Category: Self-ish

ICONS pdf available

The electronic version of ICONS is now available! Currently half-price! US$15, down from US$30.

The print version is shipping mid-month if you want to order it through your friendly neighbourhood game store or direct from the publishers.

Very pleased to see it hit!

The character generation process is almost a game in itself. In our playtest group (Dale, Jenni, James P and Norman) we ended up with some inspiring and weird characters. James rolled up a character with almost the same powers as Jenni’s character Salamandress, just a bit more useless. James turned this sows ear into a super-strong purse by deciding his character was in fact a huge fan of Salamandress and had built a metal suit that copied her powers, poorly. Thus was born Robo-Zard! Poor, terrifying Robo-Zard. (Other characters also extremely cool. huzzah!)

Suburban Gothic

Cal posted the other day about getting into the Hutt groove. It’s been playing on my mind, too, as I settle back into the neighbourhood of my yoof. I can feel old channels reopening, old patterns reigniting. Leafy streets and low garden walls and drawn curtains and the line of the hills. Older marrieds, high schoolers. Empty streets after dark. The feeling that everything is one step back from view.

Suburbs work out community differently, spacing everyone out, reducing the social importance of physical proximity. Freedom to grow each plot of land in a different way; people do. Lots of worlds unhindered.

We don’t stop at the skin. We’re networked, social, contextual. Our environment is part of who and what we are. Suburbs shape a particular imagination. Curious, respectful, measured, gothic. Vast tracts of surface calm, punctuated by moments of upheaval which quickly sink from view. Intrusions from unstable worlds. The suburbs encourage an imaginative structure where causality is concealed, even impenetrable. Where the observer cannot uncover the web of connections that would make sense of an event. I’m reading ‘The Big Sleep’ right now, and Chandler’s detective stories are chronicles of the big city. There, the fundamental principle is that of overlap, of constant surface tension, the precise opposite of the suburban reality.

The first novel I wrote, “in move”, was set in the world I knew best: the Hutt Valley, mid-90s, teenage boys. (Brian maintains it should be titled “Hutt Boys”.) It’s intensely autobiographical in the sense that it captures the emotional truth I felt growing up here. Looking back on it now, after over a decade away from here, I can see more clearly how it also captures the place. The logic of that novel is essentially suburban. The four central characters are all sealed in their own impenetrable, unstable worlds, and the story is about what happens when they are forced to cross boundaries and negotiate new alignments. The story wouldn’t work in a different environment.

It’s good to be back. I know how this works, I know how my creative energy plays out in this space, I know how the hills look in the morning. I’m excited to see what we can reach.

It’s Easy To Have A Child To Stay

We had little nibling James staying with us all weekend, and it was good fun times. It was our first serious nibling-babysitting, and ironically we double-booked ourselves with a wedding, so we the babysitters had to subcontract out to some other babysitters for Saturday evening. (Thanks Miri and Matt!)

Things I learned:
* going around on a runalong bike never stops being fun
* going down a slide never stops being fun
* waking up in an unfamiliar place is not fun
* the appropriate thing to do when you have had enough food is to carry what you didn’t eat around in your hand for the next two hours in case you get hungry again
* more bike!

He can come back, I reckon.

Oor Hoose, and ANZAC day.

And so it is.

A week in, and we’re sorted at last – the internets and phone lines were the last things to get connected up. Boxes are now stacked empty in the garage and the rooms themselves are full of stuff. It feels comfortable, already. I think we’ll come to love living here.

Here’s a funny thing, though. If you stand at the front door and look out, you see directly across the way the house where my mother grew up. We knew was there was a family place somewhere on the street, but we didn’t know it was so close until after making an offer. I’ve since learned that my great-grandfather Felix used to sit on the steps outside the front door there and watch the passers-by. It was a railways street so I expect he knew most everyone who passed. I like the idea that our new house was one of the ones he watched over in the late days of his life.

The last few ANZAC days I’ve excerpted from Felix’s war diaries. Here’s 29 September, 1918:

3.30am. Away went a very poor barrage and over we went. Took Welsh Ridge and four lines of trenches and hundreds of prisoners and village of Vacquerie. Got to our objective and consolidated. Casualties very light. Got a lot of officer prisoners and our boys have loads of souvenirs, glasses, [?], matches etc. A very successful stunt. Especially as it was pitch dark until we got up to our objective and Fritz had a lot of wire in front. The Boache seemed to me to surrender very easily. One of our Companies got too far ahead and lost two platoons. The Huns only took the fit men, dressing our wounded and leaving them until we came along.

The action at Welsh Ridge was near the end of hostilities, part of the “Hundred Days Offensive” that broke through the Western front. It was also an important experience for Felix. John H. Gray’s Quid Non Pro Patria: The Short Distinguished Military Life of Henry James Nicholas VC MM relies on Felix’s diaries for detail and colour, for Felix and VC-winner Henry Nicholas were in many of the same places. It includes some words from Felix’s daughter Mary (my grandmother’s sister) on something that happened at Welsh Ridge when he found a bugle:

He told us that during the battle he was pinned down and took shelter where he could. In so doing he found himself alongside the body of a German soldier. On his back was an unusual article covered in scrim. It was the bugle, so covered presumably to prevent reflection from its shiny surface.

He turned the body over and was struck by its youth and by its beauty. An olive-skinned young man of fine features, little more than a child. Killed he presumed by blast as he was unmarked.

Her father had said more than once over the years, that the sight of that dead boy encapsulated for him the futility of war, and picking up the bugle he had said, at least to himself – “I’ll take this and keep it for you.”

Felix kept the bugle, and every night thereafter he prayed for that young German.

Hoose

So we’ve bought this hoose.

It’s in the lovely Hutt suburb of Waiwhetu. It’s pretty close to my old stomping ground, easy walking distance to my parents and my grandmother and an easy drive to Cal’s sisters.

Moving date still to be confirmed, mid-April sometime.

I am excited!

House Things

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. This weekend just gone, Cal and I decided to put a toe in the water of house-hunting. We’ve been saving up a deposit for a wee while, and although we love our apartment we’ve been talking in general terms about looking to buy.
We do some reviewing of the house listings (well, Cal’s been checking them regularly for a while and showing me the choice cuts) and find a few open homes to check out. We’re thinking suburbia, and our price range is telling us the same thing, so we decide on Sunday to check out a few spots in the Hutt Valley.
Spot one – open home is cancelled. (This was the one we were very keen on.) Spot three – smaller and less cool than expected. Spot two, however, was nicer than we were expecting. It ticked all our boxes. It needs work, but not crazy work, and it felt good. We spent about twenty minutes looking around it.
So we decided to make an offer.
And here we are, three days into househunting and we’re already heading into a meeting with the real estate agents for negotiations. We’re acting in good faith – we could live there, and three days of reflecting on it hasn’t changed that view. But we’re in no hurry. We’re not madly in love with the house, we won’t do anything to get it. We could let it go, spend another 6 months to a year in our apartment and be pretty comfortable with that. That’s something in our favour. (Also in our favour: my brother is a lawyer who does this sorta thing all the time. Cheers big bro for the advice so far.)
But despite this, I am a bit unnerved. It seems incredible and ridiculous to me that you can get this deep into real serious financial process based on twenty minutes of walking through an empty house. Man, I take longer than that to pick a library book. But this, apparently, is how it’s done.
So, internets – advise me. What do we need to know?
And what the heck are we getting ourselves into?
And does quoting Bill and Ted make me more or less qualified as a potential home-owner?

Dec 31st, 1999


(THE LAST DAY OF EXISTENCE)
The car is parked on the Napier waterfront & I’m in the front listening to the thud of bass. People movement. A day that has been foreseen for so long. I drove up alone in two stretches, a break at PN, the exultation of geography, the Manawatu Gorge. I realised why mother begged the kids to look we had to be her eyes, it was our duty to experience & appreciate simply because we could…
…just saw Aurora and her flatmate Cassie, here w/ Aurora’s band-boy, we get ice cream and now I have chocolate topping on my beach pants. Symbolise that!
Sunlight is caught up in grey clouds like it can’t kick through. I feel underneath. And, oddly, far from alone.
I’ve referred to tonight’s soloist escapade as a happy suicide. I’m using it, this festival, to reiterate my preference for isolation, to focus and refocus in, to strip myself down. 8 years ago tonight I changed, started on a road that has led here, away from all who I know – alone in a crowd. So easy to interpret life as narrative and see the precursors to this, images and themes echoing back and down through years. 1999 has been a culmination, bringing a new freedom, the entirety of which I am only just beginning to appreciate. I have removed my cultured self by layers, folding each back and sloughing it off, and now I’m learning to live without guides and structures, not of time or need or respect; there is only one more category to lose now and that is Me as Me. Happy suicide; tonight I remove even my self. Like the years, I parcel it up and lock it away and move on, a new cycle, build a door just to open it, and free of feedback I move to dawn.
The Air India hijack continues a week on. Giant speaker stacks are playing ‘party like it’s 1999…’
Party like it’s now.

I kept a journal through 1999. Reading over some of it recently, I realise how much of it is coded so only I will ever see most of the content – this entry contains literally dozens of loaded words, packing in context and references that only I will get. But I want to take a moment on this blog to record that moment ten years (er, and a month) ago when I finished the journal, finished the 90s, and finished an eight-year process of ‘learning to live without guides or structures’. I can’t imagine myself without that process. It was how I created a version of myself I could properly and happily be.
Perhaps significantly, about three weeks after writing the above entry I met Cal for the first time.

New chair


Beautiful wife persuaded me that it was time to get a new chair. Through careful viewing of photographic comparison above, an alert reader may notice some slight differences between the two chairs, namely that one is a tiny bent hollow with a back that doesn’t go up any more, whereas the other is a majestic throne with a high, curving back.
Should have done this years ago. If this improves my comfort levels a tenth as much as the ergo keyboard has, it will be money very well spent.
Note, also, that the chair’s back curves away from the lower back, rather than in toward the neck. I only mention this because every time I get on a plane it’s bloody torture on account of some genius who thinks chairs should have convex backs, particularly if you have to sit in them for twenty-two hours. Arg.
Ahhh. The comfy chair.