Sometimes I write things

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The Illegal Artist was just outside, at the bus stop, making the sort of face you make when you don’t smoke and therefore can’t be nonchalantly smoking to indicate how you aren’t in the least rattled by the sudden appearance of a crone.

Why a crone? Let me fill you in on the Illegal Artist, one-time savior of humanity: she hates crones. Throw her a call to adventure and wrap it in a crone, and you can be guaranteed she’ll refuse that call. This tendency of hers isn’t exactly well-known, for she is a private citizen and her Wikipedia page was nominated for deletion on notability grounds, plus it was mainly just spurious rumors about her invented by Super Lucky one rainy Sunday afternoon when the liquor stores were all closed, so it wouldn’t have told anyone about the crone thing anyways.

This sort of thing happens to the Illegal Artist all the time, nowadays: strangers show up, sometimes with jeweled daggers sticking out of their backs, gasping for air as with their final breaths they command her to seek the silver monkey, or solve the oil crisis, or rescue the abducted love child of Michael Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, and Victor Deli. She always ignores them, and she always pretends she isn’t rattled, and she’s always rattled.

The first time it happened she was at the Super Lucky, with Super Lucky, and Super Lucky was emptying a lint trap and the caked-on lint had formed in the shape of a map of the state of Kentucky with a glowing red dot (it turned out to be a little red LED with a watch battery doohickey that had maybe fallen off of someone’s keychain) somewhere in the middle. Super Lucky tried to use Mapquest to work out exactly where the red spot was (Gainesville, it turned out) when a crone showed up.

This was a different crone, a mustachioed and shawl-wearing senior citizen with a ratty Lyndon LaRouche for President t-shirt. She (or possibly he, let’s go with he to minimize pronoun confusion) claimed to be the Illegal Artist’s long-lost undergraduate advisor, which didn’t jibe with the Illegal Artist’s lack of college education, and had already started to intone some syllables of dark prophecy (despite the Illegal Artist asked him/her to stop) when a mysterious assailant in a red jogging suit shot a dart into his neck with a blowgun. The assailant then fled. Super Lucky made like she was going to chase after him, but didn’t, while the Illegal Artist just glared at the crone with the dart sticking out of his neck as he slumped over and gurgled.

“I don’t do that any more,” the Illegal Artist told the prone crone. “I am done with the whole vision-quest, time travel, secret magic, Alex Jackass Pizza thing. I mean come on,” she sniffed, “you could at least have presented it as performance art or something.”

Super Lucky eventually called an ambulance, because she didn’t want a corpse stinking up her laundromat, but by the time the paramedics got there the crone had dissolved back into old RC Cola cans and shredded newspaper stuffed in garbage bags, and she’d gotten a fine for frivolous antics.

The second time a mysterious figure showed up to demand the Illegal Artist go on a pointless quest of indeterminate purpose to save humanity in some way, it went a little better, but not much. The second figure was a naked young bodybuilder who hid in the suspended ceiling of the public library where the Illegal Artist got her discarded children’s books (she used them in a variety of art projects) and dropped floppily down on her.

After the Illegal Artist had hit him a few times with a copy of the one-volume edition of the Berenstein Bears Encyclopedia (weighing in at about twenty pounds) he managed to get out that he was a performance artist on the run from the RIAA because he had used the phrase “if everybody dances now” as part of his performance, and they claimed it was an illegal use of the copyrighted lyric “everybody dance now,” despite being part of a longer poem on the topic of spousal abuse and having no musical content at all.

This part got the Illegal Artist’s attention for a few minutes at least, as did the bodybuilder’s claim that his nudism was also part of an ongoing protest piece indicting the garment industry for the plight of Taiwanese factory workers, but then he started going on about Antarctic Space Nazis, and she ditched him.

The less said about the third through fifth attempts to rope her back into the esoteric world of gods and monsters and magic, the better; suffice to say that they learned the wrong lessons from their highly limited success in the second attempt.

“…It went straight to voicemail,” Lisa-Marie reported a moment later. She didn’t leave a message.

“Enh,” said the Illegal Artist.  She wished she smoked, so she could nonchalantly pull out and light a cigarette to indicate the extent to which she wasn’t concerned about Super Lucky.

The Illegal Artist and Super Lucky hadn’t exactly been frenemies since junior high school, but it wasn’t for lack of trying; if Super Lucky hadn’t been grown in a vat in 1996 she’d have fit right in with the Bill Watterson High School Class of 1999 wholesome-seeming beer-drinking drugs-mostly-not-doing Mariokart-playing Weezer-listening vaguely incestuous pack of self-important jackasses that had included Lisa-Marie and the Illegal Artist.  To be fair, Lisa-Marie hadn’t been especially self-important, but that’s only because she suffered through crippling emotional problems dating back to her parents’ divorce when she was fourteen and Jesus Christ, you want me to go on?

I’ve been working on Operation THESIS for about nine hours and my brain is fried and in a little while I’m going to watch an episode of the Simpsons on DVD, fall asleep, then get up later than I meant to and stumble into the lab, where I’ll explain to my advisor how I really wanted to be done by lunchtime today, I mean yesterday, because it’ll be tomorrow when I talk to her… how I really wanted to be done with this particular leg of Operation THESIS by lunchtime yesterday, but that didn’t work out and if I bear down on it I might be done by midnight tomorrow, which will at that point be today.

My only point is I’m not writing this for you, so screw a lenghty literary examination of Lisa-Marie’s low-self-esteem stemming from her parents’ divorce when she was fourteen, I’m going to talk about the very different problems of the Illegal Artist, to wit:

When they arrived at Omar, the oddly-named coffee shop a half-hour bus ride from the Illegal Artist’s apartment, when they arrived there they were the only customers present except for a pair of junior high school boys who were obviously skipping school and hadn’t planned out their truancy very well.  They kept staring at Lisa-Marie, until she made eye contact with one of them and then they left, shamefaced and humiliated.  So during their excursion online, they and the bored barista (she was reading a well-thumbed paperback copy of Anna Karenin that a customer had forgotten and left on a table some weeks prior) were alone in the coffee shop, and since no one came in through the big open front door, they probably expected to still be alone in Omar when they finished.

No such luck!  For seated at the table directly across from the Illegal Artist, firing invisible rays of PAY ATTENTION TO ME at her, sat a tall bony figure in some kind of black cassock or gown. “You!” the figure croaked, with the sort of voice a skilled voice-actor would have produced if asked to talk like a eight-hundred-year-old sexless withered old man or woman, who would in the second act be revealed as nominally female, for big laughs. She raised a shaking hand and pointed roughly towards the Illegal Artist. “You! You must save the green twilight from the swinging void!”

“What? No.” The Illegal Artist grimaced at the crone, stood, and left Omar in a huff. She stomped on the tile floor and didn’t bus her coffee cup.

“Hello?” Lisa-Marie tried to get the attention of the crone, waved at her, but to no avail — the ancient figure simply closed her eyes and went to sleep.

‘Story of my life,’ thought Lisa-Marie as she packed up the laptop (making sure it went properly into hibernation mode before she closed it, to minimize battery drain) and ran after the Illegal Artist.

The Illegal Artist was just outside, at the bus stop, making the sort of face you make when you don’t smoke and therefore can’t be nonchalantly smoking to indicate how you aren’t in the least rattled by the sudden appearance of a crone.

Four time zones away, the Illegal Artist was trying to watch television. It wasn’t easy, and not because the program wasn’t engrossing. She didn’t own an television and could watch it from the driveway outside a neighbor’s window, while that neighbor had their television set on and facing the street, with a window open or at least not blocked by drapes. Thus watching television meant trespassing, craning her neck, and focusing on a distant and partially obscured object while ignoring more local stimuli, without getting arrested or run over. This wasn’t the reason she was having trouble, though.

“I can’t hold you up!” Lisa-Marie said, as if it wasn’t already perfectly obvious. She strained and rocked back and forth and grunted, her arms wrapped around the Illegal Artist’s waist. “You’re too fat! Quit being so fat!”

The Illegal Artist ignored Lisa-Marie’s ill-considered words – the problem wasn’t the Illegal Artist’s generous figure, it was the fact that Lisa-Marie needed both hands to heft a gallon of milk. “I get that. Stop trying,” the Illegal Artist told Lisa-Marie, who did.

“It’s no good,” she continued. “They’ve got a couch or something in front of the window, you can’t see the TV from this angle except the very top. I can see Wolf Blitzer’s hair, but that’s it.”

Lisa-Marie craned her neck, but as she was a foot and a half shorter than the Illegal Artist, she couldn’t see any of Wolf Blitzer at all. “Maybe you could lift me?” she suggested.

“No, no, no, screw it. Back inside. Internet.” The Illegal Artist was halfway across the street, towards her own apartment building, when Lisa-Marie reminded her that it was lack of wifi signal that had pushed them into the neighbor’s-driveway plan in the first place.

“Internet,” the Illegal Artist said again, as if she hadn’t heard Lisa-Marie and was herself coming up with a clever new plan. She was almost hit by a car, because she was still standing in the middle of the street. “Coffee shop! Grab the laptop, we’ll try the coffee shop.”

Lisa-Marie rolled her eyes. “Which one? Starbucks, Brewing Trouble, the other Starbucks over by Mister Espresso, Mister Espresso… I mean they are all full of people and laptops already pretty much.”

“We’ll try them all,” the Illegal Artist said grandly. “And if it’s possible we’ll stand on the sidewalk outside and poach their wifi without buying any coffee.”

The closest coffee shop (the Starbucks Lisa-Marie had mentioned first) was only a couple of blocks away, but its wifi required registration codes and besides it was, as Lisa-Marie had predicted, already at capacity with several unemployed hipsters standing around holding laptops waiting for a chance to sit. They moved on to Brewing Trouble, Mister Espresso, Annie’s Hammocks, Liberally Caffeinated, Coffee Tea, and finally settled on Omar, a coffee shop two towns over with free wireless and a wholly non-punny name. Also one butch barista, walls painted the color of plums, some old Scrabble sets, and a small boom-box with a tape playing “Leonard Cohen – More Best Of” on a continuous loop.

Due to its relative distance from business centers and lack of foot traffic, plus the Leonard Cohen, they had no trouble finding a table near an electric socket. Lisa-Marie ordered a mocha, plugged in her laptop, started it up, blah blah blah internet blah blah blah. Soon enough they were engrossed by the streaming video on CNN.com.

“This is Jet Wineheart reporting live from Las Vegas, Nevada, where there is still no word on the hostage crisis here at the Treasures of Alexander the Great.” The boyish brown newsreader gestured with a flip of his manicured hand to the casino resort behind him. A crawl at the bottom of the screen informed viewers that the segment had been pre-recorded, and also that more information was available at CNN.com. “Authorities have been very tight-lipped and very secretive about the affair, but we know that a phone call took place between the hostage-takers and the police just a few moments ago. No word on what their demands are, but we do know that at least thirty people are trapped inside the building, have been for more than four hours now. Men, women, vacationers, Mexicans…”

As Jet babbled, the streaming video cut away to file footage of the Treasures of Alexander the Great casino, including helicopter shots of the exterior and banks of slot machines inside.

“Oh, my, holy, God,” Lisa-Marie said, taking a full second to pause between each word. She dug into her purse and pulled out her cell phone, and tried calling Super Lucky again.

It occurred to the Illegal Artist, in a flash, that maybe Super Lucky was in the midst of escaping stealthily from the hostage-takers, and that she hadn’t thought to turn off her phone, and that when Lisa-Marie called her, her phone would ring and give away her position and the terrorists, whoever they were, would shoot her. She didn’t say anything.

“…It went straight to voicemail,” Lisa-Marie reported a moment later. She didn’t leave a message.

Sloppy, he would have been the second to admit, after someone had called him on it. Nevertheless it did the job: the door opened would have swung inward if the doorframe weren’t slightly warped from the humidity. As it was, all he had to do was push.

Four time zones away, the Illegal Artist was trying to watch television. It wasn’t easy, and not because the program wasn’t engrossing. She didn’t own an television and could watch it only by standing in the street outside a neighbor’s window, in their driveway, while that neighbor had their television set on and facing the street, with a window open or at least not blocked by drapes. Thus watching television meant trespassing, craning her neck, and focusing on a distant and partially obscured object while ignoring more local stimuli, without getting arrested or run over. This wasn’t the reason she was having trouble, though.

“I can’t believe you don’t own a TV,” said Super Lucky. “What kind of person doesn’t own a TV? Are you even part of this country? Do you know who the President is? Do you know who your Congressperson is? Do you know if you’re in Coca-Cola country or Pepsi-Cola territory? Do you realize to what extent I’m being sarcastic and how in fact I’m like halfway serious even about the Coke thing no now that I continue to think about it I am totally serious about the Coke thing! Gretch! Gretch! Gretch!”

Super Lucky was the reason she was having trouble. The Illegal Artist might have told Super Lucky not to call her Gretch, which even when she had been named Gretchen had been her least-favorite diminutive nickname, but Super Lucky’s innate obnoxiousness meant she’d have been stuck using it even more. On the one hand, we none of us choose the social roles we’re forced into, but on the other hand, being an ass didn’t have to define Super Lucky; she allowed it to define her deliberately, as otherwise she might be defined merely as a clinically immortal biological simulacrum of Ally Sheedy circa the Breakfast Club.

“Shut up!” the Illegal Artist hissed. “I’m trying to hear the thing, shut up.”

Super Lucky shut up and left the Illegal Artist’s field of vision. Specifically she went across the street into the Illegal Artist’s apartment building, up the stairs, and into the Illegal Artist’s apartment, where she turned on her laptop and searched for a wireless signal. Inside the Illegal Artist’s apartment she could pick up seven different sources, but six of them were locked and the seventh, she knew from experience, was too weak for streaming video.

She carried the laptop, and two beers, back out of the Illegal Artist’s apartment and back across the street to the Illegal Artist, who was scowling (as she so often did). “I can’t tell what they’re watching,” the Illegal Artist said when she got back. “It’s not news after all. I think it’s one of those shows about someone who’s famous for no reason and how pampered their life is. They don’t have closed captioning on, the animals.”

Super Lucky took this as an opportunity to explain to the Illegal Artist why closed captioning was a scourge upon the American people, which group of people the Illegal Artist was in danger of losing her membership status in on account of she didn’t own a television, while she searched again for a wireless signal.

“Here we go,” she said a few moments later, interrupting herself in the middle of a rant about how vital plot points were often obscured by the unnecessarily large black blocks around the letters. “I thought hey, maybe there’s free wireless over here –”

“Unsecured wireless,” corrected the Illegal Artist, who was well aware of the various court decisions which had effectively criminalized the use of unsecured wifi without permission, or at least placed its legal status in doubt. “Anything?”

“Yeah yeah it’s connecting to DEATH_TO_HOMERFISHES,” answered Super Lucky. She sat down in the driveway with the laptop in her lap.

“You should google it,” said the Illegal Artist. “Or give it here, I’ll do it.”

“I know how to use a damn browser, and it’s my laptop,” Super Lucky said, genuinely surprised that the Illegal Artist would want to take it from her.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t use google as a verb,” said the Illegal Artist.

“I will use the Google brand search engine to find the data which I am seeking,” announced Super Lucky, but first she checked her email.

The Illegal Artist’s scowl persisted as she picked up one of the beers Super Lucky had brought out, but when she realized she was drinking it outdoors in public she felt a little better. “Normal people get their information from the internet anyway, I don’t know why I have to see it on the television. In fact,” she decided, “I’m going inside.”

“Bup bup bup bup bup,” said Super Lucky. “Here we go.” She flipped the laptop around and bathed the Illegal Artist in its glow.

“Shurr,” the aging hippie said. “We take cash.”

“That’s sweet,” said Alex Pizza without thinking. “Cash is sweet.”

“Yuh-huh, shurr,” the hippie said again. He stuck out his palm and smiled blandly.

Alex Pizza opened his wallet and took a quick inventory. Seven charge cards (including three different VISAs); five of his “Secret Agent to the Stars” business cards; his pharmacist’s license, driver’s license, and fishing license; a small bundle of receipts for his expense account; five thousand Confederate dollars, four thousand Soviet rubles, three thousand GDR marks, two thousand Lucky Ducky Fun Bucks, and twenty crisp hundred-dollar bills. Reluctantly, he skipped over the Fun Bucks and pulled out US$1100.

The hippie smiled so genially Alex Pizza half-expected him to lurch forward and try to initiate a hug, which might have become a headlock and then the woman in the hajib could have pulled out a golf club or machete or lightsaber and beaten him bloody and popped the trunk of the rental car and all the hippie did was take the money and count it and thank Alex Pizza. He and his presumed wife climbed in their minivan and drove off down the coin-paved road back into the static world.

“His presumed wife.” Alex Pizza could have climbed into the hippie’s skin and rooted through his subconscious eighteen different ways. Tibetan song-dancing, Lakotan wolf-thought, Swiss offensive meditation: any of these would have told Alex Pizza everything he might have wanted to know about the relationship between the two hippies, about their political views, about their criminal and financial histories, about their diets, about where they were born and where they would die.

For that matter, he could have used his theurgical skills to shift a few femtoseconds forwards or backwards in time, evading the hippies without losing access to their summer cabin. He could have eaten a few fruits of the tree of the white lotus, and left his basal body behind and ventured into the astral, there to form a summer cabin out of his own brainpower or (if it suited him) out of brainpower borrowed from any of the sensitives, that class of 0.01% of the population (only about six hundred seventy thousand people scattered across the globe) whose psychic defenses were crippled due to early-childhood haruspication accidents. And in such a summer cabin of the mind, being a purely psychic construct, the flow of time becomes purely subjective, with minutes becoming days or weeks; surely the ideal feature for a young wizard seeking to write the Great American Novel.

But no, Alex Pizza reflected, shaking his head as he watched the coin-paved street ripple up into the gloomy halfsky, no, no, no. Down that road lies confusion and madness and the next thing you know you’re hosting a late-night infomercial and obsessively defending your creative decisions in online forums using a series of sock puppets. Better, he thought, to do it the hard and normal way, the mundane way, as if he were a disaffected college dropout instead of California’s second-most-powerful warlock.

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply in and out, three times, focusing on the internal fire of his totem element, magnesium, and let the stress and paranoia drift out of his body and into a baseball-sized cloud over his head. For a moment he considered forcing the paranoia into a mustard jar. Such a jar would be suitable for bottling up all his anxieties; within it, he could form a self-sustaining ecosystem of self-loathing and -pity, and never lack for self-destructive impulses to shower psychically upon his enemies.

Instead he stepped out from beneath the dark cloud, ignored it while it slowly dissolved, and turned his attention to the summer cabin. It was a cube of dark brown wood, heavy hewn logs mortared together with window-holes sawed into each wall and stuffed with prefabricated pop-in non-glass panes. Access to the interior was controlled by a single rusty metal door apparently salvaged from some long-abandoned fallout shelter, and it was the heavy brass lock on this door which matched the key the hippie had pressed into Alex Pizza’s hand.

He lifted the key towards the lock, and stopped. Something was wrong: his opened eyes detected a discrepancy between the ontological ground-state of the lock and that of the key. It wouldn’t fit the lock, he predicted. Regardless of whether the notches in the key matched the pins in the lock, they were a mismatch on the astral plane. He tried the key anyway; it was what a mundane frustrated writer would have done.

No good. Either the hippie had erred and given him the wrong key, or the chaotic environment out here on the very bordermarches of the country, had warped the lock or the key or both. If the former was the case, Alex Pizza knew, he should go back to the nominal civilization of Buffalo and demand the proper key. In the latter, a normal person would be out of luck, and limited to smashing a plasticized window.

Alex Pizza weighed his options, and decided it would be acceptable to cheat. He tried the key in the lock again, this time reaching out with his “fetch” and forcing the pins down. He didn’t try to fool it into thinking the key was doing the work, trusting that in the event they tracked him here and searched the cabin, they wouldn’t think to interrogate the door’s lock.

Sloppy, he would have been the second to admit, after someone had called him on it.

Ten miles out of Buffalo, where the glass starts to melt and the sky bleeds down into the ocean, where you’re right on the edge of not being able to distinguish ten and two (it’s all going 10 10 10 10 10), where the reds and blues and yellows bleed into the purples and oranges and greens like someone’s been screwing with the tint and color settings, where they send up signal flares to make sure you don’t just wander across the border and if you ignore the signal flares they send up MIRV warheads, where decent people don’t go, that is where Alex Pizza went to write his Great American Novel.

He rented a cabin from a wild-eyed couple of aging hippies. He had a thick Canadian accent that sometimes slipped away into Kansas – plainly a man who hadn’t known when to quit dodging, and drank too much maple liqueur and fried cheese than is healthy. She spoke not at all, choosing instead to stand behind him and glare with bloodshot eyes at their prospective lodger. The eyes were all of her that Alex Pizza could see; the rest was hidden behind layers and layers of ratty t-shirts. She (or someone else) had stitched the t-shirts together into a makeshift hijab, then tie-dyed with a color scheme that matched the “hot” CGA palette: mustard, lime, and brick.

“Keep a steady grip on the tiller,” the old hippie told Alex Pizza. He scratched himself with one hand while the other pressed a single key into Alex Pizza’s palm. “And don’t try to use the heater, it’s July and anyway we took out the element.”

She clucked her tongue, but Alex Pizza couldn’t tell whether she was disapproving of him for mentioning the heater at all, or of removing the element, or of the prospect of wastefully heating the great muddy outdoors in midsummer, or if she just didn’t like Alex Pizza.

“I’ll treat the cabin like it was my own mother,” said Alex Pizza, hoping to reassure her that he would be a pleasant tenant. Postmenopausal women frightened Alex Pizza on an instinctual level he wasn’t even fully conscious of; they reminded him of his own incipient mortality, and he always took pains to curry their favor. “Or failing that, an aunt.”

The second time she clucked her tongue, no reasonable observer could have suspected her disapproval was aimed at anyone but Alex Pizza.

“Better still, my sister,” continued Alex Pizza, breezily, as if paranoia from the ganja in the trunk of his car (he hadn’t lit up yet, but years of meditative training had rendered him preternaturally sensitive to his own incipient mood swings; he also becomes melancholy just before watching costume dramas and giddily excited immediately prior to his own surprise parties) hadn’t already wrapped itself around his brainstem and started to whisper rumors of war into his ears. “My beloved sister, and my mother too, and my mother’s sister. All three of them, together, incarnate as a summer cabin, o what a joy that would be…” He realized he was in danger of babbling, and trailed off into what he hoped was a grandly casual gesture, a wave hello at the glowing happy future.

“Shurr,” the aging hippie said. “We take cash.”

“That’s sweet,” said Alex Pizza without thinking. “Cash is sweet.”

Every so often I hear about young people, and how awful they are. Man, young people are terrible. They don’t even write one another emails like people my age, or communicate on a landline telephone like my mother used to when I was a kid and the word landline didn’t even exist yet. Instead they’ve taken some damn newfangled means of communication wherein step one is you give someone a lot of money and step two is you are able to write telegrams — telegrams sweet zombie Jesus — and aren’t kids idiots?

I know I’m ignoring the supposed punchline, in which Agnes’s older relative (mother, grandmother, great-uncle’s longtime mistress, whoever) facetiously suggests she use the postal service to communicate with her friends, but that is a conscious choice on my part because even — especially — if you aren’t a cellphone user, you certainly have a landline phone, and for the love of God people.

Young people with their text messages and their big pants and their goddamn tiny bicycles piss me off, that is what I am saying.

Now I went to college. It was not that long ago in fact. Okay my freshman year was more than ten years ago now but I remember it well. Also I am forced on a nearly daily basis to interact with fresh-faced young undergraduates some of whom have dates of birth that end in 1989 or 1990, and who aren’t familiar with, for instance, the fourth season of the Simpsons. Anyway my point is that I have a good idea of what college is like and these kids they are not missing anything judging by the second panel. Panel two is 80% of your college experience, right there. Another 10% is going to class and learning useful things like the symbolism in King Lear and what Erving Goffman thought of Margaret Mead (huh this spellchecker recognizes both of Margaret Mead’s names but neither of Erving Goffman’s). The remaining 10% is either casual sex or role-playing games, your choice (though I would maintain that I was not fully apprised of my options at the time), but yeah, mostly it’s lounging around feeling smug and playing with toys, and the kids have already got that down.

Sometimes it’s hard to ignore BDSM subtext. Or is it just me?

Last night my friend Jere Genest wrapped up the second half of what turned out to be a two-part Esoterrorists game. It was my first chance to use the GUMSHOE system as a player, and I have to say I liked it a lot. The GUMSHOE system, or at least the part that I liked, is an investigation subsystem which you could probably slot into any RPG, replacing whatever clue-acquisition system the basic ruleset provides. Each character, in GUMSHOE, has some subset of a fixed list of about two dozen investigative skills, which range from Forensic Entomology to Art History to Negotiation. If a character with a given skill is present for an opportunity to use said skill to get an important clue, the character automatically successfully gets that clue. Characters also have one or more points tied to each skill they have, and if there’s a clue appropriate to a given skill which is present, but not deemed “important” by the GM, the player can spend one of those points to get that clue.

So there’s no risk of the players being stymied because they didn’t succeed on a Spot Clue skill roll; the important clues are important enough (and the player-characters presumed to be badass enough) that they leap out to the trained eyes of the PCs. Even if a scene lacks important Forensic Entomology (for instance) clues to be automatically found, a player could spend a point to find something relevant. This does an excellent job of mimicking police procedural-style investigations, where there’s zero chance that the CSI team or the FBI agents et cetera will fail to obtain evidence, and the interesting part is how they decide to follow up on the clues they have.

In our hands this system worked very well, with plenty of opportunities for roleplaying and discussion among the player-characters within the context of examining and speculating about the clues we found. The first half of the game featured the bulk of the investigation, as we searched for an old friend’s college-aged son whom we determined had fallen in with a bad crowd at MIT, all drugs and strange math and Pi. In the second half of the game we worked out that the bad crowd in question was an apocalyptic cult dating back to the Gilded Age, and managed to rescue the kid from a bizarre ritual sacrifice in tunnels under Northeastern University, but only after a battle of wills with a (false?) FBI agent cult leader who didn’t bleed when shot.

I’m not discussing the non-investigative aspects of the system, largely because I don’t like them nearly as much as the investigative aspects. On procedural shows like CSI or even Bones, which was certainly the mode we fell into (although maybe with a dash of less-silly Scooby-Doo) every dramatic element is in service to the investigation: when an investigator is in a gunfight, the dramatic question isn’t really “will they survive?” but rather “what will they learn about the villain?” In the rare event that a character is shot, the episode of the show becomes about the character being shot, and the effect that has on the team’s ability to gather information and execute their duties successfully. It’s never a minor sidelight, is my point, which is why it was a little jarring when one of the other player-characters was shot early in the second session and we were all prepared to have to rush him to an emergency room, only to determine that no, he’d lost five health out of his total of ten, and no one even needed to make a medic skill roll until and unless he went down to zero. Even if he had been shot again and reduced to zero health, he could have continued to act (at least such is my understanding) at a penalty for a considerable amount of time. Likewise, being shot at is stressful, and we all lost some stability points, but again, not enough to have any mechanical impact.

So it takes multiple bullets to keep someone down, is the impression we got, and that doesn’t seem in keeping with the genre and investigative mode we were operating in. I might be too harsh, as we used the non-investigative aspects of the system only a little bit, but they left a bad taste in my mouth. Skills like “mechanic” felt out of place and not in keeping with the general aesthetics and design goals of the system. I’d pare down the general ability list to exclusively ways of mitigating, taking, and dealing (physical and emotional) damage, and move everything else to the investigation mode.

I also wasn’t thrilled with the investigative skills themselves, or rather, with the skill list. A system that has separate skills for Archeology, Art History, History, and Anthropology, but folds all the natural sciences into Chemistry and Astronomy: not one I’m wholly comfortable with. However, I adore the fungiblity of the skills, and the effortless manner in which the skill list could be customized for a particular group of characters. This is the first system I’ve seen in which it would be possible to have a team consisting of a biochemist, an inorganic chemist, an analytical chemist, and a physical chemist, and make the gradations between their skills matter, if that was what all the players were into. Of course, you could also fold all those skillsets into a single skill, and the system works equally well.

So to sum up: I really like the investigation system, which looks to be infinitely customizable and feels very organic in play. I really dislike every other aspect of the system, but investigation is 80% of the ruleset and I like that 80% a lot.

So, the worries of twenty years ago — housing and general economic collapse, pollution — these remain the worries of today. You hardly ever hear about pollution qua pollution any more, though. It’s all global warming and carbon footprints and better light bulbs and increasingly hysterical anticonservationists who are getting steadily closer to blaming global trends on a cabal of evil witches who curse us with intemperate hurricane hexes.

It’s hard to read the final panel as a punchline. I know Foob at the best of times was never a laff-a-minit riot, but in the olden days it had a reputation as a quality act, and a quality act in the funny pages means a punchline in the last panel. Maybe it’s a “there’s no reason to think Li’l Mike will live long enough to inherit the earth” kind of situation, and the punchline is that Young Elly thought that she could protect Li’l Mike from the deep-seated horrors of the slowly ending world, but — ha ha — no, he’ll probably die in the food riots and won’t live long enough to watch the world plunge into endless winter. It’s funny!

The latest in Improved Garfield: poor Jon has again forgotten that his roommate is a cat, and doesn’t know how to do things like make a decent cup of coffee. Oh, that Jon! Will he never learn?

Crimestopper tip: Purchases aren’t always what they seem. Do you know what you’re buying? For example, are you buying a Wii off eBay, or are you buying a photograph of a Wii? It has to be one or the other. Look around! If you don’t see that you are right this second buying a Wii off eBay, you are probably buying a photograph of a Wii. You might not even be aware of it, what with computers and all, until the Wii Photo Delivery people come to your door with an itemized bill. It’s $189 for the photo, $43 for the handling, $12 for the carrier fee, $13 for the wealth discharge fee, $6 for the shipping, $43 for the handling again… it’s a nightmare of hidden charges you don’t want any part of! So do the right thing, and buy a Wii off eBay! Do it now!

Well, it’s been an eventful week in Dick Tracy. Things have happened — events have occurred — but at the end we’re left standing there, wondering what to make of it all. Filled not with excitement, bemused rather than thrilled, we wait patiently for Dick Tracy to tire itself out and get back to the business of repeating itself and showcasing the stuff of nightmares.

Last time, we left off with Dick Tracy on the verge of unleashing his plan, a plan so clever no one has ever thought of it before in the history of anything at any time anywhere. This week, he climbs inside a ceramic horse and considers violence as a political tool. Read on!

The sole employee and proprietor of the Chicago Generic City Art Institute holds this thing in some kind of reverence; it has cast a spell over him. Don’t smash it for fun, he tells Dick Tracy, because it is beautiful and old.

Tracy cares not for beautiful things — he has his wife, and his mistress chief, and in the evenings he watches Dancing with the Stars, and these are enough for him, as rightly they should be for any man. Nor does he hold aged things in any special regard, for as a nonagenarian himself he knows all too well that age does not bring with it wisdom or virtue, but only weakness, apathy, and a slowly-growing antipathy towards all the human race.

Therefore he views this admonition with clear suspicion (check-check that stinkeye in panel three), but out of a sense of haste and duty he agrees to suspend his art-smashing activities before they begin.

As the pieces move towards their inevitable conclusion, Liz is struck by a moment of doubt. She knows all too well the part she has been called to play in this tired ritual: she is a damsel in distress, whose every move must be checkmated and whose initiative has been robbed her. If she does not stand by and await rescue at the hands of her creaking hero, then the whole house of cards collapses, and Tracy has climbed into the belly of the beast for nothing. Caught in the net of expectations, she can only watch as Lector — his dual identity as villain and victim marked by his new, bifurcated clothing — stumbles onward. He too is helpless before the march of history, ground up in the wheels of justice.

The driver of the truck, you’ll notice, doesn’t speak aloud to Tracy, who (separated from the driver by metal and air and the sacred horse offering) could not hear him. Instead he is uttering a silent prayer, not to Tracy the withered man in the cramped quarters, but to the shining yellow-capped Hero which Tracy represents; he prays to the ideal of Tracy, and in praying to a false idol he damns himself.

And here the question of the previous strip is answered: will Liz break the ritual and escape on her own? The tension is held for a full panel, as she stares past the babbling Lector (whom we barely see) at the gnawing black egress. But no, she relents, and allows the narrative to sweep past her, for now all attention is focused on the battle of wills between Tracy and Lector.

Will Tracy, like Han Solo, shoot first? Will he carry out his threat, and unload his gun into the face of an unsuspecting Lector? This would in a sense be murder, as Lector is unarmed and not immediately threatening, but in the world of Dick Tracy, Tracy’s moral authority is absolute; if he kills you, you can at least take comfort in the knowledge it was for your own good. On the other hand, merely by weighing the merits of such an act, Tracy risks losing his status as a hero and favored son of the cosmos. If he kills Lector in this way, will not the whole ramshackle affair come tumbling down, and Tracy be revealed as a thug motivated not by justice but by petty pride, greed, and a desire for fame?

At last — after an unreasonable number of comics showing Lector unloading his horse and Tracy lying in wait ready to shoot — the tension is broken. Tracy swings down from his hiding-place and does not break his hip, for he is in this moment buoyed by the dramaturgy of the scene: he is the Hero, come armed with gun and quip to rescue the damsel and defeat the foul villain. His claim to the archetype reestablished, it seems almost laughable that Tracy ever considered shooting Lector from hiding, without first calling out and demanding Lector explain his actions. For that would not be the action of a hero, and today Tracy is a hero.

This restoration of the established pattern is hardly lost on Liz, who is freed from her miasma of inactivity and can once again struggle to free herself (now that it is clear these efforts will come to nothing without Tracy’s intervention). So she permits her fellow-captor to attempt to open the exit door, and to no one’s surprise it is locked. We are once again on familiar territory.

It is therefore only to be expected that Tracy be the victim here, rather than the immediate victor. As hero, he must always be an underdog, who fights on proudly despite a broken wrist or whatever other injuries Lector, playing his part to the hilt, will yet inflict upon the brittle old man who wears a detective’s badge.  Lector, in stark contrast to all his prior characterization, becomes the brutal violent ogre not because he wishes it, but because he must be brash and cruel to contrast with Tracy.  His hands are tied by destiny at this point; his fate is well and truly sealed.