Christmas morning came and we children destroyed reams of wrapping paper revealing a series of molded chunks of plastic inside cardboard boxes: toys and talismans that would possess brief importance in my life before being later supplanted by a different toy. Packages containing clothing (ugh, corduroy pants) were small disappointments hidden behind smiles but we knew what to open based on the shape of the package.

I didn’t know it then, but Virginia’s gift to me would become one of my most treasured possessions: a boxed set of the Lord of the Rings. I had seen the Rankin/Bass Hobbit cartoon and had already developed a deep love for Dungeons & Dragons.

I started reading them immediately and voraciously. This was sometimes a confusing process. Someone gave me a dictionary to use after becoming exasperated at my questions about the meaning of words. I felt terror for the Hobbits on Weathertop, sorrow for Gandalf in the depths of Moria, and deep betrayal by Boromir. The books changed my life and I re-read them every year for almost two decades, committing huge swaths of them to memory.

My copies are dog-eared and sun-bleached now, held together with scotch and packing tape. I still read them. Despite their fragility, I still lend them out to anyone who asks because books are made to be read and loved.

Virginia was born on May 7th, 1920. She was an orphan (as was her husband, Howard) though we believe that her adopted father was also her biological father. The word “gumption” best described her personality – or perhaps “piss and vinegar”. She made up her mind and that’s what was going to happen and that’s all there was to it.

She died this morning, January 19th, at the age of ninety-seven.

She was a lioness, fearless and true.

I remember being scolded one year for trying to clear her walk of snow. Despite being in her 80s, she wasn’t going to let anyone else do her chores. She continued to shovel her own snow deep into her 90s, too; it just took her longer. She would bundle up, step out into the heavy Minnesota weather, clear perhaps a foot or two, and return inside to rest for a bit before beginning the exercise again.

She loved games and word puzzles. She taught me to play Rummikub and was one of the few people who could routinely defeat me. She even once played a session of Dungeons & Dragons with me, though I imagine she found it confusing.

Recently, she once again ignored the pleadings of her children to “slow down”. She slipped on a patch of ice and shattered her arm, requiring surgery and a promised long road of rehabilitation and pain. There came a day when she was simply done and events unfolded from there. Implacably. Mercilessly. Shakespearean.

My heart has been clenched for weeks. It has been a long time since I have felt this level of grief.

I find myself running my fingers over my tattered copies of Lord of the Rings. I reach for any volume and read random passages, each one evoking tiny memories and soothings. Here I am drinking cocoa and trying to keep the names of the Dwarves straight in my head. There I am laying on my back, waiting to be called to dinner, as Sam and Frodo escape from Amon Hen. Look! I am being thrilled as Eowyn destroys the Witch-King of Angmar during fifth grade recess.

For Christmas in 1984, Virginia gave me a boxed set of The Dragonlance Chronicles, further cementing my love for fantasy and adventure. It was her way, to recognize the things we loved and to share our enthusiasms.

I will miss her terribly.

Let’s talk about how I did this, why I wanted to, and what happened.

The first thing I did was unfollow hella dudes. Mostly these were men who I don’t remember following and never posted, or people who I was following merely out of politeness’ sake, or because they were “industry luminaries” and had a reputation for being smart (which was rarely the case, I found).

The next thing I did was go through my follow list and find women whose opinions I respected or I thought were funny. Then I looked at the women that they retweeted and followed them without worrying too deeply about what they would post (or not). I figured that I could always unfollow later if their posts were distasteful or annoying or useless.

(Spoiler: I have unfollowed exactly zero of these women.)

My goal was to reach a ratio of 60/30/10 of Women/Dudes/Brands in my feed. I don’t mean this ratio applied to my “follow list”, which is a useless method, but instead to apply to the “posts I was seeing”.

(I managed to hit this ratio, but it’s actually more like 60/30/5/5 Women/Dudes/Brands/Dogs.)

Why did I want to do this? It’s based on a thing I tell all my students: Listen to music you don’t like or know.

Are you a metal head? Give Taylor Swift a spin. Listen to R&B? Try some Johnny Cash. Love country? Try some Godspeed you! Black Emperor!. Get out of your comfort zone. Hear tones you’re not used to. Listen to someone else’s story.

If you stay in one place mentally you will lay down roots. This will make you inflexible and slow. You will have fewer tools. So always seek out things you don’t know anything about and do what you can to experience them.

A lot of my life’s biggest changes have started from small changes like that. I am a big believer in will-to-power. About 30 years ago, I was a dumb teenager and depressed about something stupid, and I remember saying, “I want to change stuff but I don’t know how.” My friend Mike said, “Dude, just change your brand of cigarettes. Switch from Marlboro to Winston for a while. If you don’t like it, switch back.” I did this, and it worked: the small alteration in my routine had a larger butterfly effect.

(Man, can you believe I used to smoke cigarettes? What a world.)

When faced with a daunting task, small accomplishments lend vigor to your motivation and encourage you to do even more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a step, that sort of thing.

Want to expand your mind? Start with something manageable. Listen to music you aren’t familiar with. Change the layout of the furniture in your apartment. Change your brand of shampoo. Something. Make a change.

Making small changes makes leveraging larger changes easier.

I wanted to change my perspective. It was inadequate. I needed to see different points of view. I made a change.

So what happened?

First, I feel smarter. I know more today than I did a year ago.

I feel that I am better informed generally, but specifically about my industry and hobbies and their politics. A large part of this has to do with the way that men and women share knowledge.

Dude programmers and designers (including myself – I am not an innocent) share knowledge like this: “Check out this thing I wrote about $TOPIC.” Women programmers and designers share knowledge like this: “I learned a bunch of stuff about $TOPIC and I think you may find this useful.”

There’s an implication in this: Men are seeking recognition; women are seeking knowledge transfer (sadly, this this is often worded in a way that seeks permission to enact knowledge transfer). It’s a fascinating distinction.

Further: dudes, as a whole, do NOT hold nuanced opinions. I count myself in this group. I am very much a “this is the line” type of person, very black-and-white, especially when it comes to issues of justice. When you hear nothing but black-and-white opinions, your opinions tend to be black-and-white. That’s sub-optimal.

I dropped some really awful dude journalists (<cough>Glenn Greenwald</cough>) and for each one of them I followed two female journalists. I tried to skew towards more conservative journalists when possible to counteract my natural bias. I feel that this gives me a more informed, smarter opinion about politics. It definitely keeps me thinking.

Second, I’m happier. Oh man, I’m so much happier these days. A huge part of that is that Female Twitter (ugh, I hate these terms) is generally more supportive.

Let me rephrase. Not “generally more supportive”; I mean “absolutely more supportive”.

The small encouragements I get make me feel good. Even seeing someone give encouragement to someone else makes me feel good. This causes me to want to encourage others to feel good as well. It’s a virtuous cycle; the same cycle I banked heavily on when I designed the “thanks” system for Wikipedia.

A real-life side-effect that this has had in my life is that I respond to people’s posts on Facebook and Twitter with way more likes/favorites/smiles/prides/whatevers. I didn’t use to do that; now I do. I like spreading encouragement.

Another way that I am smarter is due to less raw anger in my feed. There’s less entitlement. Less shouting. There’s not always less “outrage”; there’s still plenty of that. But the outrage is tempered. More thoughtful.

Third, I think I’m funnier. Dudes, lemme tellya, women are funnier than we are. They just are.

The funny women I follow challenge my own comedy. They make me work harder for my laughs and, interestingly, they make me want to improve the calibre of my audience. It’s great.

Fourth, I’m calmer. I feel much more in control of my emotions and my responses to them.

Part of this has again to do with having less I AM STRAIGHT MAIL TESTOSTRNE GAH in my ear all day. Part of this is because women tend to talk with a more emotional language, which helps me to identify my own emotions. Being able to identify your emotions helps you get control over them.

The biggest part, though, is the presence of more nuanced opinions. Hardline outrage feeds itself, getting louder with each cycle. That’s unnerving and it fills the mind with itself. While I am a Creature of Rage, constantly being filled with Rage is a less useful tool than one would think. Rage requires a single-mindedness that is defeated by nuance.

Fifth, I have more empathy. I understand more people better.

There’s another benefit of following people who are different from you. Say you find an account run by a woman of color. About half of what she posts is interesting or related to your industry but the other half is personal shit, stuff you won’t care about, make-up and hair tips? Follow her anyway and you’ll level up your Empathy score.

You’ll pick up a lot of ambient awareness about different parts of our culture. You will learn some glory and some heartbreak from this ambient awareness. For example, I will never, ever have the problems with my hair that black women do. I just won’t. Learning about relaxer and the costs involved in hair weaves seems like something trivial – until you understand it, and then you see it as anything but trivial. Knowing these types of things makes you smarter because you see more of the game board.

I don’t think I could have done this on Facebook, by the way. Twitter allows you to be a passive observer; Facebook invites interaction. Interaction is good! I love interaction. But on Facebook, the echo chambers are too loud. I cannot easily engage in conversation with my conservative friends on either my wall or theirs. This is because there are always the Asshole Donnies. You know the ones I’m talking about, too: they exist only to inject a special brand of stifling idiocy into conversations by calling folk “cuck” or “fascist”. The ones you want to shout “shut the fuck up” at.

So here’s my lesson to you, my young apprentice: Follow more women.

In November of 1991 I worked two jobs. Most nights I spun records at Gumby’s, the local alternative nightclub. Other nights I was on-air radio talent at WMUL FM, the college radio station, where I was also a producer (think “music director” for a single format). It is the intersection of these two jobs that put me in the position to lay out GG Allin.

I would often use my position at one place to help out the other. Mostly this took the form of doing on-air interviews with bands that were playing in town. We would record the interviews, edit them for profanity and time, and then broadcast them a few hours before the show. This was a win for everyone: the station got a listener bump, the club got an attendance bump, and I often got to party with rock stars. I did a lot of interviews. Most of them were boring but every now and then I’d land a gem.

On a Wednesday evening in November, 1991, GG Allin and his band the Murder Junkies were going to play at Gumby’s. I had no interest in seeing them perform which was good because I worked radio on Wednesday nights. However, like the dutiful music nerd that I was, I agreed to set up an interview with GG and to broadcast it. We were to meet at Davidson’s Records, a store ran by my friend Dave, which was across the street from the radio offices.

GG was late to arrive, of course. He was alone (no entourage) and he was thin and twitchy and clearly not doing well at all. He had sunglasses on and a hoodie and looked more than a little like the wanted posters for Ted Kaczynski, back when we only knew him as the Unibomber. He stank like a homeless person in summertime.

Every third word out of GG’s mouth was “fuck”, “fucking”, or “motherfucker”. I do not wilt from exposure to foul language but the Federal Communications Commission was pretty keen on not letting words like that over the airwaves. Keen enough that I would end up facing some pretty serious fines if I knowingly broadcast them.

We talked for a bit, the three of us: Me, Dave, and GG. It comes to light that GG thought the interview was going to be broadcast live. When I corrected his confusion, he went absolutely apeshit as if a switch had been thrown inside of his tiny junkie mind. He called me a coward and a “Tool of the Man” who carried water for the censors. Little flecks of spit and/or hopefully chicken kept flying out of his mouth while he ranted. At this point I am getting a little heated as well but I’m trying to be cool because it’s my friend’s record store.

Finally, he said, “Well, if the interview isn’t going to be live, then I’m not fucking doing it, you fucking coward.” To this I replied, cold as ice: “Then we are not fucking doing the fucking interview. Motherfucker.”

This was his last straw, apparently. It doesn’t matter what he said to me, about me, about my family, about my friends, about my jobs – it mattered that I called him a “motherfucker”.

So he took a swing at me.

If you’ve ever been in a fist fight with a junkie, you already know how this ends. Fist fights are always tricky: you never know who can fight and who just shows. I’m from West Virginia. We used to get into fist fights for fun. Because we were bored.

He made a feeble feint with his left before trying to land a haymaker with his right. By and large, heroin addicts are slow and transparent, so I saw all of this coming for a country mile. It was like he had spent a long time thinking about how to throw a punch like that but had never actually done it. He lifted his left fist and then tried to swing his right.

I took a step forward, into his zone, and connected. Hard. He fell backwards into a CD rack

and he went down, legs splayed out, and all the compact discs fell down on his head like out of a cartoon or a shitty romantic comedy.

I stood over him, really angry, and shouted down, “Okay, motherfucker. You want to go outside with me? I will knock out your remaining teeth.”

GG did not want to go outside with me.

He sat on the floor, confused, as if he were not sure how (or why) he found himself on the ground. I wasn’t sure if he was high or not but it was suddenly like a spell had been lifted and I could see him for what he truly was and I was disgusted by it. If anything he started smelling worse.

Dave kicked him out of the record store. “Get the fuck out before I call the cops!” GG picked himself up as best he could and slunk out the door. I helped Dave pick up the CDs and put them back on the rack and when I left I half-expected that I’d have a junkie with renewed courage to deal with but no: GG had hot-footed it back to the club.

That night he would shove one of the club’s microphones up his own asshole. There is not one moment that I regret being absent from that spectacle.

A year and a half later, GG would die as he lived: pointlessly and on heroin.

I nurture and love this pan. I make food for the people I love with it.

I did not buy this pan. It was my grandmother’s. It came to me after her death. I remember her frying chicken with it. She made food for the people she loved with it. She nurtured it because it was once her grandmother’s, too.

Cast iron pans work because of seasoning. Seasoning keeps the pan from rusting and creates a surface that doesn’t stick: ideal for cooking. A pan’s seasoning is actually a thin skin of hardened and polymerised fat. The process of seasoning cast iron is both a science and an art. Like any skin, seasoning can be damaged. This is what happened to my pan: it suffered a scrape that went through to the bare metal, and from that violence bloomed the red tidings of rust. I was distressed.

When a pan’s seasoning is damaged, it must be re-seasoned. A true re-seasoning is a difficult and lengthy process and begins with the removal of the pan’s old seasoning. This is a brutal doing. All the cruft and crap must be removed. Steel wool will grind away all the black from the iron. The correct depth is when the surface turns grey or silver. That’s the bare iron.

Grinding to the iron takes time, patience, and no small amount of agony. It must be done clinically. While it is possible to shorten this effort through the use of aggressive chemicals, such techniques are dangerous and not recommended. It is best, always, to do the hard work on one’s own, relentlessly. When or if rust appears, that must be ground away as well. In the end, fingers may bleed, but the iron revealed is stronger and blessed by the suffering.

When the pan’s surface has been returned to a dull grey sheen (you’ve flushed your bullshit), it is time to re-forge its seasoning. This is a process that cannot be rushed: doing so courts disaster. It must be done methodically and with patience.

Cast iron can be seasoned with many kinds of oils. Most will produce a decent, usable result. For my pan, I chose to season it with flax oil. Flax oil is a food-grade version of linseed oil, which has been used by artists for centuries to provide long-lasting sheen to paintings. Flax oil has low “smoke point” – the temperature at which the oil begins to burn and produce smoke.

You will want to cover a cookie sheet in foil and place it in the bottom rack of the oven. This is to catch inadvertent oil drippings from the pan. There will be no drips if the process is done correctly but it never hurts to be careful.

Flax oil should be coated over the entire surface of pan. This must be a very light covering. Once the pan is covered, as much oil as possible must be removed from it using a paper towel. This must be done continuously until no more oil can be removed with a paper towel. Only the barest hint of oil sheen should be apparent. I suggest wearing latex gloves to reduce mess.

The pan should then be placed in the oven on the top rack, cooking surface down. At this point the oven should be turned on and heated to 500° Fahrenheit (or 450°, whatever your oven can do). Let the pan heat along with the oven’s pre-heat cycle. When the oven reaches temperature, leave it there to forge in the heat for one hour. Baking flax oil produces a peculiar scent that is unusual but not unpleasant. The odor only lasts for the first half hour that the pan is in the oven. My wife tolerated it but I asked her permission before each burn.

Turn the oven off after an hour. Let the pan cool in the oven unmolested for two hours after which it may be inspected. It should be darker in color but only barely.

After the first firing of the pan, you must repeat the process: oil the pan, bake it for an hour, and allow it to cool for two. This must be done a total of six times at a minimum, including the first firing. Six is the magic number. Six is the smallest perfect number. But if the devil is six, then god is seven. I baked my pan a seventh time, for luck.

Since that period, I have set about determining what behaviors and traits in myself that I to encourage and grow. I have also decided which parts of myself I want to improve or jettison. I’ve had some successes in that regard. Some changes were obvious and carried immediate result. Others are much more involved and subtle, with slow effect. It’s slow going, sometimes frustratingly slow, but nothing of value is ever rushed and I have patience.

When I pulled the pan from the oven for the last time, after the extra firing (for luck!), I felt a deep satisfaction and pride in my work. This is a real thing I have done. The process was difficult. It required skill and patience.

Today, the pan feels different now. It rolls smoother in my calloused palms. The seasoning is subtly iridescent in the light: a thousand golden flecks glimmer in the deep black of its abyssal surface.

Tonight, I will pick up my sleeping dog and move her so that I can climb into bed next to my wife. I will open my book. I will daydream before I dream for real. I will plan out the next day. I will fall asleep.

Tomorrow, I will make food for the people I love with my pan.

This year, I decided to grant my New Year’s Resolutions to the public. I’m crowdsourcing my personal improvement plan. I asked those who know me, through several venues, what I should work on in the coming year.

Clearly, not every suggestion could be (or should have been) acted upon. For example, I am a strong proponent of gun regulation. So when a friend of mine who is an advocate of gun ownership said that I should purchase a gun, I declined (seriously, how dumb do you think I am?). Other suggestions set along the lines of “travel to places that I’m afraid of” – and while that’s a great idea, I am no longer afraid of traveling anywhere.

So after we boil out all the jokes and the obviously non-tenable, what Resolutions are left that the public has granted me? There are two.

1) Write more. This was actually a touching response, given the overwhelming number of positive responses towards it. I love writing, I always have. Lately, however, I’ve felt more and more that no one really wants to listen to the things I have to say. I am humbled to discover the opposite is true. So I’m going to work towards that.

2) Further reduce the time between when something happens that perturbs your emotional state and when you return to basic equilibrium. A Resolution from my friend Jeremy and given lots of support from others. This is a powerful suggestion since I tend to respond emotionally more often than I should. It’s very clearly the most useful “growth” pattern I can apply to myself. So I’m going to do it.

The simplest answer is that “jorm” is short for “Jormungandr.”

Way back in 1994, I signed up at a cafe Bulletin Board System called “SF Net”. It required a handle, or user name, and I used the first term that came to mind: “Jormungandr”.

(“Jorm” is pronounced with a hard “J” [JORM], while “Jormungander” is pronounced soft [YOR-mun-gan-DER].)

At the time, I was fresh out of philosophy school and thinking a great deal about self-referential terminology and concepts. Things that are defined by being themselves, as it were. My favorite metaphor to describe this was (and still is) the Ouroboros – a snake that eats its own tail. It became a “thing” for me.

So when I had to pick a handle for this bulletin board system, I picked “Jormungandr”, which is an oroboros like snake that wraps around the entire earth. The “Midgaard Serpent.” When he moves, it causes earthquakes. At the time of Ragnarok – armageddon – the thunder god, Thor will fight Jormundandr and they will kill each other. It’s a wonderful symmetry.

After a while I went onto IRC. At the time, IRC had a limit as to how long your “nickname” could be. I couldn’t use “JORMUNGANDR” because it was too long. Everyone always shortened it to “jorm” anyway – both online and in person – so I picked that. It stuck. So it goes.

Here are Jormungandr’s D&D statistics.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!

(Spoiler: the “other half of the battle” is “killing people.”)

It was a late-October Saturday night with a new moon in West Virginia: very dark, very crisp; resplendent with the odor of Autumn.

The competition was being held on the football field of the local high school. The school grounds were a self-contained plot of land on the other side of a small creek. There was a rickety one-lane bridge crossing the water and there was a state police officer to direct traffic across.

On the excitement scale, “watching high-school marching band competitions” is an activity that ranks right up there with “listening to someone tell you about their level 17 paladin“. Further, they are rather poor venues for flirtation activities, especially when the female side of the equation spends most of its time in lockstep formation on the field.

After an hour and a half the two of us grew bored and decided to seek our destinies elsewhere.

My next memories are a set of fragments:

It’s dark. I light a cigarette, fire up the engine, and drop the car into gear. The lot is packed, the routes through it twisty and confusing. I slowly make my way out to the entry road.

A car approaches from the bridge. Its lights flare into my eyes. I squint and curse. Rick laughs. Practiced fingers flick a cassette tape into the radio (Queensryche’s Rage for Order). Adjust the volume. I look up, and there are things that look suspiciously like

slam on the brakes

motherFUCKER that is a body, rolling over the hood

on the windshield.

The body rolls off the hood.

There is a common turn-of-phrase: “I lost my mind.” I know exactly what that means because it literally happened to me then. There was a moment when I hit a man with the car I was driving and then there was only a low buzzing sound – like being underwater. My vision tunnelled and the lizard-brain activated.

This is what I was thinking:

ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck

This is what I was saying:

ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck

Someone put the car in “park”. To this day I do not remember if it was Rick or I.

Reality

and I discovered that I was out of the car, yelling (ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck).

In all honesty I have to admit that I contemplated escaping in the car.

The body on the side of the road was slowing getting up, groaning, and I realized that I had hit the traffic cop.

He slowly stood up, disoriented, punch-drunk. He stood, searching the ground for something (his flashlight? his gun? all the better to kill me with!). We ask, over and over, “are you okay?” but he isn’t answering he’s just

looking

for something. He took three steps to the side of the road and reached down to pick up his hat from the dust. He brushed the dirt from it before looking up to speak:

“Boy, it’s a good thing you didn’t scuff up my hat or I’d have had to kick your ass.”

He rung up his partner with his walkie-talkie and they called in an ambulance and tried to bring in some Authority. But there was a fun little snag with that: In West Virginia (and possibly everywhere, as far as I know), police officers cannot investigate accidents that involve their own department. This little rule spawned a fun series of calls while we waited in the darkness.

This guy was a state cop, working at a county event, acting in place of a local police officer. So neither the state troopers, the sheriffs, or the local constabulary could handle the incident.

Groups of uniformed people began collecting around the area. At one point there were no fewer than four ambulances parked off to the side.

The local cops were sometimes dicks:

Boy, are you 18?
No sir.
Put out the cigarette. Y’all ain’t old enough to smoke.

After about an hour the real investigative team arrived.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goddamned FBI.

There was a large FBI fingerprinting lab about twenty miles out and they must have been very excited to engage in actual field work because they came loaded for bear.

These boys measured every inch of my car. They determined exactly how fast I was going (fifteen miles per hour). They plotted the car’s position and trajectory in exact minutes, degrees, seconds, and microseconds in latitude and longitude. They took photos of tire marks. They filled out many forms.

They brought a small army of forensic scientists to determine how a pimple-faced seventeen year old boy could possibly drive into someone who walked out in front of a car while wearing black clothing on a new moon.

They were exceptionally thorough. They had a method or device to measure everything. . . except blood alcohol content.

My “breathalyzer test” went down like this:

I was sitting in the back of a federal car, giving my statement to an agent. I liked this guy; he gave me a cigarette and let me smoke while he wrote down everything. At one point he stopped and stared me right in the eye, drawing himself up serious:

Son, you been drinking?

No sir.

And that was that.

After a while they let me go to drive home. While the investigation hasn’t been closed I was informed that I was NOT AT FAULT; the officer was, for walking into traffic. I wouldn’t see the official papers for another several days, however.

The car is a waste: the windshield shattered, hood crumpled, one headlamp busted. The return drive is contemplative at first, both of us thinking about the doom that awaits me when my parents discover what has happened.

Eventually, Rick speaks:

You know, I bet that when he was in cop school and they were teaching the “how to roll across a car hood and not get killed” lesson, he was cracking wise and saying, “what the hell are they teaching this for? We ain’t ever gonna need this shit.”

I started laughing so hard that I almost wrecked the car.

First: the cameras of 20 years ago, they were shit.

Rebel! Fight! Fuck Tipper Gore and her damned parental advice! Happy Harry Hard-On 4 Lyfe!

(There is a great sadness that we tried to shout down a man named Bush and his war in Iraq then, only to see the concept become what people in the music business call “recurrent” 10 years later.)

We were supposed to be disaffected, angry at our lot, angry at the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Bush the First.

But mostly, I remember the music. I remember feeling like this change was something that I could own. Every generation that hits the age of fourteen believes that they are the first to discover Led Zeppelin and sure we had that flaw but we were the first to discover Cobain. There was a magic in that.

I mostly remember being excited all the time.

(The Vietnam Memorial is not what you expect. More so when one is high and it is two a.m. Further, Abe Lincoln’s head is just, you know, fucking big. Dude. Dude. DUDE. I’m telling you: Abe Lincoln, man. His head. It’s fucking huge.)

In New York, I remember walking the streets of Greenwich Village, eating pizza that you had to fold in half. We drank fresh beers hidden in paper bags: each bottle lasted long enough for us to reach the next corner store, where a fresh brew could be procured. Hieneken, one dollar, and the clerk will pop the cap and bag the bottle for you.

I remember us making friends with obvious gang members at three a.m. in a subway station in Manhattan, and then having the train conductor come find us: “You white boys need to come up front with me. You’ll get stabbed!” And then I remember what it was like travelling through the belly of New York City in the front car of underground.

I remember getting into a shouting match with GG Allin, almost coming to blows. I remember smoking out with James Iha outside of CBGB where we had seen Velocity Girl.

I remember being excited. I don’t remember being sad and I don’t remember being angry.

I certainly don’t remember being this young.

I will be doing user interface design and usability.

Deciding to leave EA was difficult. I thoroughly enjoyed working there. It wasn’t the work itself that I loved, though; rather: the people I worked with and the energy that permeated everything we did. It was a hell of a thing to just bump into the likes of Peter Moore while standing in line for coffee and be able to ask him questions.

You know. Nonchalantly.

In the end, it came down to a couple factors:

1) I want to make and write games again. When you work for a game company, you can’t do that: whatever you make, they own. You have scads of non-compete clauses and while you can get legal exemptions for them, the effort involved borders on the insane. Writing games has been my favorite hobby for nigh on 20 years now. It was difficult not being able to do so.

2) I want to get back into design. I am a rather competent programmer and love doing that, but I love designing interfaces and working with all the psychology that is inherent in that field. In many ways, this is my core strength: understanding behavior. While there were a few projects at EA that allowed me to flex those wings, they were few and far between.

3) I want to spend less time in a car. While I had a generous “work at home” allowance (two days a week), I still spent two hours a day in the commute. It had gotten to the point where I started coming into the office before seven so that I could leave at three, taking short lunches, just so that I could shave forty-five minutes off my drive time. Now, I have a nice five minute walk to a train that drops me off at the office doors, ten minutes later.

4) I want to work for the good of mankind. That sounds really, really cheesy, but it’s true. I’m getting older; the opportunities to Change the World are appearing with slower regularity. I have long been a supporter of what Wikipedia is trying to do – spread knowledge – and it feels good to be a part of that process.

So that’s that.

First, access to the “outer” planes was cut off. Slowly but surely, other planes were locked away, until only the Purgatorio (a giant void filled with small “islands” of land) and Valhalla (the “earth” zone) remained. Then, elements of the void started eating up Valhalla. . .

Eventually, the main island in Valhalla was “moved” to the Purgatorio and Valhalla itself was shut off. At that point, the “memories” began appearing: shards and snippets of poetry, broadcast as global messages. These have served as my “bookend” for the game, and serve to connect one of its central themes back to itself.

Here is a log of the “memory shards”, including my final speech to the players. They were broadcast in sets, over multiple days.

Set One:

There is a sudden flash of light from all around that blinds you momentarily. As your eyes return to normal, you momentarily see several unknown rune shapes.

Visions and memories, not your own, flood your mind.

There are the eyes of a woman, auburn-haired. Laughing. Her name is Molly.

Here are the cracked and peeling houses of the neighborhood where the you-who-is-not-you grew up.

Two small boys are chasing a dog through a field. One of them has a bb gun, and will shoot it in the side. The wound will get infected, and the dog will die.

The blonde woman buys ice cream for her son. His name is Clay. He has a liver disease. The sun is setting.

The sun rises behind the tower, spreading golden light across a field of yellow grass dotted with sleeping horses. The king is dead; you have failed.

You will hear the racous cries of the fishermen selling their wares one day; the whack-whack snicker-snack of knives gutting tuna and salmon.

The wails of the slaves, so viscous, a pathetic, liquid sound. Mayhaps you’ll eat one soon.

You should speak to her. That girl. You know the one I mean. Tell her soon; the world is ending.

The symbols fade and the world rightens.

Set Two:

The true name of the Maker lies hidden between the muted rhythm of a heart beat and the liquid eeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhh-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah of the lungs. Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

The dentist grimaces as she sands bits of dried epoxy from a patient’s tooth. The teeth are stained – too much tobacco and coffee – and the filling doesn’t match.

A handful of dirt splatters on the coffin. The mortuary gave out cards; one side has a picture of a saint, and the other side has the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. You fold it without thinking and put it in your pocket.

His name is Richard. You can smell his lust; it’s a oily tang in the city air. He intends to sleep with the blonde stripper. He will fail. You order another drink and wait, the gun heavy in your pocket.

The prisoners sing spirituals as they work along the road. The pounding of rocks punctuates each verse. The noon sun gleams dully off the black steel of the guard’s shotgun.

A young brunette woman leans out of an apartment building to watch a wedding processional in the street below. This moment is captured on a greasy stream of film. It will be one of the few photographs of her. She will die a few years later, the victim of a genocidal pogrom.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

Your grandfather is teaching you how to twirl a gun. His enormous hands effortless spin an antique Colt while yours struggle with a cheap, tin pop-gun. You are four years old. He will soon die, and this will be your only memory of him.

Gently the child bobs in the water, bouyed by an air-filled vest. She smiles and gurgles as she learns to swim.

Every time a baby is born in the ward, the nurse presses a little button, and strains of Brahms are heard through the floor.

The tangy smell of cordite fills the air as the deranged assassin finds his mark. The musician dies, bleeding into the gutter. His widow cries over his body.

He is furiously stabbing at the tree where he had carved their initials together inside of a heart. Tears blind him, and he cuts his hand.

The cat is in pain. It does not know how to communicate this to its mother. Instead it sets down, glassy-eyed, barely moving.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

Several thousand miles away, an unsung poet dies.

Set Three:

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

She touches his hand, accidentally, electrically. “I’m sorry,” she says, but doesn’t mean it, not really, he is so handsome. Her name is Hannah; his Francis. One day, in the future, she will bear him a son who will become a president.

You sit at the edge of the lake. Your fishing rod is a simple thing: just a stick with a nylon line tied the end and a bright orange bobber above the hook. Father has a *real* fishing rod, with a reel and everything. There is a metal bucket filled with small trout; he caught them. You will never be happier than this moment, being a son in the moment of your father, who loves you more than you can know. Eventually, you will drift apart, and then together.

He said, “We shouldn’t tell anyone about this,” as he touched her. She sighs.

I have to let you go. You are no longer mine.

Her name is Tatinana. She likes playing with her doll. Her father is important somehow but she doesn’t quite understand. Someday, in the future, she will help to hold down a soldier while a surgeon violently removes a bullet from his chest.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

She doesn’t understand. The boy pushed her in the sand; she just wanted to go down the slide. Mother wipes away tears with a cheap tissue. There will be ice cream.

OHGOD OHGOD OHGOD DON’T FUCKING DIE ON ME YOU BITCH. ohfuck you’re overdosing. don’tyoufuckingdieplease. Here, take some speed; maybe that will make you well until the ambulance comes.

Things have never been so swell.

The knives! The knives! Once, twice, five, twelve, twenty, they stab and stab. The pain, the pain – my cloak, my hands, the floor, they are painted crimson, this cannot be my blood. That cannot be my son…

I watch the fireflies swarm in the heat. They twist and dance among the eddies of the late summer night; I think of the girl I am crushing on and wish she could experience this with me.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

He is a gentle boy. He loves creatures; he loves the world. Nervously, he tells his parents that he thinks he is gay. “You’re no son of mine,” father says. “I didn’t raise no faggot.” There are bruises the next day.

I read your fucking book. Did you hear me? I READ YOUR FUCKING BOOK.

The blood washes down, mixing with the dirt, collecting in the cracks of the soles of my shoes. “I’ll have to scrub that out”, I think.

She lifts the bowl of soup to her mouth. She thinks of a man she used to love. He boarded a ship one day and she never saw him again.

Thrum thrum thrum.

Thrum thrum thrum.

Set Four:

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

That girl, the one with dishwater hair, the one over there…

“Faggot! Faggot!” They scream this at me as they beat me but I’m not gay! I’m not! Stop! The gravel sticks into my skin, my skull lifted and pounded into it. Jesus, jesus, jesus, STOP.

Here sings the sun. It shines yellow upon the trees. They are golden in its light. I step across a broken branch and take her hand. Her touch is electric, like a jellyfish.

There is a burbling sound as he tries to breathe. Bubbles of blood collect around his mouth; ohgod it hurtssobad. The wrecked motorcycle lies five meters ahead; the car drives off.

“I want a divorce,” she says. “I never really thought we had a future together.” There is a flash of patience, then a flash of rage. There is a crunching sound as you punch the wall, bloodying your knuckles. “THEN WHY DID YOU FUCKING AGREE TO MARRY ME IN THE FIRST PLACE?” you scream. The wall will bear the mark for two years before it is cleaned.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

The monitors sing. deet. deet. deet. deet. deeeeeeeeeeeet. My friend dies from cancer, unknown, alone, in a hospital in New York. His parents are informed of his illness when they are called upon to claim his corpse.

“I do this for her,” he thinks. “She’ll love me when it’s done.” Finger pulses on the trigger: once, twice, thrice, four times. Secret Service tackles him, but the hornets find their marks.

As he lays to rest, her cat settles on his chest and purrs. He is accepted. Once he sleeps, she will slink away, her purpose complete.

“I’ve seen you around,” she says. “You’re noticable. ‘Hey, whose that rockin’ dude, there?'” Stunned, no words, the event passes without notice.

This is your world. This is your life.

Live in it now or be a spectator forever.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

Set Five:

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

It is July 2nd, 1961. The voices say, “take the pills! Take the pills!” Do it, papa. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. Best of all he loved the fall / The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods / Leaves floating on the trout stream / And above the hills / The high blue windless skies / Now he will be a part of them forever

Christ, she is so beautiful, and I’ll never. . . I’ll never be able to talk to her again.

“I want you to listen to this,” she says. “I think you’ll like it.” It’s a trip-hop drum-and-bass cd. He listens attentively because she is hot and he likes her. He tries not to think that the lyrics mean anything.

A small voice in the back of my skull says “no, stop” but I keep hitting him. He’s down, done, drawn – I keep punching. Wet meat, broken bone, my knuckles. Someone grabs my shoulders, pulls me off him; he coughs blood. Someone says, “Cops are comin'”. I wake up the next day with damaged hands and no memory of who he was.

“You know, I thought you were going to ask me if we could get another cat,” she says. He had asked her to marry him. She said ‘yes’.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

“I didn’t know it was like this,” he said. “I had no idea, I was so scared.” He kisses the other boy. “I’m so scared; I don’t know what to do, everyone will hate me.”

Click, click, click. The bullets go click, click, click as they are slotted into the magazine. Click, click, click. The Ambassador Hotel. He’ll be there.

She coughs for the last time. A small amount of blood seeps into the tube. Her family sighs, collectively.

“You know. . . You know that I love you, right?”

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Set Five:

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to weep and a time to laugh;A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to lose and a time to seek; A time to rend and a time to sew;
A time to keep silent and a time to speak; A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

My favorite quote is by an American author, John Steinbeck. “A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?”

Do your best to do good things because the time when you must ask those questions comes all too soon.

I have enjoyed our time together.

Thank you.