adopt as it should help them immerse themselves in a different style of play that still mimics their favorite source material) while still rolling dice and having a fair amount of random influence on the outcome of the story.  As far as that goes, it holds up quite well – in spirit.  I certainly wouldn't pay $13.95 for the same thin book now (how reckless was I with my RPG spending...I easily spent about 1/4 of my income on gaming shit over a three year period in the late '90s and I'd like to have most of that money back), but that also has something to do with how my experience with gaming has changed.
     More on that later.

     The only supplement I purchased for BESM was Big Robots, Cool Starships (1999).  It functions much like the original, giving ideas for how to build mecha (or giant robots), cyborgs, androids, spaceships, or even magical armor with the same level of vagueness.  BESM was focused on the idea that the players and GM could operate in a cooperative manner and agree upon how the rules should be interpreted.  Because of the level of sparsity in regards to all-around detail, I think it works.  There isn't much of a way to win at BESM (though the Extra Attacks attribute introduced in BESM becomes abusive when combined with Multiple Mecha Attacks in BRCS, because the amount of attacks multiply with each other...and that means that one character may have one attack action each round and another could have 20) because the game is clearly meant to focus on story.
     In that regard, neither MacKinnon nor David L. Pulver (author of BRCS) manage to create a sense that they have a launching pad to steer players and GMs in what they assume to be the right direction.  This may be because MacKinnon originally had no intention of getting in the way of the players' good time.  There is also the issue that Pulver's suggested adventure is too bare bones to help a new RPG player, but too scripted in its expected outcomes to make experienced GMs and players happy. 
     Still, I was pretty shocked that it has only been 14 years (almost 15) since MacKinnon first wrote BESM.  He wrote in a pre-3E D&D world, where game companies did not have the luxury of writing for an OGL (Open Game License) system and making your own system almost always meant having a distinctive setting.  Sure, Fudge showed up in 1995, but it required a lot of work in terms of figuring out how much of the rules were needed for a setting or story, and in my extremely limited experience, players and GM often had difficulty deciding on how to play with the less than concrete Fudge rules.  GURPs had been around much longer, debuting in 1986, but it relied on concrete rules that were specific in terms of what applied to what setting.  There was room for GM fiat in decided for exceptions, but the supplemental material became canon unto the type of setting people played (not always, of course, but far more often than I would have expected).
     There is a danger when it comes to mixing hard defined rules with whatever the group agrees upon.  Indeed, I never had a good experience running (GMing) or playing White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension (I played with groups that used the 1996 2nd Edition) because it did exactly this.  There is no easy way to define how magic is supposed to work unless one resorts to a set of spells, and Mage didn't want to do that.  The problem became that players would attempt to do insanely powerful things (like create a living creature out of the aether) while having very little power as defined by the game mechanics.  It invariably turned into an argument and at least one player would pout because they couldn't do whatever they wanted to do.  BESM seemingly overcomes this because everyone has to agree as to what the rules mean, because the book doesn't define them to any kind of absolute or concrete terms.  Everyone would know what the rules allow for because they are the people who set the limits, and that seems both audacious and inspired.  It should even work.
     However, if my past decade of gaming has taught me anything, it is that players seem to crave system.  Story has become much less important.  Maybe it is the MMO effect, where how one makes a character has more impact than the story for him or her.  D&D 3E was a huge offender in terms on needing to have everything fit the rule.  Gone was the simplicity of giving the baddies an AC (Armor Class, or what level of skill+luck is needed to hit the creature or character) and HP (Hit Points, gamerese for how much damage a creature or character can take before it dies) and running a combat on the fly.  Gone was giving certain creatures the abilities necessary for the scene to look and feel right.  Everything became defined, and people who played the d20 system (RPGs that ran under the OGL system) got sucked into this trap.  I know because I am one of them.
     I don't know if I could take people whose experience came from that d20 mindset and expect them to get the much more free-form BESM.  I am certain that there are old-school gamers who prefer the fits the rules mindset that has fallen upon us.  I miss the story being king.  I miss the rules always being made to fit the story, and not vice versa.  BESM requires a certain level of maturity that may be best suited for the RPG player who has learned how to play but not yet settled into a rut of comfortable systems.  I do know that it would be a disaster for an Organized Play campaign, and that is where I see most my RP action these days.  OP play is an entirely different animal from home play, the kind of RPG experience that used to be the norm.  It is as different as being friendly with the people with whom one plays and playing a game with well-established friends.  OP requires a commitment to the rules because that is the consistent element.  It is rules over story, even when the story is very good.

The in-book example of a BESM character.  Simple, at least by RPG standards.  It is clear the focus was not on tricky out the character as much as it was making one that would be fun to play.  That is what I miss in RPG systems.

     And that is sad, because MacKinnon was on to something.  He was effectively giving the gaming experience back to the players and freeing them up from having to be slaves to the on-going products and endless releases of crunch (gamerese for game mechanics and rules) that allow for better, faster, newer, etc., characters.  It was an anarchist-light idea that worked for a brief while.  I would have been curious to see what Guardians of Order would have done with George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire setting, since they had the rights before collapsing because of debt.  What could have been.