Real Life Stories 4: The Casino

You can get lost in the slot machines like you can get lost in a forest. Rows and rows of them twinkle identically off into the distance. Each brightly lit grouping is surrounded by its own handful of chain smokers in sweat pants with twenty or fifty or a hundred dollars worth of credits pumped into their machines. The old days of buckets full of nickles and manual arms that you crank yourself are behind us, it appears. Everything is button operated, which takes away the charm for me, but not more so than the tacky bullshit they paste over the front of every machine. A casino is a thing that I don't think I could conjure up in my imagination and fake if had I never been to one. I couldn't make this shit up. Ladybugs and Greek Gods and lions and wolves and Elvis, they're all there in big plastic paintings above computer screen slots. Empty drinks and dirty ashtrays don't last long on the ledges of the machines. The place stays clean like a four star hotel, despite all odds. They are overstaffed to the gills with servers and security and the place runs so smoothly you don't give them a second thought.
Walking through the rows with a whiskey and coke in hand I feel just a touch like Thompson, or at least I wish I felt like him. I am to Thompson what a casino in Battle Creek is to Vegas, so I guess it all fits together. This isn't exactly what you get in Nevada, but it's the same breed of ugliness and desperation. Everyone here is so poor, wearing the kind of old sports jackets that were popular in the nineties that you can only find in thrift stores now. They're overweight and they walk with limps and they have bad haircuts. Where do they all come from? I wonder if some of them plan to make a fortune counting cards or betting big money at this casino in southwest Michigan. One man I see only has one eye, and the other is replaced by blank, disfigured skin, as though it were melted shut. At the same moment I smell something like burning paper and I wonder at the coincidence. Or maybe that rich scent in the air is pure oxygen being pumped regularly into the building every so often, and I just happen to be under a vent. A friend of mine told me they do such things, though I thought it was illegal. Who knows? Who knows what pure oxygen smells like, for that matter?
I like to gamble for a few reasons. One is that the feeling of winning, even just a little bit, is basically unbeatable. When the cards and dice start to go your way, even the most stoically atheist (and I am pretty stone cold on that front) start to feel that some force or energy is working with them. Another is that I feel I'm pretty good at it. I play poker and, though I lose more than I win, I take second more than I lose. I was surprised, beyond anything else, when the blackjack dealer took twenty dollars in three hands, which lasted for about thirty seconds.
That said, I was not surprised when a twenty dollar bet on black at the roulette wheel paid out and I doubled my money. And I wasn't surprised that another bet of the same denomination did the same. And another. And another. Above all, it made sense to me.
When the five of us packed back into the car at one in the morning, only two of us came away ahead. Turning twenty dollars into one hundred isn't a magic trick, but it certainly feels like one.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and Jimmy Buffett

A few days ago, one of the greatest calamities of my life transpired. It was an event that was so horrible, so unbelievably and inconceivably bad, that the surrealistic nightmare of it all is nearly too much for my fragile psyche to bear. I feel that at any instant I will collapse as I am consumed by burning, radioactive waves of fear and staggering rage that will clash together like the pulses of exploding stars, and my eternal soul will be lost in outer space where I will wander cold and alone forever.
What could make me feel so very, very incredibly awful? Awful like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 when the bomb goes off and her very skeleton is set on fire? Awful so that it seems, as the doctor said, "the possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real,"? What could cause me to write with such incredible hyperbole?
Only this:
I have just discovered that Hunter S. Thompson was close friends with Jimmy Buffett.


FUCK!!!!!!!

This is exactly like being a kid and finding out that, before he was the Devil, Lucifer had been an angel. So you're eight and you're like, "God and the Devil used to be friends? Well now I don't know what to believe..."

Only this is like a thousand times worse. And here's why.

I have hero-worshiped Thompson since I first saw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was fifteen. As a teenager, I was fascinated by his unbelievable need and ability to rebel. To do everything that was forbidden by cultural norms and always come out on top. His life, lived on the edge, and passion for irresponsibility was such an inspiration to me at the time. I felt surrounded by the normalcy of suburban life and of school, and here was this side to reality that I had never really seen or thought of before. It is no exaggeration to say that Thompson literally changed the course of my life. Without him, and others like him, I might have caved to societal pressures and chosen a safe and practical career like dentistry or accounting. Thompson is a standing testimony to living and dying by what you believe in, and made me realize that safety-nets and compromises are for weak-willed villainous scum.
As an adult, I continue to admire Thompson for different reasons. While he is immediately attractive to all males between the ages of 14 and 25 for his balls-out craziness and whiskey-drinking, acid-dropping make-your-own-luck approach to life, he was also a visionary. Thompson, above all, just wanted to do something. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to be important. He wanted to find the American Dream, he wanted to find an honest politician, he wanted to become Sheriff of Aspen and change the town for the better. Thompson is a towering monument of living life to the fullest and on the edge, but also to slamming your fists against the brick wall of the establishment even though you know you're not going to get anywhere. He was a dreamer and a brilliant writer and a genius and his life-story is enough to give one hope of extraordinary things in the dismal and soulless world we live in.

And then, there's Jimmy Buffett.
Jimmy Buffett is, in my eyes, everything that is wrong with the human species. He is a talentless, gutless, money-hungry, sham of an artist. This is a guy that, after being mistakenly shot at by Jamaican police when leaving the country, wrote a song called "Jamaica Mistaica." Doesn't that just make your blood fucking curdle? What a hack. This is a guy that I have so much personal distaste for that I actually started a hate group for him on facebook, and it's going strong.
The reason I hate Buffett so much is that he's exactly everything Thompson is not. His music is easy and soulless. There is no pain or suffering or sacrifice in his songs. He doesn't live and die by his songs like all the great musicians of our time and of all other times. He has risked nothing and therefore he produces nothing. He plays an acoustic guitar with a great big smile and a flower shirt and a lei and that stupid little wrist band of his, and I just want to watch him die. He is more than a crap musician and a shitty novelist and a smiling idiot who spends too much time in the sun. He is a symbol for all that is disgusting and vile in the world of art. He is my nemesis.

So, watching these two conflicting ideologies come together in friendship... it's really just more than I can handle. What can I do? Do I think less of Thompson? Do I think more of Buffett? Each is equally impossible. I feel betrayed. I keep imagining them together. Hanging out in the Caribbean drinking rum, swimming, driving around on Buffett's boat, laughing it up and having a good time. It makes my skin crawl. This must be what Oedipus felt like. A sinking in the pit of your stomach like a rock dropped into a well, because you know something horrible has happened and there is no way to ever correct it.

Animorphs

A quick plot summary, for the unfortunate among you who don't already know: Animorphs is a series about five young teenagers who suddenly stumble upon a dying alien (an andalite named Elfangor) who tells them about the greatest-ever threat to humanity: the yeerks. Yeerks are brain-dwelling parasites that take control of a host's mind and are able to fully control the body they inhabit as well as access memories. It is in this way that the yeerks can slowly conquer a planet from the inside out and enslave an entire race before anyone even knows a war is being fought. In an attempt to give humanity a fighting chance, Elfangor gives these five youths the ability to acquire animal DNA and morph into any animal of their choosing. It is with this small advantage that Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias and Marco spy on and fight the yeerk presence on Earth in secret for three years.

I think it's going to be pretty much impossible to explain just how incredible K.A. Applegate's Animporphs series really is, but I guess it's about time I tried.

Let my opinion of the series stand very clear from the beginning of this blog: I think Animorphs is the greatest collective work of fiction ever produced. Through a series of 54 shorter books and 8 companion books that reached the length of typical novels, the sheer scope of the series alone is enough to boggle the mind. In short, this epic story is told in no less than 10,000 pages total. A number which Stephen King's lengthy magnum opus The Dark Tower series doesn't even come close to. It doesn't even cut it in half.
Now, I sense some of you are immediately doubting my claim that Animorphs is the best thing ever. "But Jordan," you whine, "that series was about kids turning into animals. It's written for ten-year-olds. How could it be greater than Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? Length isn't enough to make something great."
First, let me say that I'm surprised you would leave yourself so wide open for a "that's what she said" in your retort. In the interest of taking the high road, I'm going to let that one slide.
Secondly, I'm the first to admit that on the surface this series looks pretty stupid. Especially if you look at some of the absolutely ridiculous covers. Like this one:

But you can't judge a book by its cover, dammit!
In actuality, the grave seriousness of Animorphs is what stands out most in my memories. This isn't 10,000 pages of kids turning into butterflies. It's a 10,000 page chronicling of war, and the central themes of the series are appropriately aligned with that subject matter. Once you've suspended your disbelief and firmly settled yourself into the bizarre sci-fi nature of the material, what you've got is five teenagers who struggle with things like dehumanization, the responsibility or leadership, sanity, insanity and morality. It is told with the horror of actual war, where the battle is not only physical, but mental as well. Is it right to kill unarmed enemies? Is it right to ask a team member and friend to carry out a dangerous mission? Is it right to retreat, to continue, to do anything?
Horrible things happen with surprising frequency in this series. Characters you've grown attached to have mental break-downs, crumble under the pressure, cease to be heroes. In fact, a lot of this series serves to debunk childish notions of battle and war as being something magnificent and heroic. The battles that are fought are not great feats or victories, but rather a series of jumbled, confusing actions that leave regret and sickness in the hearts of those who fought. Each decision, whether in the heat of battle or for the greater good, comes later to haunt the character who made it, and they forever feel the weight of their actions and their own short-comings.
And not just the war itself tortures the minds of the five protagonists, but the effects of the war as well. The life of one of the main characters is completely ruined in the very first book when he is trapped, permanently, in the form of a hawk. And this series doesn't come to you with all the gentle and convenient packaging that seems to characterize children's fiction. There is no easy way out of this. For the greater part of the series, which spans over three years, this young man is trapped as a fucking hawk. He can't pursue the girl he loves, he can't live his life without fear of the elements, and he has to learn to hunt and kill mice in order to eat. Through the alternating first person telling of the series, which serves to so quickly break down any barriers between you and the fiction, the reader is immediately struck by the notion "What if that happened to someone I know? What if that happened to me?" It seems so ridiculous and so easy to furrow your brow at, but if such a thing were to actually happen it would be completely devastating, and the writing fully captures that emotion.

Beyond the ass-kicking tragedy and depth of the series, the story itself is timeless in nature. All the great elements of an epic story are there.

• All of the main characters are memorable and specific. Their relationships are real, charming, and memorable. Alone they are readily accessible to the reader and so incredibly human that they can't help but be identified with. Before your eyes they grow and change as the nature of their burden becomes more serious, more important, and more terrifying. The leader of the group, Jake, is as memorable a hero as has ever been written.
  
• The threat of the book is ultimate evil. The yeerks spread through the galaxy as an uncompromising virus, obliterating their enemies and subjecting their captured to a fate worse than death: making them a prisoner in their own mind and body. Visser Three, the leading antagonist of the series, is a straight-forward villain up in the ranks of Sephiroth and Darth Vader.
• BUT just as Sephiroth spirals into madness because of confusion and hurt, and Darth Vader returns to the light side at the end of Return of the Jedi, these ultimates must be pushed and questioned. Sympathy for yeerks, whose natural state is blindness and powerlessness, is established. Also, our great heroes must run the risk of evil themselves when the gains of immoral actions seemingly outweigh one's own soul.
• The loss or gain of the war is total. Either humanity is enslaved or it is not. The war is for the entire planet. The stakes are high and the story is so damn epic.

In the end it just makes me sad that I seem to be the only one who feels this way. I mean, I can't even buy an Animorphs shirt online. Because of the length, which is part of what makes this series so massively epic in the first place, no movie interpretation could ever do the series justice, and I fear the astounding story will never reach a mass audience.
My suggestion to you is to read this series. Maybe not all of it, maybe not most of it, but some of it. Your refusal to do so is unsurprising, but if you've never read and loved the Animorphs, to me you're no different than those freaks who have never seen Star Wars.

In the end, if you don't like this series, we probably don't have anything in common. It is literally the most amazing thing I've ever read.

The Disparity of Wealth on Christmas

Christmas.
A time for family, gift giving, and feeling the true weight of how poor you actually are. Well, for me anyways. And for a lot of other people in this country during this recession. This holiday season, while walking home from work past brand new cars and homeless men, I got to thinking about the people that Have and the people that Have Not. Particularly, I was thinking about the all-too-common theory that poor people are poor because they way to be.

What is that? Who would ever want to be poor? It's hard as shit to be poor. It's stressful and depressing and every financial decision, no matter how small, is a painstaking decision. Furthermore, the poor are surrounded by the judging eyes of the Haves.

I don't understand how we came to worship money so feverishly in this country, but that appears to be the situation. At times it seems to me that we live in some sort of bizarre nightmare reality in which the most important thing in your life is supposed to be your job. Does that give you chills or what? The thing that gives your life meaning is the way you make money? That sounds awful.

A lot of different philosophies speculate at the true meaning of life. It might be to find happiness, it might be to find peace, it might be to help others and it might be 42. All of these seem valid to me. What does not seem plausible is that the ultimate goal of one's life should be to have a solid financial foundation, with good investments and low interest rates. I mean, have I watched too much Bill Hicks and read too much Palahniuk? Do I just have an especially strong distaste for bullshit? Am I wrong? Is life really about mortgages and nice cars and all the boring percentages? Because I would prefer my life to be a little more interesting than that.

You know, when you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense that the Haves would see the Have Nots as enemies. The Haves are all cooped up in their offices, stuck in neck ties, tricking themselves into believing that work matters. Paperwork matters. Deadlines matter. Business is important, damnit. And if they have to waste the only lives they have to live on making money, why should anyone else get any of it, whether it be a quarter to a homeless man or taxes that pay for public services?

And that's why I continue to be unsurprised about the failure of the health care reform. No one should get anything for free in this country. The only problem is that people just aren't working hard enough. And that's the kind of short-sighted, uncomplicated thinking that you develop when you start to define your worth by the money you make. You start to judge everyone else by the money they don't make. That's called The Process of Othering and it makes things less complicated. By thinking of the poor as others, they aren't really people.
"They" are all too lazy to work.
"They" are all just drug addicts and alcoholics.
"They" lie and cheat to get food stamps and medicaid.
"They" are immoral. Automatically. Because they don't make enough money.

It is so acceptable to hate and resent the poor. It's so easy to imagine that they are constantly scheming up ways to get the money that you have worked so hard for. Democracy was built to protect the rich from the poor, because "they" are the enemy.
But we're all human beings, and that should matter more than what's in your bank account.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Pokemon

Let me be very clear about this: Fuck the Blue version. Red is where it's at.

Within the last few days I decided to fire up the old Pokemon cartridge. It's a game I come back to every now and then, just like all the games of my early adolescence (like Super Mario 64, Final Fantasy 7, Ocarina of Time, etc...) I think of that time in my life as a sort of golden age of video games, when I wasn't distracted by things like work, or a social life, or the desire to create and achieve.
Coming back to these games is like coming back to my own bed after a long trip away from home. It's always nice to be back in a familiar universe.
Now I'm back into Pokemon like I haven't been in years, and an idea has been forming in my mind since I started the new file. I wasn't certain that I could be right at first. I was sure that I would be proven wrong, but I must say that now I am confident of my new opinion, and want to share it with the world:

Pokemon proves that all this ADHD, hyperactive-kid epidemic talk of the last decade is just absolute, flat-out bullshit.
Why? Because Pokemon is an INCREDIBLY slow game. Difficult, one might say, to even get through.

You start off with one Pokemon of your choosing. Now, training one pokemon wouldn't be so tiresome, but you can carry six pokemon at a time. Now, tell me, who isn't going to want to carry six? So, you go through the game, fighting and capturing the low-level pokemon that you come across and building them up as well. The thing is, these new pokemon you capture (and even the ones you start with, originally) are just as weak as the pokemon they're fighting. So that means your Pidgey and your Rattata are good for maybe one or two fights before you have to take them back to the Pokecenter in town to heal.
And hey, you're not a psychic. You're no Alakazam. So you're gonna want to build up all the new pokemon you come across (especially in the beginning) in case they have any sweet moves or evolve into something cooler. So you spend hours of gameplay walking around grass and caves, fighting little fights for measley amounts of experience, and as the game progresses you stay forever locked into a losing battle to make your little animals stronger.
AND THAT'S THE WHOLE GAME!
Most games that are released nowadays can be beaten in about 10 hours. There's no real reason to buy games anymore, because you can run through them no problem in two or three days. But in Pokemon, the game has only just begun at the 10 hour mark. I JUST got the ability to move quickly in the game. My pokemon are JUST beginning to get all four of their moves. I've caught 27 out of 150, and all I see are fucking oddishes, which are basically radishes with feet.
I mean, I read for fun, and this game is trying my patience.
How could a country full of little hyperactive kids sit through this entire game, content only to move their thumbs and watch a little cartoon kid walk in circles in the grass? I submit that they could not.