I’m listening to Funwater Radio week five as I type this.  Lindsey and I selected and mixed it tonight at the kitchen table as she made Jack Kirby themed cookies for an art show tomorrow.  The major chord of washing machine, dryer, and fan is sustained behind me.   It’s 11:30 and pitch black outside, but I’ve got the front door open and I can smell the warm grass and trees outside.  I’m glad I’ve got enough sense to see that this scene is awesome, this moment is great.  But I still feel low and that bothers me.

I haven’t written you beautiful few for a while and for this I apologize.  I wish I had a good reason like a broken wrist or a multi-million dollar screenplay, but I really don’t.  I reached a weird point where I felt I was writing this thing according to a style sheet, each entry had some formula to follow.  Which could be fine, but it wasn’t a good style nor  a good formula.   I wanted to speak of happy things and make you guys laugh, but all my jokes got really bitter and unrecognizable even as jokes.  I wanted to talk about funny things at work, but they’ve been  coming less and less.

I’ve held strong to the belief that if I’m unhappy it’s mostly my fault, and  I just haven’t looked at the shitty moment from the right, bright viewpoint.    Your surroundings are only as good as  what you put into them, and life is all one shade of gray with your moods casting different colors upon it.  But lately this method has been failing me.  I took a break to find brighter colors, I guess.  It’s not serious or anything, mellow melancholy at best, but still it’s time to be happier.

The other day I was walking to the bathroom and saw a semi truck stopped at the light at Washington and Sylvester.  The driver was staring at the road ahead, but he had this crazy big smile and he was rubbing his hands together excitedly.  I was wonderstruck by him.  What could he possibly be so happy about right now?  His hand rubbing was that exaggerated, almost cartoonish excitement–like fat uncles at the thanksgiving table when the turkey’s brought out.  And there wasn’t anyone outside but me, I mean he wasn’t being offensive about some young lady walking by.  He just thought of something that got him super pumped up and I caught him at that exact  moment.  It was kind of fantastic.    It made the walk to the bathroom better.

Barbering’s been bumming me for a while now.  The shop  and the hotel and the cycle of it.  It doesn’t help that there’s a bump in the wall of the urban onion bathroom that looks EXACTLY like a fetus, so in the slow times I build up elaborate fantasies of the space baby being incubated in our walls and what sort of terror it will unleash when born.  The spot has stayed the same size for a while, so at least the terror is not growing.  Then again, I don’t  know the gestation period for astro-babies.  But this story is not going anywhere.  Here’s a better one.

When walking to get coffee this morning I saw a couple guys working in the alley.  They had shirts that said, “Got Carpet?”.  They were working for some carpet company.  This bothered me , cos the slogan sounded linguistically gross, and also  I want people to generally be wittier.  Like, even if you only know carpets and how to run a business installing carpets, you should still have enough humor  to come up with an original tagline.  It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be yours.  ‘Cars, pets, nothing’s too tough for our carpets.”  Something clumsy but new like that.  Eagan’s has the tagline, “Got Goop?”  There’s an auto place on Southbay with the slogan, “Got Tint?” and now this “Got Carpet?”

When it first came out, “Got Milk?” made no sense.  There’s no joke there or anything.  It sounds a little discomforting.    I don’t know why so many businesses have  adopted it as their own.

Then I realized that I’m thinking too hard on this.  All these people want to do is say what kind of service they offer  and “Got Whatever?” is an easy, two word way of doing that.  And then I realized that I was seeing the birth of a new, “…..And Sons”.

Here’s what I mean:  You know all the different businesses that say, “Brooks and Sons” or “Steinway and sons” or  “Schuster and Sons”.  At some point , that “And Sons” didn’t exist.  Some carpet guy would just open a place called “stan’s carpets.”  Then maybe one day his son joined on, but Stan didn’t care for him much, and kept the name.  Then a little later his other son joined on and now Stan had to admit it wasn’t just him running the place anymore, he was getting older and his sons had grown into responsible lads.  So he changed the store to “Stan and Son’s Carpets”.

Other businesses saw this and realized how easy and quickly that new slogan explained the strong, family nature of their work so they changed their names as well, to “Foster and Son’s appliances” or “Cooper and Son’s Nickelodeons” or whatever.  The point is, at one time this idea didn’t exist and someone had to start it.  Now, the “And Sons” is just an affectation most of the time.   You don’t  have to have kids to use it, the title goes unquestioned.  And you dont’ have to have a direct line back to the dairy industry to use, “Got Piano Tunings?”.  The phrase is for everyone.

Thirty years from now, “Got Something?” will be an old-timey affectation to show how you remember the good old days when businesses were honest and just told you they “Got burgers” or whatever.  It’ll be used the same way craft soda companies use the phrase “a revitalizing tonic!” today.  Or how stores will call themselves Shoppes, even that that extra “pes” has no part in their dialect.  We were born during the birth of a new “…Sons”, the beginning of a new cliche galaxy.  .  That’s kind of cool.  We can remember it’s origin point, and we can remember the strange transition period  when you’d see someone in an alley and you’d just want to scream, “hey carpet man!  you’re shirt makes no sense!”

Instead I just went  and got coffee.

So I might be in a lower mood than usual, and I might have just listened to Kathryn Calder’s “So Easily” about 8 times in a row like some sad teen, and I might have felt sad that I only have the song on MP3 because i’d like to hear the needle hit the end of the record and have to physically start it over again, because lifting the needle’s arm and placing it again at the edge  is the gesture of pleasant bummerness.    But I  can change these things.  I don’t need to fixate on the barbering, I can look beyond it, at least to the sidewalks and alleys surrounding the shop and then I’ll carry on from there.

So here was the best part of my day today.  Or at least the funniest (the best part might have been talking about Street Fighter IV, Haruki Murakami, and Stand-up Comedy with a new customer–pleasant twining.)

But this afternoon I was walking to get another cup of coffee(can you see the ebb and flow of my day?)  And the Fifth Avenue Sandwich Shop guy was smoking on the backstoop and talking to my building manager(who I cannot stand because he looks and acts  like a burp).  Tim(the 5th ave man) says, “THERE HE IS!” to me and I smile and say hi.  Then he says, “I haven’t seen you come in for a roast beef sandwich lately.”  And I tell him I was in a couple weeks back and he laughs and says good good.

then my manager says, “You have to try their pulled pork sandwich.”
At this point I’ve walked past them so I say, “I’ll do that.” and keep walking.

But he’s not done talking about the pulled pork, “The sauce was excellent and the meat was perfect.”

I turn around to be polite  but he’s not looking at me, he’s smoking and staring at the asphalt.  I can’t tell if he’s still talking to me so I keep walking.    I dont’ think he knows either because he never directly addresses me , but his voice keeps getting louder as I walk away as if he unconsiously wants to make sure I hear him..

“They used a kaiser roll!”  he bellows out.  I reach the end of the alleyway now and am standing next to Batdorf and this guy is now a good 60 feet away but I can hear him crystal clear cos he’s straight up yelling.

“I THINK HE SLOW-ROASTED THE MEAT!” he cried out, “IT MUST HAVE COOKED ALL NIGHT.  IT CAME WITH POTATO SALAD AND I GOT A DIET COKE!”

The air was perfect, the sky was blue, and I’m listening to a  man scream at the top of his lungs the details of yesterday’s special.  It was so awkward and absurd and so weirdly pleasant and I thought, “I want Funwater to know about this!”

It felt good to think that.  I wanted you to know that too.

Friedrich

A Game by Richard Sivel

Today we will be reviewing the board game Friedrich.  It is a four to five hour game for 3-4 players that sets out to simulate the Seven Year War between Prussia and the rest of Europe.  It is my second favorite game, a legitimate piece of art, and another example of how beautifully crazy the human mind can work–what grand things can be thought of from disparate sparks of whimsy and then melded into some new whole.  It is also, of course, incredibly fun.

from designer's website, histogames.de

The game pits three players against one.  The three represent the major powers of Europe at the time-Austria, France and Russia along with some other minor powers.  The unlucky player is Prussia-Friedrich the Great- the country and leader that everyone is out to get.  Luckily for Friedrich the three Europeans aren’t actually allied, they all have selfish goals in mind, cities each needs to conquer to be declared sole winner.   Friedrich just needs to survive long enough until the other country leaders either die or surrender out of exhaustion.  It is quite hard to win as Friedrich.  Signing up to play as him is like signing up to play “Stop Hitting Yourself” with your older brother, both of you knowing you can’t stop hitting yourself until he lets go of your hand but you can’t figure out how to make him stop.  The game plays differently each time you depending on which country you choose.  Sometimes you want the slow behemoth of Austria, sometimes the darting nimble France or the desperate, fatalistic Russia.  And sometimes you want to have a small aneurysm while everyone yells at you for four hours and you panic sweat through your shirt so hard it becomes unusable.  Then you’d volunteer to play Friedrich.

The game was created by Richard Sivel, springing from an idea he got while watching TV.  If only all our TV watching led to such results!  He wanted to make a game that combined the troop management and tactical maneuvering of war games with battles fought using only playing cards.  Also, he wanted it to be historically accurate while also endlessly replayable.  And he wanted it simple enough to keep the rules to a few pages.  It took him fourteen years.  Friedrich succeeds on all fronts.  To me, playing Friedrich is similar to reading Nabokov or Flann O’Brien.  The treat is peeking into a gorgeous brain and seeing the Babbage-like machine within producing such wonderful thoughts, thoughts as intricate as the network of branches on a tree.

The game is played with a large battle map of Prussia and its surrounding environs and five decks of playing cards.  Players move their wooden generals around from point to point in a meticulously detailed board where the distance from point to point is based on the actual topography of the land.  The map is overlaid with a grid, with each box of the grid bearing a card suit.  When Friedrich and another country meet they fight using cards, playing only in the suit their pieces are currently located in.  At the end of the round a card of fate is pulled.  Mostly the cards say trivial things like, “Voltaire writes Friedrich a letter.  He thinks Friedrich is cool.”  Other times the card will say, “the Queen of Russia dies.  Russia surrenders.”  If this happens, Russia has to immediately leave the game, no matter how well the player is doing.  When every country has left like this, Friedrich wins.  If one of the countries conquers Prussia before this happens, then they win.

from designer's website, histogames.de

The intricacies of the game are in the subtle rule details.  The different amount of cards each country gets each turn, the rules for retreating and defending cities, the strategic possibilities of the country’s landscapes carried through by the pointillist map.  The game should not work, the battles should not work, but somehow it does.  And it does so dramatically.  You feel the storm and sweep of an epic war.  Friedrich is juggling multiple theatres, the other players have short and long goals they slowly see realized through grand tide-changing battles or just well maneuvered troops that cut off Friedrich’s supply by surprise and make him retreat back to Potsdam.  And all of this happens without the players realizing it.  There’s an embarrassing side effect to boardgaming.  When someone gets really into the game they stand up, as if that extra height perspective will somehow help them.  No one realizes they’re doing it or how stupid they look, like playing guitar with your mouth open.   You’ll go into Olympic Cards and Comics and see some calm game of Magic: the Gathering happening, everyone sitting down except one excitable youth, standing, with his fists planted intensely on the table.  Whenever I play Friedrich, everyone ends up standing.   Every time.  All four of us there with our chairs forgotten, looming over the map, scanning the countryside, shuffling, stressed, through our piles of cards.  Last game, after six hours of the game, it came down to Prussia and Austria in one last battle.  My friend Zatarain was playing Austria, and as he stared at the board and put his first card down he said, “I’m sweating.  Why am I sweating?!”

Also, each time we play Friedrich, all though it takes half a day, as soon as it ends one of us invariably wants to play again.

This game does take a long time, somewhere between two and eight hours depending on how the cards of fate play. You will not notice the time.  This game is an event, as are all the great games.  It is a great testament to what happens when you listen to those plucks of inspiration, and have the patience and discipline to see them realized.  Lucky for us, Richard Sivel had an inspiration that is fantastic to play.  I hope you enjoy the game.

You told me why you liked it walking past Freshman dorms, heading back to your room.  Ben Kweller, rain smell, early night, daily show, and taquitos.

The cats desperately needed food and kept biting me to let me know that they’re crazy like that, and would eat they’re own family if it came down to it.  I loligagged for too long, reading random blogs of people i don’t know complaining cryptically about other people I don’t know, while mentally I reduced my to-do list until the only thing I really needed to do was get the cats food.  So a little before noon I finally left the house to walk to the pet store at the southgate center.

I’ve been a little bummed lately, and it’s totally a first world problem that is literally me worrying that I haven’t been following my bliss, and being kind to my muse, and all the other things that make people buy journals with Celtic knots on the covers.  I’ve been working on my “big stuff “writing a lot lately, but neglecting the blog(as you guys must know), and feeling like my talent is good but my verve is lacking.  I’m feelilng better, and I don’t mean to be all glummy on this, but I just wanted to point out that as I walked outside patting my back because I was going to accomplish something today, and that something was the act of feeding my cats, it made me feel kind of down.

Tumwater is not kind to you when you’re feeling down.  It’s at a low point these days with a lot of empty houses, empty buildings, and snobby, eye contact avoiding state workers walking their lunch break rounds.  But it’s also bright May.  The Japanese maple on the corner of Hazelhurst has burnished to a beautiful red.  All the enterprising businesses and retired neighbors cut their grass this morning, so there’s these outpost colonies of summer every few blocks.  On the corner of Lee street a man had cut his grass and was now throwing a ball for his adorable lab puppy.  A few paces down was the disheveled, cinderblock house where, every day that I pass by it, I see a man sitting in the middle of the living room with his head in his hands.  Then I passed the insurance company, with grass freshly cut and again the deep full scent of summer.    I felt like I was in a Sci Fi setpiece, adrift in a busted ship moving from oxygen tank to oxygen tank, or maybe a deep ocean fish moving from sea vent to sea vent.  The smell of grass sustained me past the creepy massage place called “Angels” and the rock garden next to the hair salon on Ruby Street that always has a mostly empty Corona Bottle wedged into the pebbles.  I know it’s not the same bottle because there’s differing amount of beer left in it each time, meaning that for one stylist what was a depressing “one crazy night” has become an even more depressing tradition.

Burger King and Starbucks both just cut their grass and I was refreshed again, all the way past capitol to the Pet Food store.

Qick tip to local readers:  The pet supply store in the  Southgate center is really nice!  It took over the dollar store spot and the prices are comparable to Mud Bay and the ladies running it are nice.

I bought Friedrich and Iggy some Avoderm and the cashier and I talked about the nice weather and i mentioned how I was taking a  walk.    The cashier said, “I’m going to give you a bag to carry this in, in case you need your hands free.”  It was such a weirdly thoughtful, battle ready gesture, like having the staircase handle on the left side to keep your sword hand free. It was like  she saw me buying cat food and thought, “He might need to catch something later, or get into a fight, or push something forcefully with both hands.”

On the way back I saw a guy leaving the Southgate Rite Aid.  He was in his upper 40′s, with a grown out pompadour, wearing a too-small windbreaker and a t-shirt that said I [centipede monster] videogames.  He was carrying a small white bag which I knew had his prescription medicine in it.  There was something special about him, I felt a kinship but I couldn’t tell if he was aspirational  or foreboding to me.  I turned to walk on the sidewalk outside of Ace hardware.  They had all their fertilizers side by side on pallets making a pleasant walkway and i realized that no matter how many times the employee has to drag these pallets out, no matter how tired they were, every time there must be a wonderful childish impulse that they are building a castle.

I was full on blissful at this point.  I had some case of Summer dementia that made me feel like I deserved a refreshing soda.  I talked myself out of a Baja Blast, but when Burger King was offering 1$ icees, I had to give in.  All the Icees were a dollar, both the  16 oz and 20 oz.  I love that Burger King thinks there are people out there who will choose the smaller size, who will say, 16 oz is good enough for me regardless of price.  The day had gotten warm at this point and i had taken off my jacket, holding it one hand.  The cashier gave me my icee and I walked out holding it in my other hand, totally grateful for the pet food bag dangling from my wrist.

On the way home Maya, the lab puppy, was still playing outside dragging a limb back and forth.  A biker passed me wearing a purple hoodie and a purple helmet, witha  purple yoga mat strapped to his bike.  He looked like a new age, granola version of Cam’ron.

A couple weeks ago I went shopping with my grandma at the commissary, and it was kind of a bumming thing.    She is great, and I love shopping with her, but her political radicalism has gone apocalyptic and  so Obama is doing a good job, but the country will be bankrupt in a few weeks, and medicare will be revoked, and racism is rampant all through DC and Obama will be impeached or forced to resign somehow, and I’ll never be able to afford a home.   I walked up and down the aisles already a bit depressed at the strange pattern my life had taken and now completely freaked out about the country and about my future and how my generation can really only coast, waiting in a nice idle until things get better, and it’s possible that our main achievement, as a generation, may be an awesomely curated DVD shelf and a mega torrent we found of songs that all include the words sun, brother, and gimme that.  I was thinking this while staring at baked beans and canned veggies when I looked up and saw , atop another shelf four aisles back, a leftover cardboard cutout of a man flexing.   I couldn’t see what he was advertising, only his smiling face, and his muscle-filled tank top, and his upraised arms flexing both of his biceps.  The ceiling tiles were perfectly aligned above him so that he seemed to be coming at me with anime force, lines stretching away from him endlessly.  I didn’t know what it meant.  He looked so lonely and out of place up there.  I had a strange feeling, that it was like I was meeting a once renowned western sheriff doing tricks for a traveling wild west show.   I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something.  And then I had another realization, still staring at beans, that symbolism must come from aesthetics first.  We only attach meaning to the things that are appealing, that follow some pleasing pattern, and a sunrise wouldn’t mean anything if it wasn’t, initially, so beautiful.  This thought was worth a gray shopping trip.

That feeling welled up in me again today, coming home and throwing a big bag of food onto the kitchen table and bellowing, “Kittens!” , feeling like a pioneer dad returning from the city.  All the stupid things that  I’m trying to list here-the grass, and the friendly cashiers, the manure maze, the idle monday, the sega genesis cases at Tumwater Video bleaching in the sun, the videogame future man, the abandoned town, the familiar glumness, the closely held memories-they all seemed strongly significant, symbolic, in some way.  But they were all beautiful first.