Congratulations on Fucking Her In Her Prius!

The date will go alright. Not great. You’ll start off by accidentally calling her a racist, and when you ask her name you’ll immediately forget it, referring to her as “you” for most of the night. And you’ll consistently get her drink order wrong, getting her four Harvey Wallbangers and two white wine spritzers when all she wanted was a whiskey, neat.

But as it turns out that won’t really matter for her, because she has pretty serious self-esteem issues and she can’t recognize the difference between taking control of her sexuality and allowing her sexuality to be taken advantage of. She’ll also have a keen sense of irony and a good eye for ways to take revenge on douches that she dates. So when she makes you leave the bar by grabbing your pants you’ll think you’re in for the ride of your life, and you’ll be more or less right.

She’s going to take you back to her Prius, rip off your jeans and ride you for a good hour and a half. When the cops finally knock on her fogged up window they’ll just be trying to high five the girl inside, who will be laughing at you as you quiver beneath her, horrified at what her vagina is doing to your penis.

When the entire experience is over you’ll need therapy. Months and months of therapy. And her Prius will be ruined from the combination of blood and sexual fluids that will have just poured out of your prize date. But she won’t give a shit, because she’ll have ruined vaginas for you for several months, effectively doing a service to both women everywhere, Alcoholics Anonymous as an organization and Toyota’s marketing group, which will now be able to use the slogan “Sexually Ruin Someone in a Prius Today!”

Congratulations on Fucking Her in Her Prius!

Congratulations on Talking Her Into a Mistake!

You’re not the most charismatic person in the world. In fact, you could be the least charismatic person in the world. You’re tall and thing, but you’ve got mean features, a terrible laugh and you literally cannot listen to someone to save your own life. It’s a bad mix for relationships, which rarely last over a week, but it’s an amazing mix for convincing young women to embarrass you sexually, which is exactly what’s going to happen today.

Today you’re going to walk right into AA, throw your five year chip at the group leader and shout “FUCK YOU!” at the top of your lungs. The entire group will watch you as you ascend to the podium, since that’s actually sort of a normal speech intro in AA. Then you’ll look back out at them from the podium, staring deep into their eyes, wondering who you could convince to come out with you and ruin their life again.

You’ll zero in on one woman, tragically worn with dark circles under her eyes and full, colorless lips. She’ll still be beautiful, but it will be clear that the road of the world has worn her down. You’ll lock eyes with her, point out in the crowd and speak.

“This is all bullshit,” you’ll say, gesturing with your finger to indicate that bullshit is located pretty much everywhere in the room, especially within the crowd. “You,” you’ll say, pointing at the young woman, “should come out with me and make some mistakes tonight. Like people do.”

The young woman will look at you up and down. She’ll bite her lip for a second, then shrug.

“Alright. But not tonight. Tomorrow. I got a thing tonight,” she’ll say, winking at you.

You’ll shrug. “Alright.”

Then you’ll turn to the crowd and wave to them. “Thanks for trying guys.”

On the way out you’ll whisper into the group leader’s ear to give your number to that girl, and he’ll nod back at you. After all, you two used to be good buddies back in the day, before he got all lame. He’ll come through for you. He always does.

Congratulations on Talking Her Into a Mistake!

Congratulations on Your Successful Poster Presentation!

Forty five minutes before it’s due the ink will still be drying. You’ll be running down the hall, your hair flying every which-a-way, your pulse pounding. You’ll deck a kid with a diorama as you run past him, just to show him what’s what. And then you’ll arrive at your classroom, drenched in sweat, only to find it empty.

This will give you some much needed time to prepare. You’ll arrange all of the desks into the shape of what you call “Fort Awesome,” smoke a bowl and put on some deodorant before you take your seat near the head of the class to present, when the time comes, your findings on the interplay of various complex proteins during the reproductive process of fruit flies.

You’ll have a good thirty minutes to cool down and let the weed take hold. Thirty minutes you’ll spend whiting out portions of your poster and hastily re-writing them in pencil instead of relaxing and collecting your thoughts. But when the time comes and your fellow graduate students and teachers file into the room and take their seats, you’ll know that you’re ready.

The presentation will begin with the students slapping their feet against the ground rhythmically, pounding out the beat of “We Will Rock You” by Queen. It’ll rise and rise into cacophony until it nearly deafens you. Then the professor will stand with his arms raised and shout:

“BEGIN!”

You’ll leap atop his desk, pointer in hand, and begin shouting out random facts from the poster while pointing to various locations.

“Ribosome inhibition occurs along this genome!” you’ll shout at the class. They’ll respond with a series of oohs and ahhs, accented by a mass, collective eyeroll.

“Fruit flies aren’t actually flies!” you’ll scream, flicking a pencil off your professor’s desk and catching one of the douchiest students in the classroom right in the eye, sending him writhing to the ground in pain. The classroom will erupt in applause.

Your professor will stand up and place a check mark on the blackboard, next to your poster. You’ll smile at him and then open your mouth before blacking out.

When you come to the class will be carrying you on their shoulders. Your poster will be in tatters on the floor and the professor will be stripped to the waist, pounding his chest. The blackboard will be covered in check marks.

Congratulations on Your Successful Poster Presentation!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: To the Bastion!

There are relatively few games I would unequivocally recommend to nearly everyone I know. Recommending a game is a risky thing, after all. Unless you know someone’s tastes very, very well you risk offending their sensibility or worse, exposing the manner in which you see a person. That Civ 5 recommendation could be interpreted as thinking that person is boring. That Baldur’s Gate recommendation could be mistaken for a statement about their level of excitement regarding spreadsheets. And the majority of AAA first person shooter releases could be mistaken for a statement on the recommendee’s attention span and intellect.

In order to be recommended to nearly anyone, a game must have a certain level of perfection underlying it. It must be one of the few, elite games that accomplishes all of its goals while never really revealing them, one of the few games that draws players in before reinventing itself, growing and changing what it means to be a game all the while. It has to be something that is both fun to play, but can hold up to a closer examination. Bastion is one of the few games in recent memory I’d recommend to nearly anyone without any caveats whatsoever.

Even defining what Bastion is is kind of risky, because it doesn’t really fall within the boundaries of traditional genres. It has prominent elements of brawlers and RPGs in it, but it also carries elements of platformers and adventure games as well. There’s even a little light tactical work at play in it. It’s such a singular collection of elements that it feels wrong to try and define it within a genre. It’s something that simply warrants being experienced.

Its art style walks the line between high brow and low brow perfectly. The inhabitants of Bastion are all more or less adorable, but they’re adorably cast against a stark and lifeless world hostile in every conceivable way. You can play through the entire game marveling at how cute the not-quite-sprites are, or you can traverse the world of Bastion marveling at the harsh beauty Supergiant Games crammed into every inch of its world, reveling in the subtext present in all of their art. It has something for the casual gamer and the most pretentious indie acolyte.

And its writing and voice acting is so pitch perfect, trying to put it into words is a disservice to the game. This is how you do games writing. There is nothing else to say about the subject. You accomplish your goals as a writer, you find the right voice for your words (not a stock actor like the very talented but very overused Stephen Jay Blume or a celebrity the like of John Goodman) and you just let it speak for itself. You accommodate things that players could do in the game and acknowledge them, providing constant feedback for both small and big choices. You make a word for players to enjoy, not just a set of rules for them to engage.

Bastion builds its world better than most titles with ten or a hundred times its budget. I never felt that anything was out of place, nor did I feel that anything needed more explanation. Unlike Starcraft 2’s ham-handed portrayal of the Koprulu Sector, Bastion’s ravaged, lifeless world seemed to have an involved, storied history without any of it ever being told.

And the music. It’s the rare game that experiences a simultaneous soundtrack release, and Bastion is certainly that game. And what a delicious soundtrack it is. From the haunting to the bracing, Bastion’s music perfectly suits its world. To say anything more about it is to risk spoiling one of the most incredible games I’ve played in recent memory (so much of Bastion is how it unfolds in the telling, so my persistent attempt to avoid spoilers will be a constant black mark in this review, one I hope you’ll forgive after you play Bastion).

But all I’ve talked about so far is Bastion’s world. What of the gameplay, the glue that holds this world together, that immerses you within it?

As I mentioned above, it’s difficult to define Bastion’s gameplay. Each person seems to do so a little differently, and it illustrates as much about the speaker as it does about the game. Bastion is rife with different ways to play, using a simple and straightforward set of tools. And while mastering the game and these tools usually involves zeroing in on a particular style the developers wanted you to use there’s never any pressure to find or use a specific set of tools to defeat your many, many foes.

The crux of Bastion is that you’ll use an assortment of weapons and special abilities to defeat hordes of enemies. As you do so you’ll acquire money and special items that allow you to upgrade weapons and purchase new abilities. You’ll also acquire experience, which makes you marginally tougher and gives you access to a wider array of special abilities. It sounds blasé there, because I wanted it to, but the finished product is elemental in its execution. There is something terribly fun about whittling away at your big, bad foes and ripping through your little, pathetic foes, and the degree to which you choose how to do so is something unrivaled in most other games, from RPGs to FPSes. I believe the Deus Ex prequel may have been outdone in terms of the importance and scale of choice by Bastion, a fifteen dollar game I didn’t know about a month ago.

The point of this review isn’t to give you a clear idea of what Bastion is. To give that to you is to ruin Bastion, a game which is as much about the way game play evolves and changes within it as it is about the story which that game play serves as a mechanism to advance. The point is to get you playing Bastion, thinking about Bastion and discussing Bastion. It’s a marvelous creation, original, intelligent and fun. It’s just as long as it needs to be. And every element of it was crafted with such care and dedication that it’s hard not to look at the sum of all its parts and feel a swell of love for the effort of Supergiant Games. Play Bastion. Play it today. I don’t care who you are, just play it. You won’t regret it.

Congratulations Progressive Warlock!

Despite their history of persecution warlocks are actually pretty socially conservative. They’re very, very concerned with tax rates, they dislike social programs, especially when they apply to other people, and they never, ever, ever let women into their warlock clubs. We think they’re called “movens” or something, to show that they’re manly covens.

But that never really cottoned with you. You’re a big fan of casting dark magic upon the earth, sure. No question there. And you absolutely love sacrificing people to your black gods, filled with vitriol and hate who are all too willing to aid you in your quest for power. But you hate seeing inequality in the world around you. It just makes you want to conjure up a hellbeast to eviscerate the perpetrators of bigotry in this world.

Which is why today you’re going to become the most progressive warlock in the entire United States. Today you’re going to stride into your moven with an attractive blonde woman wearing a robe of deepest onyx. She’ll be naked underneath it, her eyes darting cautiously about the basement of the church where you meet.

Your fellow warlocks will touch their knives as they look at her, clearly thinking about what it would be like to sacrifice her. It’ll be all you can do not to summon an inferno with a wave of your hand and burn them all alive in delicious agony. Instead you’ll bring the young woman into the center of the room and rip off her hood.

“This is Kristen,” you’ll announce to the room. “And she’s the newest member of the Moven of the Totally Awesome Custom Van.”

The room will already be silent when you make your announcement, but after you speak the air will have a charge to it, like it’s ready to explode.

“Who will stand for her?” a voice will call from the back of the room. You’ll raise your hand. Then you’ll step forward and draw your knife. You’ll hold your palm out to the crowd and then draw your knife across it, opening a freely flowing gash with one clean cut. You’ll grab Kristen’s head and hold your wounded hand above her mouth in a fist, dribbling blood into her mouth. She’ll swallow it hungrily, acquiescing to the ceremony just as you told her to. Then you’ll take her palm and slice it, sucking blood off of it as it wells up.

As you do so you’ll feel the wound close in a surge of heat under your lips. You’ll feel your own wound sear closed as well in delicious agony. And when you bring your head back up from the totally platonic procedure you just administered the crowd will look baffled. They’ll all be standing stock still, their jaws gaping. All spare one man, who will be fuming.

He’ll be a balding older man. His face will be bright red, his eyes bloodshot. He’ll step forward and shout.

“Blasphemy!” Spit will fly from his mouth as he points his finger at you and Kristen. You’ll worry for a moment that the room is going to turn against you, but Kristen will point her finger at him and mouth one word.

Burn.

His robes will burst into flames, flames of such extreme heat that his flesh will immediately melt from his bones. He’ll writhe for nearly half a minute in agony before he falls to the ground, returning silence to the room for a moment. Only for a moment, however, for thunderous applause will begin to rise as the scent of brimstone wafts through the church basement.

“Welcome Kristen,” the crowd will begin chanting. She’ll smile grimly at them all, and you’ll feel a swelling of pride within your breast. And rightly so. You’ll have single handedly broken down one of the many glass ceilings still present in America, and you’ll deserve to feel good about you for a while.

Congratulations Progressive Warlock!

Congratulations on Building Your Own Computer!

Building your own computer is easy and fun. You barely even need to be competent to do it, you just need to match components up, so when someone does it we normally make a “jerking off” gesture, roll our eyes and check what’s next on our Tivo. But today we’re going to be legitimately impressed.

See, you’re an out of work automotive robot from Detroit, so when you build your own computer out of a combination of boredom and an attempt to make yourself a wife you’re going to be doing something kind of amazing, something we can all relate to. Everyone here at Sexy Results creates things we want love out of all the time, they’re just characters or illegitimate children. You’re going to take it one step further, and there’s something impressively brave about that.

You’ll have to use pretty low quality components, just due to cost issues, but it’ll be pretty impressive when the whole thing comes together. And when all is said and done you’ll have built a machine that is incapable of thought or emotion (unlike you, an automotive robot built by an especially cruel wizard who imbued you with the capacity for sentient thought) and you’ll find making love to it using its USB slot to be pretty unsatisfying.

But lucky for you there’s a whole big internet of lonely people who want to get fucked by an automotive robot out there, and that wizard made you quite a player. So after an hour and a half of unsuccessful fumbling with your bride to be you’ll get frustrated and start Googling “sex with robots.” You’ll find a staggering array of responses, many of which are pretty offensive, but a handful of which are dating profiles for “robosexuals,” a group of fetishists who fantasize about being violently taken by robots.

Seeing them, you’ll set up an e-Harmony profile and step into the bigger world of closeted fetishist dating.

Congratulations on Building Your Own Computer!

Congratulations Musketeer!

Musketeers aren’t really in fashion anymore. Actually, that’s a bad way to phrase it. Musketeers aren’t really relevant at all anymore. They’re a bygone relic of a time when firearms and swordplay were contemporary forms of warfare, where people were expected to be able to fire off a rifle accurately before defending themselves in close quarters against droves of Britons with their rapier. There isn’t a lot of call for the sort of person who wears a floppy hat and says “Sacre couer” a lot.

But that didn’t stop you. Nor did the career counselor at your high school, or your undergraduate advisor, who informed you that “French language was a dying field and that only an academic would be able to make any meaningful headway in it as a career path.” You laughed at your fencing teacher when he told you that none of what he’d taught you was practical and you dismissed the street gang members who shot you in the shoulder while you were cowering behind a car as “dishonorable cowards who could not face you in single combat” after you murdered one of them with a musketball and then unsuccessfully attempted to challenge the rest of them to a duel.

Which pretty much brings us up to date. That gunshot wound cost you your latest temp job, and without that money life’s looking pretty grim. But today it’s going to get a little better when you get a new day nurse.

She’ll be pretty in a mousy way. Not the kind of girl who would be considered drop dead gorgeous under any set of circumstances, but pretty enough to make her stand out in a small group. She’ll smile at you, at the floppy hat you’ll still be wearing, and she’ll caress your saber with great care each time she stops in to check on you.

“Brave of you to face down those men,” she’ll say in a bad French accent. You’ll twist your mouth into some sort of indecipherable, affected expression when she does.

“My duty,” you’ll say before coughing violently from the effort of speaking. That’ll make the young nurse place her hand upon your head and look down on you affectionately. Then your musketeer training will kick in.

You’ll run your hand across her cheek and bring her head down to yours, kissing her deeply on the mouth. She’ll let you do it, smiling the whole time, and when the two of you finally part for air she’ll whisper in your ear.

“Claire,” she’ll say, lips quivering inches from your flesh.

“Gerard,” you’ll retort in a throaty voice you’ll have been practicing for years.

That’ll make her laugh before she brings her face back down to yours and kisses you once again.

Congratulations Musketeer!

Congratulations on Winning at That Stupid Game!

Today at 5:45 AM you’re going to let loose a violent roar as you drop the blood covered rock you used to crush the skull of Shauna Tinkleton, the young woman you found yourself pitted against in the final round of Senior Assassination.

What began as an innocent high school game will have rapidly devolved into a violent bloodbath, one you felt totally at home in. And when you reached the semi-finals and found yourself pitted against a photogenic young honor’s student with her whole life ahead of her and no mistakes behind her you knew it was your game to win.

We’ll be honest with you. After this it’s all going to be downhill. Tomorrow you’ll be charged with Shauna’s murder and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a maximum security prison. You’ll be raped ceaselessly for several months until one day you snap and shank the biggest, toughest guy in the entire joint in the kidney then cut his head off and fuck his disembodied mouth in front of all the hacks in gen pop. When the guards take you to solitary the next day you’ll have tied his severed head to the bars by his hair, and even though you’ll spend the next three months in a windowless room eating bread and water when you get out you’ll have a newfound respect among your fellow inmates which will never materialize into anything more than abject fear.

When you finally turn forty and try to write a book about your life and mistakes it’ll be published under a fake name and sell moderately well, but none of the funds from the sale of the book will reach you or anyone you care about. Instead you’ll be left with clippings of middling reviews and memories of better times smoking weed in various faculty buildings as a youth.

Later that year you’ll be denied parole for the umpteenth time, and it’ll make you pretty sad too. But today you’re going to kill a promising young woman so that you can win at a high school game no one will even remember in a month, effectively ruining dozens of lives with your actions, and that’s something. So Congratulations on Winning at That Stupid Game!

Congratulations on Answering the Age Old Question!

Today, following the receipt of a five hundred thousand dollar grant from the National Science Foundation you’re going to set up an experiment which will answer once and for all the age old question as to whether or not a tree falling in the woods without anyone around will make a sound.

You’ll use a series of recording devices, some shaped charges, seismometers and cameras to confirm that the tree falling actually makes a sound. You’ll make a controlled detonation and then wham, the tree will fall and you’ll have your answer.

Turns out if won’t make a sound at all. It’ll make a small seismic tremor, but no noise. More troubling than that will be the fact that aliens will immediately show up on site to both capture the anti-sound waves that must exist in this unique environment and to have their picture taken with the tree in question.

Then they’ll track you down using your data recording devices (which will be covered in your DNA, which they use CSI style to track everything ever down) and kidnap you briefly, beat the shit out of you and then upload the video to Youtube. They’ll do this to discredit your findings, which could potentially ruin the intergalactic anti-sound trade.

This should be a lesson for you to be more careful when you ask questions. It’s a great way to learn, but doing it outside of school is a great way to get your legs broke.

Congratulations on Answering the Age Old Question!

Congratulations on Impressing Everyone at the Funeral!

It’ll feel appropriate because they’ll all be wearing suits. Solving problems, making the world a better place. Grandpa would’ve liked that last part.

He fought at Normandy, at San Mer Eglise. After he received a medical discharge following Operation Market Garden he funded a non-profit organization dedicated to providing financial and psychological support to people affected by the war. He raised your mom and dad and, whenever he was asked to do it, you and your brother too. And he did it all in what he called his “uniform,” a black suit with a tie, mostly undone. Sometimes he’d take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves, but only under the most dire of circumstances.

So you don’t think he’d mind the fact that you’re spending most of his funeral playing Elite Beat Agents on your DS. Not at all. Maybe if you weren’t so good at it. But every once in a while someone will come over to you, look over your shoulder and nod at you in what you take to be an approving fashion. You’ll know that it’s because you’re so good at this game, so good at mourning. You’ll know that grandpa would be proud if he could see you there, beating the shit out of a video game at his funeral while your family occasionally watches on with some sort of emotion you have trouble decoding.

Congratulations on Impressing Everyone at the Funeral!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Old World Love!

If I factor in the time it took me to finish Old World Blues, I’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas for over a year at this point. I sank a considerable amount of time in to Fallout 3 and Oblivion, sure, but I’ve spent most of the last year sustainably interested in Fallout: New Vegas, which is pretty impressive considering it’s a single player game based on a largely recycled engine in a world I’ve explored pretty thoroughly at this point. And with one last piece of Downloadable Content on the horizon I’ll be playing it again ere long. So even though I’ll end up sinking almost $100 into Fallout: New Vegas with DLC, I’m confident that I’ll spend at least eleven months playing the game, possibly more with graduate school. Hell, if I start replaying it again I might even sink more time into it. And after finishing Old World Blues I’m seriously considering replaying it again.

Old World Blues is a rare expansion by any measure. It takes a small space and packs it with dense bits of exploration. It’s marked with enough waypoints that you’ll likely see everything you care to pretty quickly, but if you take the time to crawl around on your own you’ll find far, far more and sink a pretty fantastic amount of time into it. It tells buckets and buckets of story with relatively little real dialogue. It makes me form a relationship with a character who spits white noise at me. It constantly references penises, but the dirtiest moments come from me simply breathing.

It’s sick, funny, disturbing and deadly serious without ever taking itself too seriously. It plays with the idea of internment camps, government experiments, friendship and mental illness, all the while cracking a smile. It has overtones of the Venture Brothers coloring it throughout, including a small hidden room filled with Walking Eyes (the pinnacle of super science). It’s just good through and through, and despite its relatively small size I invested a pretty significant chunk of time in it.

To get down to brass tacks, the central storyline of Old World Blues is the briefest of any of the expansions so far. You can breeze through it in a handful of hours given a maxed out character. In fact, I’d bet you can complete the entire thing without every initializing the Sink, although if you never initialize the AutoDoc you’ll be leaving some pretty personal things behind. There are really only four segments to the main quest, and three of them are open-ended, simultaneously accomplished bits of it. Old World Blues packs a lot of storytelling, character development and intrigue into its handful of hours, sure, but for all of that it is quite brief. Unless, of course, you choose to explore on your own or engage Old World Blues’ robust side quests. Then the game will stretch out to quite a bit.

And really, you didn’t buy an expansion featuring James Urbaniak as a brain in the jar, the world’s angriest toaster and sexy twin light switches, to breeze through it. You bought an expansion like Old World Blues to drink it in, and Old World Blues wants to reward you for it.

Old World Blues is scattered with various miscellany more than New Vegas itself was, filled with tiny little dungeons, each of them containing a neat little reward. If you simply play through all of the various quests you’ll be prompted to visit the majority of the locations in order to acquire modules in what is one of the most rewarding base-building sub-games I’ve ever engaged in, but I wasn’t aware of this when I first stepped in to Big Mountain. I spent the bulk of my time wandering aimlessly, searching the corners of each base looking for clues as to just what was going on and what had transpired in the Big Empty. In fact the bulk of my time was spent exploring places unprompted, and many of my most rewarding experiences came from searching random locales completely unrelated to the central plot. Most of these locations tied into Dead Money’s storyline and the greater intertextuality of all of Fallout: New Vegas’ DLC to boot. While wandering through the ruins of Big Mountain I felt like I was learning as much about the world that came before as I was about Ulysses, and what is to come in the final Lonesome Road DLC. My curiosity was piqued, as if Dead Money didn’t do that well enough before, and I’m sure I’ll be very distracted for one to two weeks when Lonesome Road finally hits and I find myself in The Great Divide.

But the single biggest thing that Old World Blues accomplished was reminding me why I loved New Vegas in the first place. The rich exploration, the colorful characters and then customization is so unique. It’s so willing to make its inventory system fiddly and finicky, happy to let you play without engaging huge chunks of its gameplay but deeply rewarding when you choose to hand craft those bullets or change out that energy weapon’s normal power cells for some max charged cells. In the desolate ruin of Big Mountain I found myself looking for water, for upgrades, for anything I could use to stay alive. It was strange and challenging and, in the end, wonderful.

That’s the power that New Vegas brought to bear, the power Old World Blues is here to remind you of: it offered up a world for you to explore at your leisure, a world that can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be. Do you have lengthy conversations with the inhabitants of Big Mountain, or do you brush them off, rush through their tasks and kill them all without a second thought? Do you tediously micromanage your food and water supply (which people like me love, I should add) or do you carelessly charge into battle with a flaming power fist, crashing into lobotomites and sending body parts careening left and right? These are the choices that New Vegas presented its players with, and Old World Blues is back to remind you why you made them.

Congratulations on Your Country Hit!

Most country singers get their start by doing a bunch of small, intimate shows where they belt out covers and, occasionally, play a song they wrote. But when you started playing you swore to yourself that you wouldn’t never play no one else’s music afore you made it big on your own. So before you ever sat down in front of a crowd you put pen to paper and started writing songs about shit that’s important to you.

So far you haven’t had a lot of success. “Waitin’ For My Refund” was kinda weak, and “My Mommy and Her Girlfriend Both Drive Subarus” was never destined to be a country hit. You had a little success with “Shootin’ Guns is Pretty Fun,” but it didn’t really connect with anyone on a base level. So you’ve been toiling away, writing reams and reams of song ideas down in your notebook. Most of them have died as single lines there, but one of them plagued you, haunted your dreams and eventually grew into the song you’re going to play tonight. A simple song called “I’m Saving My Asshole for Jesus.”

You won’t play it for anyone before the show. You’ll be too nervous. You’ll just sit down, open your guitar case and light into it with all the fervor you brought to sucking your first dick. You’ll croon sweet and soft, and everyone will know that this is a boy who loves his country, loves his God, and ain’t never let anyone in his asshole before whatever else he done.

And when you hit those closing bars, belting out “But I ain’t getting’ gaped afore I hit them Pearly Gates, for my asshole waits for Jesus and his love,” the crowd will go wild. Men in trucker hats and women in oversized t-shirts will scream at the top of their lungs, knocking over tables in their rush to applaud you. Later on that night you’ll run out of CDs, and enough requests will come in for t-shirts that you’ll be able to justify putting that CafePress order that you’ve been procrastinating about in. You’ll make the money you need for rent and six different promoters will give you their cards, promising to make you the star of gay country in eastern Utah. It’ll be a good day to be you.

Congratulations on Your Country Hit!

Congratulations on Riding to Mordor!

You can’t even quit smoking. You have trouble not jacking it to internet porn every time your girlfriend steps out. You were once asked to stop drinking so you could get your grandma from the airport, and you lasted fifteen minutes before taking a shot just because you couldn’t. You’re quite possibly the worst possible choice for a task requiring a great deal of willpower, like the one just laid at your feet.

Which should make you suspicious, but Gandalf will offer you cold hard cash (five hundred bucks, the money you’re missing for rent!) to take your Honda Accord across the land of Gondor and into Mordor to drop the Ring of Power, the single most desirable artifact in the world, into a volcano at great personal risk to both your body and your soul. And the presence of cold hard cash will make you disregard every possible negative and just go for it.

The journey will actually be pretty uneventful, since most people in Mordor won’t know how to deal with cars. Before they realized they can just set an orc in front of you and let you hit it, disabling your vehicle with its tremendous mass, you’ll already be on top of Mount Dhoom (turns out Mordor is roughly the size of Connecticut). At this point you’ll have a problem.

See, you won’t be able to make yourself let go of the Ring.

“Is it really that bad?” you’ll ask aloud, thinking you’re alone. At this point Gandalf will magic your trunk open. He’ll have been hiding inside it the whole drive, waiting for this moment. He’ll silently nod at you and then use his surprisingly intense old man strength to push you into the pit of lava waiting for you and the ring at the base of the volcano.

“Yes, it is,” he’ll mumble into the lava before getting into your car and driving home using magic, because he won’t know how to drive stick.

Congratulations on Riding to Mordor!

Congratulations on Isolating the Frequency!

Conspiracy theorists are fucking idiots. Not just because they take innocuous phenomenon and extrapolate weird and outlandish conclusions from them, but because they ignore the conclusions right in front of their faces. For example, those conspiracy theorizing jackasses have long posited that Area 51 is a site where covert UFO research takes place, but we know the truth. The real deal is at Area 52, and the real deal is research into sonic weapons.

Not weapons that create waves of sound that can literally shake a man to pieces or that create brain bursting frequencies that make people’s heads explode, although the second one is closer to the truth. No, the real research has been going into developing the perfect universal Brown Sound for America’s military.

In case you haven’t heard, the Brown Sound is a very special frequency that causes people to shit their pants uncontrollably. It’s an incredibly effective way to embarrass your enemies, and everyone has a brown sound frequency. Most people will go their whole lives without encountering it, but finding an individual’s brown sound frequency is just a matter of time and luck. Most test subjects in your lab are exposed to it in a mere matter of hours. What’s far more difficult is discovering a universal Brown Sound.

Nazi scientists discovered just such a Brown Sound during World War II, but they neglected to write it down since they weren’t really big on documentation. So now it has fallen to you and your crack team of researchers to discover the Brown Sound that will make anyone shit themselves.

Under President Bush you had nearly unlimited staff and funding, but Obama, college boy that he is, took all of your money and put it towards roads and jobs and shit because apparently thinking about people shitting their pants doesn’t make him laugh the way it makes all of us laugh. You received a mandate from the President when he took office: results in four years or no more funding. No more Brown Sound weaponization program. Might as well pack it up and move to the European Union, where countries like Greece will force other countries to accept Brown Sound research as part of their budget. A fate worse than death.

But of late you’ve been making progress. You’ve found a narrow band of frequencies which seem to cause the Brown Sound response in people more often than not. And today, after making three Marines who were “volunteered” for your project shit their pants in less than a minute of tinkering, you’re finally going to find it.

“Booyah!” you’ll shout to your office, standing up and pumping your fist in joy. This will make Paul, your HR guy, stand up and look at you sternly. Paul’s kind of a douche.

“What happened?” he’ll ask without a shred of irony.

“I’m not sure,” you’ll tell him, chuckling. But I need your help.

After five minutes of convincing and less than a second of exposure, Paul will be collapsed on the floor of your lab in the fetal position, weeping in his soiled britches, cursing your name. But you won’t be able to hear him because the chamber is sound proofed and you and everyone else in the office will be laughing really loudly about what just happened.

Congratulations on Isolating the Frequency!

Congratulations on Describing Your Incredibly Embarrassing Wet Dream to the Wrong Person!

Psychiatrists are supposed to be bastions of public confidence, people who can literally be trusted with any secret. They’re supposed to be iron traps of will who never cave, no matter how many times someone shouts “pretty please at them.” They’re supposed to be un-corruptible, be it by sex or money or drugs.

They’re definitely not supposed to live tweet their sessions with patients.

So imagine your surprise when your mom sends you a link to a Twitter feed (when did she get on Twitter, anyway?) detailing your entire sessions with your psychiatrist. It’ll start with a series of “snore” posts every twenty five seconds, right up until you start talking about the weird sex dream you had.

“Gross,” the first post will read. Then the next post will read “Still gross, but getting hotter.”

Then the tweets will start to graphically transcribe the sex dream you detailed to your shrink. It’ll go into what you think your sister’s pubis looks like and what you think it smells like. Then it’ll detail the entrance of Jenny Michaels into the dream, that girl you have a huge crush on from your school. It’ll go over what you do to Jenny and what Jenny and your sister do while you watch. The shrink will start to rate his “boner meter” with a little set of ascii penises of various length.

By the time you finish the boner meter will take up an entire tweet, which will be followed by “lol. kid shouldve been in penthouse.”

Then he’ll laugh at how stupid your complaints about high school being tough are, and sign off the stream with the post: “fuck my mortage for making me sit thru this shit. peace”.

You’ll be mortified. Your mom will walk into your room just as you finish and just point and laugh at you.

“Fucking pervert!” she’ll squeal, before you slam the door in her face.

“Hah!” you’ll hear your father laugh from downstairs in the house as he reads the feed.

The only silver lining will come when your sister knocks on your door.

“Fucked up, man,” she’ll mumble through the wood. Then she’ll pause on the other side of the door, her breathing just barely audible. “I’ll talk to Jenny. See what I can do.”

That last bit will make you turn over and dry your eyes a little. You’re sure your whole school knows that you dreamed about having a threeway with your sister (granted, one where nothing happened between the two of you, but still) but she’s pretty good at talking people in to things, and if she puts in a good word with Jenny you might at least get laid out of the whole thing.

Congratulations on Describing Your Incredibly Embarrassing Wet Dream to the Wrong Person!

Congratulations on Inventing a Terrifically Vile Description for a Sex Act No One Will Ever Perform!

We don’t want to get into the details here, because we have children (well, really a teenagers, and really only one of them at that) reading this thing. But it’s called the Pumpkin Patch and it takes an entire tube of lube, a six pack of condoms, an amputee and at least four hours of prep time. The act itself takes two to do properly.

Just come up with a description of your own at UrbanDictionary.com and our hard working staff will rank it to show you just how close you’ve gotten to the truth. Today is your day to do that. Good luck and godspeed.

Congratulations on Inventing a Terrifically Vile Description for a Sex Act No One Will Ever Perform!

Congratulations on Dropping the Ball!

This isn’t one of those literalist posts where we talk about you dropping a ball that triggers a series of nuclear explosions that cascade across the country and summarily rip the nation to shreds. No, this post is about you forgetting to give your daughter her insulin injection early this morning.

“I didn’t ask for her to have diabetes!” you’ll shout at your wife over the police officers restraining you. She won’t respond, so you’ll shout it again louder, but still, nothing.

As the police drag you to their cruiser you’ll keep shouting, but by then your wife will already be inside the hospital and you’ll have a long, quiet drive to the police station where you’ll be officially charged with criminal negligence and held there until your wife has a chance to help out with your processing.

In retrospect, you probably should’ve cleaned up your act before marrying the assistant DA and having a kid with her, but huffing is hard to quit and nobody’s perfect, so don’t beat yourself up too much over the whole thing.

Congratulations on Dropping the Ball!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Platforming Comes Again!

Platformers were once the most basic template of all gameplay. Most people in my generation were introduced to video games through platformers. The Mario versus Sonic feud continues to this day, and has even found its way into some ill-fated copyright shattering games that tried to monetize the conflict. But the flower fell off the platforming tree during the late nineties and it’s been taking its time coming back. Even some of the more contemporary big-box platformers aren’t really that great at representing what makes the genre special. The tight, simple controls that made Mario and Sonic such perfect games for introducing game play concepts and refining skills are completely absent from fun, visually stunning games like Mario Galaxy.

And even before the most recent era of well-made non-platforming game experiences based on platforming concepts arrived there was a slough of wretched three dimensional platformers or platformalike games with sloppy controls and iffy physics. Titles running the gamut from Sonic 3D to Landstalker all tried to make platformers sexier and destroyed what made them great in the process. As a result the genre fell upon dark times. Nowadays most gamers can recall a time when platformers were a novelty genre, reserved for retro kitchy games and ho-hum stylistic throwbacks.

But lately anyone who’s anyone who plays indie games has noticed a resurgence of great platformers. We’ve entered renaissance of platforming, where the concept of the platformer is not only being explored anew but is also being explored in some very interesting ways. Indie games left and right want to make you ask what a platformer is, what a puzzler is, what an action game is and where the divisions between the genres begin, end and have meaning.

Perhaps no game better illustrates this than Trine. Trine is ostensibly a platformer, but it has elements of adventure, puzzle and roleplaying games to it as well. The gameplay, beyond the basic running, jumping and avoiding danger elements normally associated with platformers, turns on the conceit of switching between three different characters with unique abilities that allow them to solve puzzles and fight enemies in unique ways. One character controls environmental objects and guides them around, doing damage and building solutions to puzzles from existing objects. Another hits enemies hard and destroys barriers with an array of physical powers, mostly existing for the sake of fighting particularly dangerous enemies. The last character is quick, agile, and has a grappling hook: a tremendous advantage in a platforming game.

The end result is a game that is as much about timing jumps and anticipating problems as it is about manipulating your environment and selecting the correct solution to each puzzle. The genre of the platformer is not only expanded: it is essentially contextualized within Trine. By placing emphasis on platforming elements in a game crowded with other bits and pieces without allowing those bits and pieces to overpower one another, Trine has moved the entire platforming genre forward.

Braid is a much more prominent example of a platformer expanding the genre. Braid took the platforming game format and added time manipulation to the mix, a seemingly simple change that manifests itself in all sorts of interesting ways. By making time function in new ways and forcing players to accommodate these shifts in the function of time in order to solve brain busting puzzles, Braid turns the entire genre on its ear. Platforming is no longer a test of reflexes, memorization or foresight. Instead it becomes a cruel, exacting puzzle within the confines of Braid’s.

And Braid goes one further. It adds a story to the mix, making it the first platformer with an actual story that I’ve ever encountered. Most platformers turn on very basic premises, extended explorations of weak plotlines that then grow into fully fledged experiences defined by the journey more than anything else. But Braid has a story about love, inevitability and pain at its heart. It’s buried, optional and subtle (full disclosure, I haven’t finished Braid at time of writing, but I’m tremendously impressed by it so far) but it functions beautifully, a piece of short fiction laying out the existential journey of a selfish, self-centered character who encourages and obviates sympathy at the same time. It’s wonderful to see a game tell a story like this at all, but to see such a tale told through the art of platforming is tremendously heartening for storytelling in video games at large. In Braid the oldest, least story intensive genre has been re-invented as a means of telling a wonderful tale of existential angst.

There are other games that have contributed tremendously to the resurrection of the platforming genre. Games like Limbo continue the tradition of making beautifully artistic, wonderfully designed games. And games like El Shaddai and Bayonetta represent new takes on platforming, wonderful new takes on the subject that make not only platforming but gaming as a whole richer for their efforts. The platforming renaissance that indie games have wrought upon us extends past the indie environment that spawned it, to the broader world of video games at large. It is no longer inconceivable for a retail title to contain platforming elements or to focus its gameplay primarily on platforming. And the big box three-dimensional platformers, for example the Mario Galaxies, have gotten much, much better at correcting the mistakes of their predecessors. Sure, the genre of three-dimensional platformers as a whole still has some serious problems, problems that remain unaddressed by many of the developers who keep returning to the genre. But they’re getting better, and some of the issues, such as controls, camera manipulation and level design and layout, are being dealt with by a handful of people.

The platformer will likely never again rule the gaming world. But the recent renaissance of the genre expresses more than just the resilience of our love of jumping. It also illustrates the durability of games as an art form, games as cultural objects capable of sustaining themselves. It shows that other genres, such as RTSes or adventure games, are unlikely to spontaneously lose their cache with players. While tough times will no doubt beset every genre so long as people still hold them dear and do their best to make something interesting that holds true to the values and themes of a given genre, it will never die.

Congratulations Cougar Hunter!

Some people who hunt cougars track down and fuck attractive older single ladies. Other people hunt and kill big cats.

You mix the two up and hunt and kill older attractive single ladies. Today you’re going to make a particularly satisfying kill when you shoot Marybeth Swanson, a real estate agent who makes six figures a year and has never felt love for a day in her life, in the back of the head while she’s driving down the freeway. It’ll be awesome, except for the guy she was going to fuck that night, twenty year old Blake Nelson, a young man who contributes nothing to society who was counting on Marybeth to pay his rent this month.

Congratulations Cougar Hunter!

Congratulations on Fucking Your Wife's Sister!

Today you’re going to be driving home from your job and you’re going to get lost.

“Shit!” you’ll shout at the sky. “Where the fuck am I?!”

You’ll shrug at the air and then drive to your wife’s sister’s house. She’ll open the door and smile at you.

“Hi!” she’ll say, waving at you energetically. You’ll wink at her and she’ll shrug. Then the two of you will go into her house and bone like wild boning machines.

“That was fair to middling,” she’ll declare the ceiling as you figure out just what to do next.

Eventually you’ll try to kill her with a pillow, but she’ll overpower you and force you to your car, where you’ll drive home because you know how to get from her house to your house pretty well. Maybe that’s why you went to her house in the first place. That and you’ve always liked her more than your wife for reasons you really couldn’t articulate.

Congratulations on Fucking Your Wife’s Sister!

Congratulations on Misquoting Our Founding Fathers!

“I’m pretty sure that they said slavery was an inalienable right,” you’ll say. Or you’ll think you’ll say that, but you’ll actually say.

“Don’t niggers have no rights what a white man oughtn’t be givin’ up I say. Grandpappy told me so.”

The man next to you will understand the gist of what you’re saying.

“I’m relatively certain that what you said is-“ he’ll begin, but Brit Hume will cut him off.

“WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA!”

Later on the clip will air on the Daily Show, and then CNN will pick up the story from there. You’ll foment a new period of divisive political diffidence between two inept news groups, one attempting to perpetrate a story about a liberal media hellbent on destroying “normal Americans” and another based on illustrating how absurd the group perpetrating that first story is in their methods and means while totally ignoring the inherent tragedy that there isn’t a coherent viewpoint that the group should be espousing.

The saddest part is that no one will discuss your shameful racism or your total ignorance of American history, which is really what you wanted people to pay attention to. You think both those things could’ve been corrected if America had stronger public schools, and you entire intolerant, ignorant media image is just one big attempt to show people that if they stopped home schooling people and focused on investing in a solid public infrastructure which promoted knowledge and self-discovery and encouraged tolerance between different people people like you wouldn’t be a problem any more.

But two bands of idiots will simply acquire your own idiocy for their own ends, and that’ll be a tragedy that will never be discovered, which will make it all the more tragic.

Congratulations Misquoting Our Founding Fathers!

Congratulations Zombie Carwash Owner!

Some people are amazing business people. They just come up with ideas that no one knew they wanted and make them into businesses.

You are not one of these people.

Today, in an attempt to make lemonade out of the lemons that are the zombie outbreak that took the world by storm you’re going to start the world’s first zombie car wash.

It’ll be a disaster, since mostly zombies will just vomit blood on windshields instead of cleaning cars. You’ll get a handful of customers, but they’ll mostly just show up to kill your workers, since zombies won’t have any kind of protected status under law. They won’t even be considered legitimate property. The only reason you won’t be arrested on the spot for owning zombies is because if they arrested everyone who owned a zombie, they’d be arresting half the population.

But no one will shed a tear when you finally close your business’ doors in a month’s time. It was pretty poor taste to enslave other people’s loved ones to try and make them wash cars for you while they were trapped in undeath. And it was a shittier idea to do it in the ruins of Boston, where people were assholes to start with.

And we’d like to tell you your next business will do better. But really, no one is going to want to buy a shotgun with a pitchfork attached to it from the guy who used to run the zombie car wash. The zombie outbreak is over, and that business idea would’ve been perfect during the outbreak, but now it just makes you look like you can’t get over the outbreak that took your wife and family from you.

Nut up, junior. Lots of people had hard times during the outbreak, and you don’t see them whining about it. At least, not quite as loudly or publicly as you seem to be doing.

Congratulations Zombie Carwash Owner!

Congratulations on Being the Most Awesome Lesbian in the Tri-State Area!

Today you’re a New Jersey based mother of three (two natural children, one from each of you, and one adopted child) who has been living with the same partner for roughly fifteen years. The two of you have been through hell and high water together. You volunteer at a local women’s shelter and an organic grocery co-op, you own a plot on a shared garden that you tend three times a week while listening to old Liz Phair. You’re pretty great, it’s true. But you could be better.

As of today that will no longer be true.

Today you’re going to drive your partner, blindfolded, into New York City. You’re going to walk her up to the steps of an aging brownstone that you purchased as a surprise for her. When you take the blindfold off she’ll be speechless.

“Oh my god,” she’ll mumble.

You’ll nod at her. “I know it’s a big step to do on my own. And the sale isn’t final. But we’ve talked about moving in town for a long time, and we finally can.”

She’ll have tears welling in her eyes. She’ll know what’s coming, but she’ll let you keep going anyway. She always was great that way.

“There’s a community garden we could get a plot in. I had to pay an arm and a leg to do it, but I managed to get us on a priority listing. And the schools are as good as they can be.” You’ll finish with a shrug before turning around and striding back to the car. Then you’ll open the door and lean over, into the glove box, where you’ll remove a blank piece of paperwork.

You’ll put it in her hands and smile.

“Then there’s this.”

She’ll choke out a sob as she leaps over to embrace you, tears welling out of her eyes and catching in your hair. You’ll stroke the back of her head and whisper into her ear.

“Will you marry me?”

She’ll nod, her chin awkwardly catching your shoulder as the blank license rubs into your back. You’ll want to pull her back, look into her eyes and kiss her, but you’ll let her have her moment first, her head bobbing, her face puffy and hidden, her world terribly different and beautiful.

Congratulations on Being the Most Awesome Lesbian in the Tri-State Area!

Congratulations on Your Week of Binge Drinking!

Today you and your friends are going to sit down on a set of chairs made out of thirty packs of Miller High Life. They’ll be thrones, really. Glorious seats for beggar kings, men without peer or fear. You’ll look at each other, look to the stack of board games, candles and Sun Chips arrayed before you and share a nod. Then you’ll begin.

It might seem implausible that people could live off of beer and snack foods for so long. In fact, it might seem completely absurd that anyone would ever try. But each time one of your wives dies under mysterious circumstances you all gather here in this abandoned warehouse to sit and drink and reflect on life and play a bunch of awesome board games. It’s something you all agreed to when you became writers, an accepted, shared reality. Wives die, and time must be taken to reflect.

So here you sit today, surrounded by the leavings of former lives. Discarded beer boxes, scattered cans from years past and crumbs dating back to the time before George W. Bush. No one will speak, but someone, perhaps Greg, will open the can with a crack and a hiss and the process will begin.

In a week you’ll go back to your jobs. Three of you will return to our offices and continue making dubious predictions. The rest of you will go back to temping in various office settings with your own special degrees of dissatisfaction with life. Hopefully no one will need to be back here soon, since the remaining members of The Circle are pretty happy with their marriages. But you’ll all be ready to answer the call with at least a week’s worth of sick time stored up and a doctor’s note to back it up. Not that anyone at our office needs to use sick time. We know how it is.

Just take your time, make your peace, and enjoy your week of cathartic binge drinking.

Congratulations on Your Week of Binge Drinking!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Off the Path Again!

When we depart from the path laid out for us we encounter trouble.

I’m writing this from a coffee shop in Matowac, a small town on the western edge of Lake Michigan. It is purportedly blanketed in Wi-Fi. It has a pair of attractions – a ferry and a maritime museum. There are two, that’s right two, bike stores. There’s a home brew store and something like five bars on the main drag. There’s a library that shames most of the public libraries I visited in Portland, a massive two level affair impeccably maintained by an impressive staff. This is just in the section I walked through, too. There are a staggering number attractive young college students in the coffee shop I’m in, and the couple (I assume they’re a couple) who run the shop would be perfectly at home in Portland. This place is strange, and I would never have discovered it if the ferry I’d tried to ride in Milwaukie had been operational.

My path was set. Of the two paths recommended to me by the internet for each leg of my journey I chose the more remote one, the one that would show me unexplored territory. I wanted to see more of the country, new places I’d yet to visit. I was excited at the prospect of exploring South Dakota, never having to visit Wyoming again, and seeing Michigan fading into the sunset.

Instead I’m sleeping on a ferry and driving from five in the AM until I collapse tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stay in a shit motel in upstate New York because I’m just too tired to drive a full fifteen hours. Maybe I’ll be cavity searched while entering or exiting Ontario and will, as a result, be detained for a full day, rectum distended, stuck in Canadian jail where I understand you are all too politely raped by very nice people. Maybe I’ll make it back to Massachusetts in one good run, one long trip interrupted only by the occasional tollbooth and brief, uneventful border crossings.

But none of this would’ve happened if I’d stuck to the path I knew, the journey that had been selected for me the first time I crossed the country.

Turns out there’s a consensus on how to generally get from place to place in America. The interstate highway system mostly asks people to stay within the country and drive through the same shitty parts of the world as everyone else. It sets up regular little places to resupply, which in turn dot the highway with insultingly great frequency. It guides you through towns that seemingly exist solely to serve those poor fools stuck on the highway strip. It moves you along the same trails, time and time again, the same ugly settings littered with people who want easy trips along pre-determined routes.

The end result is a gray, polluted slog occasionally broken up by bits of beauty. Northern Wisconsin and Montana, for example, are beautiful beyond belief. Northern Idaho would be a perfect place if not for the bulk of people who live there. But Indiana, Ohio, eastern Washington and North Dakota are all depleted repositories of nature left out to dry by the side of our interstate highways. They’re drab, dying places strewn along the roadside.

The first leg of my journey focused primarily on the prettier parts of that previous trip: mostly Montana and Idaho. When the time came for me to enter North Dakota I decided I’d change my route up and run along highway 212, a lovely, if desolate, strip of road running through the center of South Dakota. It treated me to some breathtaking visages, some amazing little towns cut off from the rest of the world, some surprisingly racism and a handful of surreal sights. For example, I saw a tractor parade holding up traffic just outside of Watertown, South Dakota. I have no idea what it was for, but the lead tractor had an American flag on his helm, so I can only assume it was general patriotism.

I ran into a snag when I was around one hundred miles from Minneapolis. A detour side-tracked me for a whole half an hour. In a ten hour day of travelling a half an hour might not seem like a lot, but it’s absolutely infuriating when you’re making your last big push for a particular leg of your journey and it comes out of nowhere. But it’s nothing compared to a ferry shutdown adding what could be an entire day to your travel time during the home stretch of your trip.

That’s exactly what my current diversion has done. But in addition to that I’ve found a really cool little coffee shop, a place that might as well have come out of a Charles Baxter novel. I’ve found a wonderful main street with all of the comforts of any big town, thrift stores and bars abounding. I’ve found a maritime museum I probably should visit that I definitely won’t. I’ve found a small town the like of which I never would’ve dreamed, filled with small town hippy kids and businesses that are closed on Monday. I’ve found pockets of culture that seem out of place, sights that make me think I’m still in St. Paul. I’ve found a place and had experiences I won’t forget.

I’ve driven a piddling seven hours today, which seems like an absurdly long period of time to any rational human being. But I’ve had to wait in this town for a total of eight hours just to catch my ferry, to put it all in perspective. That’s eight hours where I have to stay awake and stay occupied, eight hours where I smell like I’ve been driving for four days straight and eight hours where I’m walking around town smelling like I slept in a heat wave for the last two nights without air conditioning.

If I’d stuck to the interstate I’d be passing Chicago now. I’d likely be settling into a motel in Indiana or Ohio in a few hours, exhausted and cursing my luck to be stuck in such a shithole state. Instead I’m watching a psychosexual drama play out a few tables away between a group of college kids (who ostensibly aren’t fucking) hell-bent on reading each other’s text messages. I’m decompressing and taking in the middle of the country after a four day tear across the United States.

And I wouldn’t have found any of this if I hadn’t tried to wander off the path. If I hadn’t responded to each hurdle by wandering a little bit farther off each time. If I’d stuck to the trail set for me I’d be bored out of my skull, perfectly calm and collected and well on my way home. Instead I’m kind of a little lost, ostensibly still on the right track and planning to do some truly horrible shit to myself the next day. I’ve been enjoying my surreal journey, my trials and tribulations, and I’ve been appreciating Planes, Trains and Automobiles a little more with each passing hour. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Does this relate to video games? Does it relate to stories? Of course. Stories are most interesting when they veer off the rails, when they enter unexpected territory and revel in it. Sometimes they don’t end up at their destination. Those are the best times, when stories come to new conclusions that we’d never dreamed of, conclusions we were completely unprepared for. I don’t think that’ll be happening to me. Maybe this will be my last will and testament, a document that will somehow survive my brutal murder by Canadian hill people and/or Mounties tomorrow. More likely I’ll just get home a little later than I would’ve liked. I might be tweaking a little when it happens, too.

For now this essay is just an aside, a cop out piece to fill in a weekend while I’m driving across the country. It’s a missive on just how strange and wonderful the middle of this country is, how fantastic it can be to get off the beaten path and how important it is to roll with life’s punches. Never step back from a side trail when it takes you off the path. No matter how it ends, you’ll never regret taking it after it’s happened. Or, if you do, at least you’ll have a good story.

Congratulations on Rewiring Your Bedroom!

You’re a big DIY guy. So when your house has wiring issues you don’t even think to get an electrician to come help you. You just grab your tools, Google around a bit and then get to work.

It’ll start off pretty innocuously. You’ll begin by ripping through the wall in your bedroom to fix the loose wiring near the dimmer switch. It’ll seem straightforward at first, but after two hours and a total of seventy three mumbled “motherfuckers” you’ll be ready to give up, but not before dragging the woman you convinced to marry you into the whole sordid affair.

“Fuck,” you’ll shout at the top of your lungs. “Karen, get in here!”

Your wife will obediently appear, looking like she’s already exhausted by whatever you’re going to ask her.

“Hold these wires, damnit!” you’ll shout, ramming two stripped wires into her hands. She’ll shrug and take them, but she won’t grasp the rubber parts. Instead she’ll take a hold of the exposed copper. The light will immediately start working again, though it’ll be extremely dim.

“It’s working!” you’ll shout.

“This kind of hurts,” your wife will mutter.

“Let me see if I can make it brighter,” you’ll mumble, getting down on your knees and unzipping her pants.

Twenty five minutes and one tired tongue later you’ll have made the lights much, much brighter for a short time, and then suddenly made them all but explode for a five second period before making them basically go out.

“I think I’ve got this figured out,” you’ll beam up at her from your position on the floor.

“I think I’d let to let go of these,” she’ll say, still shivering from coming all over your face.

Congratulations on Rewiring Your Bedroom!

Congratulations on Making the Most Awkward Toast at the Wedding!

“…and may the Holocaust never come to your wedding. Or the planet again. Or any other planet. Mentioned in this toast. Or in any other toast.”

You’ll wipe the sweat from your brow and smile awkwardly at the bride and groom, raising your glass before ramming it into your own mouth and chipping one of your teeth.

“Fugh,” you’ll mumble as you try to reach into the gum between your lips and teeth and grab a hold of the shard of glass. Your fingers will slip as you try to pull it out while blood pours from your mouth on to the ground as the rest of the wedding party stands in silence and just watches as you struggle on your knees.

“Doth abyove hab pliers?” you’ll shout, at which the crowd will shake their collective heads and look collectively down at the ground, giving you a moment’s relief from your shame.

Congratulations on Making the Most Awkward Toast at the Wedding!

Congratulations Swimsuit Assessor!

Many people wear shirts that say “Swimsuit Inspector” in big block letters or, if they’re less specific, “female body inspector.” These people are almost all douchebags, and should be universally reviled. But did you know that these are actually real occupations filled by real people, and that you’re actually one of them?

Your day will begin with a quick jaunt down to Falmouth beach, where you’ll approach a number of young women with your clip board, ticking off boxes as merited. Then you’ll ask them questions about religion, politics, humor and popular culture. Their answers will be mostly unacceptable, but that’s the norm for your day.

Then you’ll be flown by super secret supersonic jet to a college campus in the Midwest. In the midst of downtown St. Paul young women will be splayed out on a lawn, covered by little more than swimsuits. You’ll apply your exam to each of them in turn. Eventually you’ll come upon a young woman who is reading a massive textbook on civil rights and liberties in her swimsuit. She’ll be wearing light carbon glasses frames and staring intently at the words, so intently she won’t notice when your gaze lingers a bit longer than is necessarily professional over here ass.

“Hello miss,” you’ll begin your quiz, at which point she’ll look up and acknowledge your presence.

She’ll hop up to her feet and extend her hand, pulling her i-pod buds out of her ears.

“Oh hi!” she’ll beam at you. “I didn’t notice you there. How’s it going?”

You won’t know how to respond. Her smile, the question, her energy… It’ll all be so new to you.

“I’ve got questions,” you’ll stammer at her, and her smile won’t skip a beat.

She’ll keep it up as she answers each of your questions. At one point she’ll unselfconsciously tuck her i-pod into her bra, placing the device in one cup and the balled up headphones in the other.

“That looks uncomfortable,” you’ll say, and she’ll shrug.

“Gotta put ‘em to use, right?”

After twenty five minutes you’ll have the survey completed and you’ll simply stand there, staring at her, as you detach her carbon copy from your clipboard.

“Congratulations, madam,” you’ll mumble towards your feet. “You’re the perfect woman.”

She’ll laugh, then look at the form, where you’ll have actually scored her responses to every single question. She’ll look at you as if she’s offended for a moment, until she reaches the part of the form detailing her stance on social issues, her capacity for human compassion and her easygoing nature and approach to sex.

Then she’ll smile, scribble something down at the bottom of the paper, and hand it back to you.

“Thanks,” she’ll say. “But I’ve got to study.”

Then she’ll hunker down on the lawn again, the grass pressing into her perfect thighs. She’ll sit facing you, her shoulders hunched over so that you’re given a spectacular view of her cleavage. After a few seconds of staring at her chest you’ll look up and see her face, smiling at you. You’ll turn away, red in the face, and look down at the paper. Her phone number will be scribbled down there, along with her name.

You’ll mumble it to yourself as you stumble towards your rental car, searching for excuses to stay in town another night.

Congratulations Swimsuit Assessor!

Congratulations Super Hot Lady Bassist!

Most bassists are dudes with beards. These beards cover slightly ugly faces that lead these men to become bassists so that women will touch them and potentially even fuck them. But you’re not like that at all.

First of all, you’re a lady. You’re one hell of a lady. You’ve got the uh and the ah and the UH goin’ AWN. To look upon you on the street is to look upon the face of love and to know for one moment peace in all the world. You get a lot of young men quietly staring at you at your shows.

But today things are going to get dicey. A boy is going to ask you to go out and you, against your better judgment, are going to say yes. The boy will be pretty, and he’ll be from another band. Your lead singer, who moves from man to man easily, will say he’s “alright, not great,” and shrug when questioned on his nature. Your guitarist will shrug and your drummer, being a drummer, will not be asked for his opinion and will instead quietly sit at home with his wife and watch NBC sitcoms.

Once you reach the bar you’ll immediately know something is wrong. It’ll be a trendy place, filled with pretty young people avoiding looking at one another. They’ll be drinking small drinks, wearing t-shirts from bands from the seventies and none of them will be talking about a single interesting thing.

“Sup babe,” the young man will nod at you as you enter the bar.

“Hi,” you’ll say, your muscles screaming at you to leave.

“Waddya drinkin’?” he’ll ask mystifyingly. After a few seconds you’ll figure out what he means and nod.

“I guess a beer?” you’ll respond.

He’ll laugh at you as loud as he can.

“You’ll have to be more obscure if you wanna get inside these jeans,” he’ll reply before pointing at his groin, unimpressive beneath a pair of extremely tight pants.

At this point you’ll just lose it and punch him right in the mouth with your big bassy fist. Blood will fly up from between his teeth and he’ll drop to the ground, blood flooding his mouth from the stump of his tongue, foaming up between his teeth.

You’ll walk outside and leave him there on the floor, where the other hipsters will ignore him. You’ll light a cigarette as you walk to your car, your knuckles bleeding from the force of your blow. A young man in a flannel shirt will look at you and nod.

“I’d hate to see the other guy.”

You’ll smile at him, crack the door to your Prius, and roll down your window so you can smoke while you drive.

Congratulations Super Hot Lady Bassist!

Congratulations on Amazing Us With Your Parlor Tricks!

Today you’re going to take a bunch of apples and juggle them.

“Oooh!” we’ll all cry in amazement as we watch you juggle apples.

“Thank you,” you’ll say before bowing and beginning your text trick.

Next you’ll take some coins and make them appear from behind someone’s ear.

“Oooooooh!” they’ll ululate, louder this time.

You’ll pause for applause before showering the audience with pennies, injuring one young man and then making everyone else overjoyed as they’re showered with hard, dirty, almost worthless money.

Then you’ll summon a young man named James to the stage. James will hail from South Carolina. He’ll be dressed in a suit and tie and he’ll look kind of sullen.

After they get a few seconds to catch just how sad James is you’ll begin the trick, tearing off James clothing to reveal a pink tank top and bright blue running shorts underneath, leading down to flawlessly shaved legs and a meticulously manicured pair of feet. You’ll give James a big old kiss on the mouth and he’ll light up, laughing in joy and holding on to your shoulder.

“I’m gay,” you’ll shout to your mom, who will be sitting in the back row, watching your show with increasing mystification.

The crowd will explode in joy.

Congratulations on Amazing Us With Your Parlor Tricks!

Congratulations Ice Cream Kid!

You’re a kid and you hate ice cream. Fucking hate it. It hurts your teeth, makes you poop funny and it’s cold. Horribly, horribly cold. But everyone expects you to love ice cream. If you exclude yourself from the culture surrounding ice cream you’ll find yourself a social pariah. So what’s a boy to do?

You’ve spent months pondering this question. Moving towards the seemingly inevitable conclusion that you might have to live out your days as an outcast, a poor wretch for whom the world is simply a string of increasingly hurtful rejections that eventually will push you inside yourself. But you won’t give up. You’ll think and think and think and then you’ll come up with a solution.

You’ll start making ice cream. You’ll steal your mom’s credit card when she’s insensate in a haze of weed smoke one night and order it off the internet, and it’ll arrive a week later.

Like a brewer who hates beer, you’ll approach the entire process with a coolly detatched mindset. You’ll begin by learning the basics, testing them on your little brother, who is a normal fucking kid and likes ice cream just fine.

“This is good!” he’ll cry as he samples your vanilla, and you’ll nod your approval. He’ll respond similarly to all your basics, made simply by googling recipes that people have come up with on the internet and putting them to use in your ice cream making kit.

Once you start to understand how and why these recipes work you’ll begin to work on improving them. It’ll be rocky at first. Your chocolate will taste chalky, you’re strawberry flat and flavorless after one particularly poor attempt. But eventually you’ll find perfection and your little brother will briefly lose consciousness.

This will begin the fourth phase of your plan: advanced experiments.

You always recognized ice cream’s potential for exploratory flavorings. From strange berry combinations to grown-up blends that embody everything most people hate about each flavoring class, ice cream has always seemed to be wasted on those who love it for you. So you’ll begin experimenting with things like marijuana infused vanilla (your mother will love it) and whiskey infused coffee ice cream (which you’ll call Aunt Molly’s Secret). These flavors will pick up buzz around your house, and before long you’ll find yourself the toast of each family dinner, which will begin phase five.

Acquiring funding.

Your rich uncle Carl who doesn’t have any kids will be alone in his apartment when you knock on his door. And when you drop your proposal on his coffee table he’ll actually look impressed as you flip through it.

“Your cost-benefit projections are pretty air tight, kid,” he’ll say with approval. He’ll agree to fund you, but he’ll insist on maintaining majority ownership in the resulting business until such a time as you reach the age of majority. You more or less expected this (Carl is kind of a dick) but you’ll still feel a little disappointed that he didn’t just agree to put the money into a blind trust that you could access once you turned 18.

The business that emerges will be a huge success. You’ll make Ben and Jerry look like two dudes blowing each other. You’ll rake in money hand over fist, establishing factories in America with real benefits and actual compensation for workers. You’ll become a titan of industry, wealthy beyond your wildest dreams before the age of ten. Which means you will no longer have to worry about having friends, because you’ll be richer than god, and people with money don’t need to worry about other people’s opinions.

Congratulations Ice Cream Kid!