Happy Nineteen

This past month contained my and Amy's 19th wedding anniversary. Can you believe that? It was 1994 when we and a bunch of friends and family trudged out to the sweltering woods outside of Three Rivers, Michigan, and tied the knot at a little Latvian cultural day camp called Garazers (which our invitation designer insisted on pronouncing “Gazzazaps”). And now, almost two decades later, we celebrated by dropping off our daughter at her grandparents' house, hitting a Chinese buffet, and then going home to read for an hour in utter and complete silence. It was awesome.

But while we were scarfing down sushi, we did take a little time to talk and reflect, and one of the things we discussed was how we’ve managed to last so long. Not that we're particularly surprised by it, but more that in the world around us, it seems like less and less marriages do. Not many first marriages, anyway. And high school sweethearts, as we happen to be, are even rarer. So what did we do right? And I have to preface this by stating that we in no way consider ourselves "gooder at marriaging" than anybody else, or that we're just "more in love" than other couples. We just noticed that we’ve had a few factors in our life together that have conspired to get us to this point. I'll enumerate them now...

First of all, we were friends first. As clichéd as that sounds, I think that really is the most reliable way to form a lasting relationship. Like I mentioned, it was in high school. She thought I was nerdy and cute, I thought she was funny and pretty and was clearly a great friend to have. And even though it took a little over six years from the day we met to the day that would later necessitate celebrating a nineteen-year anniversary, we spent the first three and a half years of that courtship setting up a great friendship. That hasn't changed, as it does with all the best friendships. We still say things that the other finds funny and surprising and supportive on a daily basis. If you've got a friend like that, you’d better hang on to them.

Next -- and this reason is central enough that it affects the rest of the reasons -- we couldn't get pregnant, and it took over ten years of work and sacrifice to actually get it to happen. As terrible as it was at the time, it gave us plenty of time to figure out who we were -- not just as a couple but as individuals -- before we started introducing brand new little people into the mix. We went through a whole lot of stuff in those thirteen years; illness, bankruptcy, infertility ... now I can see that it all made us stronger, that each little victory was adding another brick to the foundation of the team we've become. If we had also been dealing with young children at the time, it would have been immeasurably harder.

When you become a half of a couple, there's less room to give priority to your own wants and needs. There's another person to consider in every decision you make, major to minor. And then, when a child comes along, your own ego and selfishness has to be pushed even further into the backseat. If your relationship up front isn't solid, the chances that you'll be able to continue to live with each other goes down. Maybe (hopefully) not by much, but it does go down.

Another major decision that we made before little folks became a factor was our careers. I had been working at Borders since shortly after we got married, and by the time the century changed, I knew that it was where I wanted to stay as long as I possibly could. And after going through several jobs, Amy decided that what she really wanted to be was a stay-at-home mom. It was really her dedication and refusal to give up -- combined with my improved health insurance when I successfully lobbied to get back into Borders after being outsourced -- that made it possible for us to jump through the necessary medical hoops to make our dreams of parenthood come true.

Lastly, and maybe even most importantly, is the fact that we have differing opinions on a lot of things, and we don't necessarily feel the need to convert the other person. It's something that I attribute to our first getting to know each other when we were still teenagers. When you go through your late teens and early twenties, you suddenly find yourself in successively larger worlds, moving from high school to college to career to full-scale independence. You change a lot in those years, mentally speaking, and your worldview and how you see your place in the Universe really gets solidified during that time. We went through that side by side, and eventually came out with differing ideas about things. For example, Amy's a Creationist, and I'm a believer in evolution. Every now and again this becomes something we discuss, but for the most part it doesn't come up, and because of that it demonstrates to us, I think, how unnecessary it is for people with such different beliefs and ideas to hold animosity for the other. The journey toward your own personal truth is a slow, gradual realization, and having someone by your side who is going through that same journey, no matter where it leads, is something that's supremely valuable.

There. I think I've managed to sound sufficiently smug and superior for one entry. Seriously, I don't think that we have all the answers, in fact I know we don't. We're just two people who lucked into meeting someone we're incredibly compatible with, fell in love, and had faith in that and stuck with it even when things got rough, even really really rough. Outside the world of romantic fairy tales, that's the true heart of a couple's relationship: the dedication and work that it takes, the self-sacrifice and faith in the other person. I guess that's the takeaway here.

To wrap up, let me re-dedicate this site to my wife, Amy, who has stuck by me (and been stuck to by me) for the last nineteen years. We've got a long way to go, and I'm glad she'll be the one to make the journey with me.

The Existential Horror of Temple Run 2

The tablet game that I've spent the most time playing in the last few months is Temple Run 2. For those of you who haven't had the sheer adrenaline rush of playing it, here's a brief explanation of the game, which at first does little to belie the soul-crushing implications of the game itself:

Temple Run 2 (as in the original Temple Run game, just with better graphics and more bells and whistles) takes its cue from the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford gets chased by a giant rolling boulder after stealing a golden idol from an ancient Peruvian temple, thereby setting off all the ancient traps and obstacles -- that are all somehow still in working order – meant to prevent him from leaving with it.

In the game, you play another intrepid explorer (one of several you can unlock after achieving high scores of one kind or another) who has stolen a golden idol and now has to run... the difference here is that you're running down a series of vertiginous bridges above a misty mountain valley below, turning, jumping, ducking, and leaning to avoid fires, spinning spike wheels and crumbling sections of bridge. The point is to run as far as you can, picking up as many coins that are lying around as you can -- they help you unlock special powers and buy new characters.

The big change from the Raiders scenario here is that, instead of a giant boulder, you're being pursued by a twelve-foot galloping monkey demon who is inexplicably wearing a skull mask (at least, I really really hope it's a mask). As if you didn't have to worry about plummeting to your death or slamming into trees and low overpasses, when you stumble over too many obstacles the monkey catches up with you and slams you on the ground. In any event, it's game over.

You see all this from a vantage point above and behind your running explorer, so you don't actually see the galloping monkey demon for most of the game. Only when you hit one of those stumbling obstacles do you actually see its hairy back and grasping arms, coming up behind you. That's when you know that you had better not even so much as misstep again, or you're going to get bodyslammed into oblivion.

It's an intense, fun, and patently simple game, but something happened a few weeks into playing it that changed my thoughts on exactly what's going on in this game, and the implications, frankly, were chilling. It all started when I had to pause the game to attend to something my four-year-old was doing. I had just gotten to a place in the game where the bridge falls away entirely, and my character had to jump on a rope and zipline down to where the bridge picked up again. This is the only time when you change perspective, because the "camera" briefly swings below the character as they slide down the rope.

My pause came just as the angle was changing, and when it stopped I was surprised to see some strange artifacts on the screen. Near the top, I could see four downward pointing arrows, gray and stony-looking, and near the bottom of the screen was a reddish, snaky looking thing that had a small fork at the end. It took me maybe ten seconds to realize what I was looking at... and my blood ran cold.

I was looking out from the inside of the monkey demon's mouth. I had just happened to pause as the swinging "camera" was poised between his upper teeth and tongue. Then I thought about it a little more... I had been doing well. I hadn't stumbled at all during the game so far. I hadn't even seen the monkey demon since the brief prelude to my run where I saw it racing out of the temple to follow me.

So here's how it breaks down, folks. The people who programmed this game could have just set it up so the back of the monkey demon appears when you make that first stumble. But they didn't do that. They set it up so that the monkey demon *is* *always* *there*, *whether* *you* *see* *it* *or* *not*. It is not even onscreen, but it's always invisibly snapping at your heels, ready to leap forward into view the moment you screw up. And even worse, they took the time to give it huge, sharp teeth and a forked tongue, *even* *though* *you* *never* *see* *the* *damned* *thing* *from* *the* *front*, except in that initial glimpse.

That's the moment that it stopped being a game for me. I'm not saying I stopped playing it, but the way I played it changed. It became more of a personal mission to do better, run faster, to stay even farther ahead of that dark, loping thing, even though I now know I can't run fast or far enough to keep it more than two steps behind me. Sometimes it feels like it's the most apt metaphor for life I can think of.

What Raiders Taught Me

A few months ago I wrote a blog called "The Collected Works", in which I mused about the size of the body of work I've written over the course of my lifetime. I knew at the time I wrote it that I had, in my basement, several filing cabinets and boxes in which I had many handwritten projects that never saw the light of day, either because they were unfinished, or had been written in my childhood and were ridiculous. But what I decided to do after I wrote that piece was to go through and digitize whatever I could still decipher of my chicken scratchings (winner of the 1989 Rosetta Stone award for questionable handwriting in my senior year of high school, thank you very much), just so I could have some record of it existing in the first place, for good or ill.

What I found as I started to go through and collate the contents of those file drawers was startling. I found several aborted short pieces, and a full screenplay, that were excessively violent and at times just mean-spirited. My style suddenly swung from swordplay and Dungeons & Dragons-variety derring-do to spies, devil worshipers, and more deadly gunplay than any Sam Peckinpah film. It seems that I was always eager to set up simple kill-or-be-killed conflicts, mostly with one person against incredible odds, and require them to slug or blast their way out, with no quarter given.

I'm still in the process of going through all these old stories, but early in the process I started to see a pattern developing, a clear tipping point when my work turned more violent and turned into a series of action set-pieces. It became clear during my attempts to place these writings on a timeline; the most reliable method turned out to be following my progress through my preferred writing process: from longhand block writing to cursive, back to print, then to manual typewriter, followed by electric typewriter. Adding in any recollections I have of where my family lived when I originally wrote them, I found I could usually place a piece somewhere within a year of when it was written. And that sea change came somewhere around 1981, when I was nine years old. So what caused it?

A little background: growing up, I was in what most people would term a "progressive" household. At the dawn of the Seventies, I had a mother who worked, a father who changed diapers, and a strict no-gun toy policy. All of these things, I probably don't need to point out, were turnarounds from the way houses had been run in the Fifties and Sixties. Not that my parents were hippies in any sense of the word, but they took the lessons of that decade to heart and raised my brother and me in a kid-friendly, stable household, with emotional support and a sense of safety.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve realized that my early works fall into two clear camps: pre-Raiders of the Lost Ark and post-Raiders of the Lost Ark. That film, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's homage to old-time movie serials, was Harrison Ford’s first turn as archaeological explorer Indiana Jones, and came out over thirty years ago, right at the beginning of summer 1981. I remember that I saw it twice in the theater that summer, accompanied by my Dad, who fell asleep midway through both times.

Up until that summer, the most action I had experienced on screen was three years before, when I saw Star Wars for the first time (I didn't catch it until the 1978 summer re-release, so there's no need to call the sci-fi math police, folks). Raiders was a different kind of animal, though. Seeing an alpha male blow his problems away with a pistol that sounded like a cannon, while repeatedly saving a woman who was simultaneously helpless and able to drink a giant Sherpa under the table, must have been more of a revelation to me than Star Wars.

I have to say, this shocks me more than a little bit. And it's taken me all this time to realize how that movie had held such a strong hold on my childhood psyche. I’ve rewatched the film a few times in the last decade, and every time I watch it as an adult, it kind of washes over me without having any effect. I know all the individual shots, I know so perfectly how it's going to go that there's no excitement or suspense. I took this for granted until now, thinking that it was just one of those movies that was so overplayed on HBO back in the day that I just sort of absorbed it. But maybe the fact that it’s been so long since the film had any emotional impact on me is evidence that it’s part of my DNA now.

This recent evidence has now proven that I was hypnotized by this movie specifically, and action movies in general, so much so that it stuck me in a creative rut for the next five years. Looking at my creative output during that time, it’s astonishing how clear my M.O. became: Take someone with no experience or background, and throw them into a life-threatening situation where they have to use violence to escape.

Of course, once I figured this out, I had to go further and figure out exactly why I gravitated toward those kind of stories. Here's the best I can come up with, and it matches up with something else I know about myself. It goes back to the choices my parents made bringing me up. Like I said, there was a no-gun policy in our house, toy or otherwise. And while I don't argue that my parents should have been more active in teaching my brother and me about violence, I think that might be the reason.

My parents were always clear with us that violence was not the answer to problems, and while they let us watch pretty much any TV shows we were interested in, they didn't let us watch old Popeye cartoons for that very reason. Growing up in that environment, I didn't end up having a real frame of reference for the consequences of violence. So when Raiders of the Lost Ark exposed me to it on a level I had never seen before, I don't think I knew how to process it correctly. It's strange; in being somewhat sheltered from violence, I also took a while to really learn the value of life. The pendulum ended up swinging the other way in my later childhood and early adolescence, when I began almost hyper-aware of onscreen violence, and even the dispatching of the most despicable/expendable evildoer would cause me to sympathize with their untimely end.

For a while I actively stayed away from violent material, but eventually the balance righted itself. And don't think that I'm calling out Spielberg and Lucas for making Raiders -- it's solid entertainment and delivers exactly what they set out to accomplish. I just wish I hadn’t taken it so much to heart, and thought it was the only way to tell a story. Still, if it hadn't been that film, another would have taught me the real price of violence, even if it did take me some time to work out. I suppose there are all sorts of issues that people just have to work out in their own time, and this is one that I'm still unearthing from my past.

Shining Inconsistencies

Being such a big Stephen King fan, you'd probably be surprised to know that The Shining was one of his books that I never got around to reading until recently (I still haven’t gotten to The Dead Zone yet either). While I knew Stanley Kubrick’s movie version was quite different from the book, I was surprised about how *really* different it turned out to be. And I can understand why... virtually all the conflict in the book is inside the character's heads. You get an even-handed view of what's going on from the vantage points of all four of the main characters, and there's virtually no way to translate that to the screen. I get what Kubrick was doing… he had to make someone the “bad guy”, because in the book it’s really the hotel itself and how it messes with people’s heads.

But what really bugged me most about it was this... remember that episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and has to keep it in the freezer because it's so scary? Well, when he discusses it with the other characters, most of the things he talks about are references to the movie, not the book! For example:

- "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is a phrase that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson’s character) types obsessively in the movie... in the book Jack actually finishes a play, although he doesn't like the way it turns out.

- Joey mentions the two creepy girls/ghosts in the hallway... in the book, although it's mentioned that two little girls were previously killed in the hotel, they never actually show up.

- Joey also ineptly tries to keep his discussion spoiler-free and mentions when the father goes after the mother and kid with a "blank" but they get away at the last minute... he could mean "axe" like in the movie, or "oversize croquet mallet" like in the book, but what he doesn't mention is the big explosion that happens at the end of the book... the movie ending is much more low-key.

- He does get the dead woman in room 217 correct, but that's one of the few things that's in both the book and the movie. (Except that in the movie, the room number was changed to 237 because the hotel in which the movie was filmed actually had a room 217 and they didn’t want customers to freak out about that.)

I guess I’m just surprised about how the TV writers who created the episode managed to choose the movie version over the book for *every* plot specific detail that they mentioned. If it was just an oversight, it was a stunningly consistent one.

Okay, nerd rant over. You may all resume your lives.