Over the past few years, I've become much more interested in the horror genre. Some of it is in response to how big of an impact It had on me (so much so that I read it every year for three years in a row; this past summer, I watched both of the new movies in lieu of reading the book, just to get my fix). But I'm realizing that I've been interested in scary stories since I was little. I loved reading the newest Goosebumps books--I even dabbled in the "more intense" Fear Street books every once in a while (what can I say? I was an edgy nineties kid). I still have Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares: Tales to Make You Scream, which I keep on my own kids' bookshelf in case they ever want to dive into the mind-numbing horror and utter depravity that is a kid's collection of spooky stories.
I never owned Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, though some friends (and maybe my brother?) did. The drawings in them disturbed me much more than the written words did--I had nightmares from those pictures, I'm not going to lie. (One of them leads this post.) I read things like Roald Dahl's The Witches, which scared me more when I saw the traumatizing ending of the movie. In short, I had an interest in the right amount of scary. Ghosbusters 2? I was there for that. Chucky? Not so much. There was something about being spooked just right that scratched a childish itch. This isn't to say I didn't have nightmares or bad dreams. I still vividly remember having a night terror where a gremlin (from the movie Gremlins, unsurprisingly) and E.T. (from the movie E.T., unsurprisingly) tried to shuffle out of the darkness in the corner of my bedroom to grab me. I kept screaming at these shifting shadows to go away. I even hurt my hand when I struck the side of my bunkbed while trying to swat them away. My mom came in, frantic (and probably furious at having been awakened). Her presence made them drift away, vapor in the wind. I don't know if she remembers it happening. Like all kids navigating a strange world, my imagination fueled plenty of frightening things at night, infusing the surety of surreality in my small mind and driving those sleep-depriving dreams deeply into my psyche. Yes, I dreamed of Freddy Krueger, despite having never (to this day) seen A Nightmare on Elm Street. His scarred face and knife-glove jolted me with a pang of panic for much of my childhood. At my grandma's house, she had a VHS collection of the TV show Fairy Tale Theater (hosted by Shelley Duvall, the actress from The Shining that many call the scariest movie of all time and I found interesting and enjoyable and not at all scary). My favorite episode was "The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About the Shivers". A jawbreaker of a title name notwithstanding, it was the one that I thought was the best made. Rewatching part of it recently, I can remember why I liked it so much--though I don't know what part really scared me. I recall that the Taylor Maid store at the mall I went to as a kid terrified me with its assortment of werewolf, zombie, and gruesome masks--enough that I dreaded it when we came into the mall via the entrance closest to that store. Yet for all of that, I didn't mind picking up scary books. I mean, yes, Goosebumps is hardly the example par excellence of horror, but for a third-grader, it's got some pretty intense scares. And it isn't even the idea that affects me now--namely, a written scary story hardly bothers me at all--that was going on back then. I distinctly remember reading Jurassic Park in the sixth grade (I don't know if my parents knew I had purloined it off my dad's nightstand and read the entire thing over the course of a weekend) and writhing with anxious dread and near-panic as Tim and Lex are chased by velociraptors in the kitchen on Isla Nublar. Heck, there was even a time--I can't remember the book now--where a jump scare actually worked with me and I jolted hard enough to almost drop the book. Nowadays, though, I don't feel that way. Written stories can gross me out (I read Brian Keene's City of the Dead because it was a new take on zombies; it was pretty gruesome), give me a slimy feeling, or fail to impress me (I think the much-vaunted-but-pretty-meh-for-me Hell House by Richard Matheson fits in there). Basically nothing I've read has scared me. Movies and video games, on the other hand… I find that really interesting, actually. I flatter myself that I have a fairly robust imagination (except for when someone's like, "Quick! Think of a clever way to say this…" and I completely freeze), but for some reason, the world of words doesn't feel dangerous enough, I suppose. Even if I imagine something in greater detail than a film might, it sits in my mind differently. I can only hypothesize that this is because of just how many words I use--both reading and writing--in my life. We're too intimate, words and I are, to have that disparity of knowledge that's crucial for cultivating fear. There are knives in words, yes, but they aren't in ghost stories. In the visual world, however, it's a different tale altogether. I already mentioned being traumatized by the illustrations of one of these Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books (though it might have been some imitator version, now that I think about it). During my early married days, another newlywed couple would come over each weekend and we'd watch scary movies. I saw The Grudge and maybe one or two of the other Scary-Face-Booga-Booga type movies that were popular at the turn of the millennium. We'd also play scary video games. Silent Hill 4: The Room, Fatal Frame 1 and 2, and a couple of others graced our CRT television. Once, the scares were so bad that neither Gayle nor I could fall asleep, with my wife finally asking me to talk to her about the details of my then-work in progress just to get her mind off the images of the game long enough to slip into sleep. I finally played Resident Evil VII recently, as well as the remakes of both 2 and 3. There are some jump scare moments in those games, though a lot of any creepiness is alleviated by the presence of shotguns and/or rocket launchers. And while Resident Evil has moved away from the true horror of its roots (with VII being an exception), I don't feel like I've been genuinely scared by an RE game in many years. I tend not to watch too many R-rated movies (clearly, I make exceptions, as I've already confessed my sin of watching both It movies), so I don't have a lot of experience with some of the real touchstones of the cinematic variety. Still, I know the difference between Jason Vorhees and Mike Myers, and while I couldn't really explain the plot of the movie, I can recognize Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre without prompting. Blair Witch Project? Come on: I grew up in the nineties. Of course I'm familiar with it without having seen it. I know the vintage monsters--Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and werewolves--as well as some of their more intense, frightening versions, including An American Werewolf in London. I've seen bits and pieces of The Thing and Alien, as YouTube is a great resource for cinema analyses, which tend to focus on some of these more popular movies. This has given me the chance to become more versed in the subgenres of horror, with an understanding of what I do--and don't--find interesting. I think psychological horror is fascinating; ghost stories are great. I'm not a fan of torture-porn (I don't care to learn what Hostel is about; the original conceit of Saw is conceptually interesting, but I don't have any desire to learn more about Jigsaw) and body-horror really distresses me. Slashers have a certain allure, but for the most part I like a hefty dose of the supernatural to go along with it. In other words, movies like Scream (which I saw on TV when I was younger and, so far as I can remember, is a surprisingly good mystery/horror film) aren't likely to catch my eye. I think part of that is knowing that true crime isn't something confined to opening and closing credits; serial killers do exist and that is alarming to me. Stories about the occult, demons (in certain contexts), and possession aren't for me. Pod-people stories stress me out, though I kind of like them. There's something about the inability to know or trust the characters that's really off-putting, which is the point of horror, of course. (Maybe this is why I really don't like Spider-Man stories with the Chameleon in them; it's so hard to know what's going on.) So I'm not an aficionado of horror films, but I know a bit about them. It's kind of weird, honestly. And, since it's October, I'm purposefully "studying" more about the genre via the aforementioned YouTube videos. And, since I'm me, I've been thinking about why I'm this way. What is it about horror that's drawing me to it, albeit in a slow orbit? Here's a possibility: Horror is supposed to show how people behave in extreme situations, so any demonstration of redeeming qualities--kindness, a helpful attitude, loyalty to friends and family--become that much more impressive. Not all--indeed, not much--of horror relies on that particular trope, however. So there has to be something more to it than that. Maybe it's the fact that horror stories often (not always, of course) show the eventual defeat of the darkness. The night is long, but sunrise eventually returns. That is a star-like glimmer of hope amid the inky sky of the horror story. Or perhaps it's the slight adrenaline jolt that can come. I'm not a fan of jump scares, but really creepy atmosphere? A pervasive sense of unease? The tickling at the back of the neck letting you know that something is wrong, though you can't quite discover how? That can be an enjoyable feeling, with the dread of the drop equaling a literary version of that moment before the doors on the Tower of Terror open and let you know that you're hundreds of feet above Disneyland. Whatever the reason, I'm sure that I'll continue to pick at the idea. Monsters have always been interesting to me; perhaps they'll act as a stepping stone toward other story possibilities in the future. I guess I'm just a boy who's gone out in search of the shivers. In the past year and a bit, there have been three notable video game releases--Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote about Resident Evil 2 Remake back in January 2019 when I finished it for the first time. I have since replayed it a good three or four times, still enjoying it quite thoroughly. In fact, in anticipation for RE3 coming out at the beginning of April, I replayed RE2 and had a great time blasting my way through the infected of Racoon City yet again.
But what I was really waiting for was Final Fantasy VII Remake. I have an enormous soft-spot in my heart for Cloud and his colorful crew--enough that I should maybe expand on some of what I talked about back in January of 2018--and I have been waiting and hoping for this game for over a decade. Really, ever since Advent Children came out, I wanted to see LEGO-style Cloud remade with newer graphics and video game mechanics. When Square Enix announced that FFVII Remake would be a reality and that we need only wait a bit longer, I was skeptical. After a certain amount of time, anticipation far outstrips what can be delivered. (This is the problem with Half Life 3, though there are stirrings about that actually coming to pass…) It's hard not to be excited about something that you're, you know, excited about. But the more I focus on wanting a thing, the less impressive it tends to be when I finally get it. So, I specifically avoided watching trailers (except for a couple of times, when the temptation was too great), and I did my best to think on other things. However, as it got closer, the demo dropped, and I was immediately excited--I played through the demo twice the day I downloaded it. Suffice to say, I have been a rather-pampered gamer in the past little while. In fact, that's what I wanted to talk about (I will try to write a review of both RE3 and FFVII in the near future, while the experience playing the games is still fresh): The strange way iterations in the video game medium differ from other media. Make vs. Remake Films are notorious for this: We have classic films that Hollywood knows contain a lot of quality, and they get remade with modern sensibilities, acting styles, costumes, and special effects. Almost always, they are an inferior product. I'm not a huge film nerd, but I can, off the top of my head, list a handful of movie "reboots" or remakes that failed to make a lasting impression. The Mummy, Godzilla, Ben Hur, Clash of the Titans, Total Recall, and Robocop all came and went with hardly a note. In fact, the aborted "Dark Universe" was supposed to be a cinematic contender of the classic Universal monster movies against Marvel's undisputed creations, but fell apart at inception because of many reasons that aren't really relevant here. The point is, with just over a century of film history, we've repeated film ideas constantly. It isn't like film invented this phenomenon, though. Lost to us now, there is a version of Hamlet from the late 1580s (maybe early 1590s?) that we only know about because people wrote about how bad it was. Maybe it was an early draft of the play that Shakespeare himself wrote (which is what Harold Bloom argues), or maybe it was just a trashy version of a familiar story. What Shakespeare went on to write--the Hamlet that has changed the world--is, on a story level, a reboot of the Ur-Hamlet. (And, yes, I would love to read that play.) But even Ur-Hamlet is based upon a Danish story about a prince named Amleth (whose name cracks me up…just relocating the last letter to the front and boom! new name). In fact, almost every story that Shakespeare told was actually a retelling--and he did it better than anyone else. Drama, being the forebearer to film, that makes sense. But even in poetry--arguably our oldest form of permanent communication--we see retellings and reimaginings. While The Aeneid is more of a spin-off from The Iliad, we see Homeric and Virgilian echoes throughout almost all of history. New forms take the epics and uses their tropes to experience the stories again (think, for example, of the experimental novel Ulysses). Even the Bible isn't free from retellings, as the sublime and unsurpassable Paradise Lost shows. What's the reason for this? Being a would-be writer, I understand this impulse. Some stories--and, in many ways, the way the stories are told--have an unexpected influence on a person. A creative person often will take that influential energy and redirect it through their own lens and talents in a hope to glean a piece of the original's power and put it into their own work. I despair of my own writings when I read Steinbeck or It, because I can't reach the level that I see. I want to try my hand at those influential stories--it's the reason I retold Hamlet for my NaNoWriMo 2019--and see if I can "do what they did". But as a consumer, it's a desire to reclaim the awe the original inspired. I envy anyone who gets to come to Paradise Lost for the first time, or experience It without expectations or prior knowledge. There's something inside of these stories that can't be caught anywhere else--but that doesn't mean we don't want to try. Within the Digital I understand why people want to retell and rework and reimagine and remake their stories. What's so fascinating to me about this phenomenon in video games, though, is why they want to try again: The technology has improved. Assuming Bloom is right and Shakespeare decided to try the story of Hamlet again, it wasn't because there was a new innovation in the medium of his story. It wasn't like they discovered they could have stereoscopic sound in the Globe Theatre. There wasn't a technological advancement in printing that made Milton think that the story of Genesis could now be told in epic poetry. (In fact, his choice of epic poetry was a commercial risk, as nobody read or wrote in that format anymore; he was using an antiquated format for his Bible fanfic.) Final Fantasy VII was originally released on the PlayStation because that console had the greatest amount of power available to the developers at the time. They crammed as much content as they could into three CD-ROMs, using every shortcut* they could to be able to tell the story as possible. The limitations of their technology prevented them from doing all that they wished to do. With the continual increase of processing power, photo-realistic graphics, and improvements on acting capture (a level beyond motion capture) technology, video games now have the ability to tell their stories more fully, with greater detail and precision than ever before. The medium itself is changed. So the desire to revisit that which was technologically-confined is, I think, understandable. But what surprises me is that these remakes are, from a standpoint unaffected by nostalgia, superior to the originals that inspired them. And that is a controversial statement. The Power of Nostalgia There's another form of iteration at play here: As rising generations--in this case, the much-maligned Millennials of which I am one--begin to create, they often recreate. It's a call-back to a "simpler" time (simple only because the creator was a child during that time, and most kids have the innocence of childhood to paste over the hard parts of history). I think the best example would have to be Back to the Future, where the modern (1985) clashes with the idyllic (1955). The majority of that film takes place in the fifties, with only the framing concept being in the eighties. The stuff that was modern to Marty Macfly is nostalgic to me now. Stranger Things takes this feeling as the primary part of its appeal (even though it's technically historical urban science fiction--not a particularly large genre, to be honest). It's common for this to happen: Soon enough, early 2000 pop-culture will be used in our stories as creators who have fond memories of a pre-9/11 world will take creative control over our television, movies, novels, and video games and use that nostalgia as fuel for interest in their creations. That is the nature of how we tell stories, I think. Originality is simply a combination of two previously uncombined elements, but those elements still exist. We can find fingerprints of others throughout any story, if we really try. What's happening now in the video game world, though, is that the power of nostalgia is being coupled with outstanding quality. Resident Evil 2 will always be one of my favorite video games. I played it countless times and could probably knock it out in a single afternoon with minimal saves if I really wanted. My long-standing fascination with zombies comes from that video game. (In fact, I tried writing a zombie story in middle school that involved an evil corporation that accidentally turned people into zombies and had to be stopped by the main character, a gun-toting, ponytailed girl who wasn't afraid of the monsters.) I have a huge amount of nostalgic appreciation for that game…but I don't recommend it. Not because of its violence or gore (which is so much worse in the remake), but because it's a product of the times and the technology. The voice acting is bad, the animations strange, the controls a mess…everything that we now use to judge a game's quality** renders Resident Evil 2 as a definite pass. Yes, it's influential and continued the survivor horror genre in video games. It's an important game. But it's no longer a "good" game…at least, not without context. Resident Evil 2 Remake, however, is excellent on almost every front. Again, without the nostalgia-glasses, it deserves the acclaim it's received and could be considered a better game than its original. If you add back in the nostalgia, its power is diminished a bit (since it can't ever be experienced in the same milieu of life in which I experienced the original), but only a bit. Where it fades (the twists and turns of the story aren't a surprise, for example), the nostalgia of being in the Racoon Police Department, hunting for the Diamond Key more than makes up for it. Final Remake Much of what I said about Resident Evil 2--and, by extension, Resident Evil 3--doesn't apply as much to FFVII. That game is still wonderful, and even has a retro vibe*** to it now. In fact, I insisted that my son play FFVII on his iPad before he played the remake on the PlayStation 4, as I didn't want him to create nostalgic memories of something that I didn't have. I wanted, in this particular case, his experience with Cloud to be dictated by the original PlayStation version. And I think I made the right choice (though my other boys won't have that experience, since they've watched me play FFVII Remake and have now started formulating their own childhood memories that will one day bloom into nostalgia). My oldest is at the perfect age to allow these types of memories to shape him and go with him. And while I think FFVII Remake is a remarkable game, the power of the connection between the original and me can't really be undone. I'll never be able to feel about Remake as I did about the nineties' version, because I'm not that person any more. I'm not in middle school in an America that had been at war since before I was born. I'm no longer living in a world with corded telephones and no home internet. What I made out of that game is contingent on when I encountered that game. So of course the remake can't really generate the same sort of feelings. Instead, whenever I play FFVII Remake in the future, it will remind me of this time, of the chaos and strangeness of living in quasi-quarantine as a virus ravages the world. The context of now will continue to affect how I feel about that game, just as the context of then affects me now. Still, it is remarkable to me that the video game industry is able to be iterative in its reiterations. I think there's more to this than happenstance, too, but I won't know for certain until we get remakes of things like Overwatch or Fortnite…and maybe we won't. Perhaps our technology has reached a place that current ideas can be realized fully on the first try (albeit with a patch or two), preventing the necessity of remaking anything. I guess we'll have to wait and see. --- * FFVII had "solved" the problem of not enough processing power by having all of the character models be simple geometric shapes, imbued with a subtlety of movement within their animations to convey their feelings. The other members of Cloud's party would disappear, walking into his body so that the game didn't have to render three characters at once. When they went on to develop Final Fantasy VIII, the developers at Squaresoft wanted to keep the models of the characters the same in the battle sequences as in the world--no more of that blocky, severely deformed character model idea. That desire nearly prevented the game from being completed, as it was one of the most difficult programming feats the developers had to do. ** Not the story, though…I've never seen the caliber of story as one of the graded components of a video game review *** If you were curious, I don't much care for retro aesthetic. I didn't like pixelated video games when that was all I could get. I disliked seeing cover art that looked so dissimilar from the product. Retro gaming doesn't appeal to me because it creates a false impression of nostalgia--it looks like my gaming past, but it's a brand new game that I didn't actually play. Without nostalgia to smooth over the rough (pixelated) edges, I don't get a lot from the game. As an amateur, armchair paleontologist (I would say dinophile, but that's not actually a word, and, strictly speaking, it means "lover of terrible [things]", which doesn't sound particularly pleasant) now is a great time to be alive and loving dinosaurs. There are, according to Steve Brusatte (in his book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, which you should read, because it's good), about 50 new species discovered every year. This means that, at the rate of about one a week, a fresh dinosaur is described.
Most recently is a bat-winged creature called Ambopteryx longibrachium (see the picture above) has caught some attention. It isn't the first bat-winged dinosaur ever discovered--that happened back in 2015 when scientists described Yi qi. And that's kind of my point: It's really hard to keep up with the past. This isn't just a phenomenon I suffer from with dinosaurs; being a history aficionado has this same peril. I recently learned about Virginia Hall, a spy for the French during World War II. A book about her life was just released (I haven't read it yet), and, according to the NPR article that let me know about her in the first place, there are three books about her, as well as two movies in the works. This, of course, is wonderful. Far too often the butchers and killers and maniacs of the war are the focus of our stories. And, as most of the soldiers and all of the generals are male, it's particularly nice to get a story about the contributions of women in the war. Moreover, I also have a hard time keeping up with already published (and purchased) books that cover the topics I'm interested. I have two books about living in Elizabethan England, too many about Shakespeare to even catalogue from memory, and a solid handful of Milton-related works. Most of these were purchased because I thought they'd be interested and I believed (as I always do) the lie I tell myself that I will find a way to squeeze in a bit more reading, one more book. Thinking back over my own past, there was a time when what I liked was more niche than nowadays. As a kid, I loved reading Spider-Man novels--not just the comics, which were too variegated for me to keep track of--because I could buy them as they came out. In the mid- to late nineties, there wasn't the glut of interest in superheroes that we're enjoying (and I am enjoying it immensely) today. Now, however, there are so many ways of getting into the spider-verse that it's honestly intimidating. I don't want to say that this is simply because of nostalgia-glasses, though that certainly is a possibility. I was a pretty oblivious kid (I didn't, for example, know that eighth grade GPA didn't "count" until the third term of that year was over), so there's a good chance that more was happening that I simply wasn't aware of. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that there really is just a lot more output of content now than ever before. Clearly, the internet is the conduit for this, but I'm still convinced that part of the reason this feels the case is because there is a way for smaller voices to be better heard. I mean, not in the Spider-Man case: Intellectual properties tend to be pretty tightly regulated. But just in general, I'm confident that people were making stuff that they couldn't get into the mainstream and so they languished. So, I guess it's actually pretty hard to assert that we have quantifiable more stuff. The difficulty remains, however: Keeping up with the stories of the past, the new ideas of our future, the important aspects of our now is no easy task. It's beyond what a full-time consumer of culture could ever hope to accomplish, like drinking the ocean. Then again, who needs to drink it? We can enjoy it in many other ways. Maybe that's what I should focus on, instead. When I was a teenager, my first exposure to zombie fiction was in the form of Resident Evil 2 for the original PlayStation. My friend Mark and I would play through the game frequently until it got to the point that I could run through the first half of the game without much difficulty. (Due to the nature of the old PlayStation, my memory card had a tendency of getting erased, so I ended up playing the beginning of the story more times than finishing it.) It started a seed of zombie appreciation that continues--albeit abated--to this day.
Capcom recently released a full-fledged remake of Resident Evil 2 for the PlayStation 4. I don't know what the thought process was, though I hope that Square Enix is taking notes about how to update without rebooting, to pay homage to the past without slavishly abiding by it, because Capcom has really created something worthwhile here. A handful of caveats: 1) I didn't finish the game; I didn't finish one campaign. I imagine I was within striking distance of finishing Claire's story, and I have the entirety of Leon's to play, but my Redbox rental came due and I didn't want to spend any more money on a game I'm likely to buy sometime in the not-too-distant future. 2) I'm not really going to divulge a bunch of plot twists or spoilers per se, but I also amn't going to hold back on points I think are worth noting--consider this the spoiler warning. 3) This game is extremely graphic and it has quite a bit of foul language. So, if you're thinking of trying out the game but those things bother you, then you may want to reconsider. Onward… The great challenge (or, more precisely, one of the great challenges that isn't related to how the community of developers and fans treats minorities and women) of video gaming is the closeness of incipience and perpetual iteration. Video games are living memory-new, having been born at about the same time as a great many aficionados were. Video games, therefore, have a quality to them that is inherently nostalgic. Its roots are ludic (it's in the name, right? Video games) and there's a sense of possession that this particular medium has which extends far beyond the type of possessiveness that other burgeoning media might have had. Comic books were printed on pulp because they weren't considered valuable enough to preserve. Early film--heck, no film--was available for home-use consumption, so film couldn't be seen on-demand up until the '80s--right around the same time that video games began to make themselves known. What I mean by this is that I believe there's an unprecedented connection between the product of the medium and the consumers of it. Video games are inherently interactive, and the fanbase that has grown up with video games takes that sense of interactivity to (all too often, sadly) claim it gives them possessive rights to the games. They're the DNA of our childhoods, as it were, and mutating that DNA is risky business. Gamers are strange beings in that they claim to crave originality but truly they only want more of the same. (Evidence: Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Assassin's Creed games are indistinguishable from previous editions to all but the most dedicated fans. And for all its glory and beauty, games like Flower or Journey are footnotes on the indie-game scene.) So when it comes to wanting a remake of something, video game developers are in a bit of a bind: If they hew too closely to the first, it isn't "original" and is considered a waste of money. If it's too different, then it's clear that the developers have lost touch and they're just trying to exploit the fan base. This is, I'd wager, one of the biggest hangups that Square Enix has on remaking Final Fantasy VII: There's a lot of stuff in the original game that doesn't transfer well to the 2020s, so what should be changed? What kept? And how does a company take what made the original so beloved and update it to modern* sensibilities? Capcom's biggest hurdle was finding a way to invoke the distinct flavors of Resident Evil 2 from 1998 in a way that, just over twenty years later, can utilize new methods of gaming. That is, a beat-for-beat remake would be dull--an HD Remastering, not an actual remake--and something that took the series into brave (and controversial) territory, as they had with Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, and 7 would fail to feel like they were being genuine or connected to the past. What they discovered, however, was that it's not so hard to invoke nostalgia that can actually enhance expectation and subvert it at the same time. The Raccoon City Police Department's layout is almost the same, particularly with the massive hall in the center and the two separate wings. There are some new things that I wasn't expecting--emergency shutters and Mr. X stomping his way through the building--but familiar pieces made the transition, too (the licker jumping through the one-way mirror in the interrogation room, for example). The result was a familiar story--Claire Redfield looking for her brother amidst the hellscape of Raccoon City during the G-Virus outbreak--with enough twists to make it feel fresh. Chief Irons has a larger story, and there's an extended amount of area to explore, including an orphanage where Sherry Berkin is kept prisoner for a short segment of the game. The updating of gaming mechanics--being able to move and aim and shoot instead of the tank-controls of previous iterations--was a good move, in part because there were enough wrinkles** to make it so that, enhanced aiming notwithstanding, the zombies put up a good fight. Allowing the camera to be moved around instead of fixed-camera angles was necessary--it's how we're used to controlling characters nowadays--but there are enough zombies-in-the-dark-or-sneaking-up-behind-you moments that the jump scares still happen. In fact, as I was playing through a section in the sewer, my wife sat down to watch some of it. A zombie that we both saw slump off a banister was waiting when we came down and immediately jumped on my character's back. My wife, concurrently, jumped and screamed, declaring how much she hates games like this. All of the additions feel perfectly at home in the Resident Evil world--with a gripe about language. I know, I know; I'm aware of the hypocrisy in being fine with graphic violence but not swearing. But there's hardly any in the original, and Claire cusses the entire time she's taking a bead on a zombie. It's…distracting. Chief Irons is the biggest perpetrator--and since he's supposed to be scum, one might almost expect f-bombs from him. But Claire's profanity felt gratuitous and somewhat out of character. Speaking of graphic violence, though, there's a large difference between the pixelated flowers blooming from a zombie's face in 1998 and the glistening viscera the REngine can create. While the details of the world--and the insides of many of the victims of the game's violence--are incredible, the 2019 version did something that the '98 version never really managed: A genuine sense of revulsion and recognition of just how bad a zombie apocalypse might be. While there might be spots with static blood or a corpse on the ground in the 1998 version, there is no sanitation of a loading screen--back in '98, any time I wanted to see if a zombie really was dead, I need only wait for the bloodstain to grow beneath its stomach. Then, when I came back into the room, the corpse would be gone--spirited away by the limitations of the gaming system. Not only that, but there aren't any loading screens now…it threw me off for a bit, seeing Claire shove her way through double-hinged door after double-hinged door (not complaining, by the way, just noticing the difference). I didn't realize how the screen loading affected how I responded to the world until I started realizing that the tension I felt in the hallways never abated. In the past, I was accustomed to having a few seconds to catch my breath before the next screen opened up. No such luck in the 2019 version: Everything blends perfectly together, and the chances for a break are few and far between. Unlike Final Fantasy VII, which has countless memorable tunes, Resident Evil 2 (1998) only had a couple of songs that really stood out to me: The RCPD main hall theme and the eerie-yet-soothing theme of the "save (safe) rooms", a place where you could be certain a zombie wouldn't attack. Those auditory clues aren't in the 2019 version--though I think you can buy a more expensive version of the game that will come with the original soundtrack (which bothers me, but I won't get into that right now)--and I miss them. Still, on the whole, the game is an excellent game, a wonderful balance of nostalgia and freshness, and entirely worth your time--provided you like that sort of thing. To old fans of Resident Evil 2, I think you should give it a go. To those hoping to get into the series, this is a good way to see what Resident Evil 2 did to us twenty years ago, back when we were kids. --- * Another interesting bit: The progress of "modern" gaming. The iterations of gaming systems--with talk of a PlayStation 5 already looming, as well as other offerings from Microsoft, Nintendo, and (perhaps) even Ocular Rift--is fast enough that they can fit inside of presidential terms. What makes a game modern will quickly become antiquated--I remember buying Metal Gear Solid 4 in a deluxe edition because I assumed I'd never be able to buy another MGS game. Unlike the classics of literature, which has a real past, "classic" video games are really just the oldest--regardless of their value. I actually find it really interesting to see the ways that gaming culture tries to mimic canon when there isn't an Iliad or Odyssey to use as a measurement. How long before this medium has something that is the quintessence of the form? I don't know; hasty awards, while noteworthy, fundamentally fail what the medium is capable of. It'll be interesting to see what kind of consensus is required in determining what is the best representation of video games. ** In the sewer portion of the game, I got poisoned because a big monster vomited goo all over my face. Claire limped around for a good twenty-five minutes as I searched (mostly in vain) for relief from the poison. Whilst infected this way, Claire would frequently fall into coughing fits, which meant she couldn't run as fast and, if aiming, couldn't pull the trigger. These moments were particularly tense, as I often found myself going up against overwhelming odds and--unexpectedly--unable to fight back. The way they increased the horror differed, but the effect was the same: It made it more intense, more terrifying. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Now that the official day of Christmas has passed us by, rushing in and out like an avalanche of avarice and very pretty wrapping paper, and I can slow down just enough to almost hear myself think, I thought it might be enjoyable to go to Barnes and Noble to spend some of my Christmas money. My son, Demetrius, won a $15 gift card to Target during a family game, so he's anxious to get out and buy more--because the hundreds of dollars we all spent on each other wasn't enough, apparently. My wife tried to make a Ben Reilly Scarlet Spider (pictured above) hoodie for me, but accidentally ordered the wrong color (and then, later, size) of hoodie, so she has some stuff she wishes she could return. In other words, there are reasons for my remembering a day after Christmas from many years ago. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was probably the Christmas of 1993. Despite the outrageous success of Jurassic Park, I didn't ask for a velociraptor (a choice that would haunt me until I was in my thirties, when my wife at last hunted down an original Jurassic Park velociraptor for me to add to my collection). Instead, I was big on my superhero kick--more of a punt, really, as it's still one of my favorite things--and a fan of the X-Men cartoon series. Any comic book loving millennial worth her avocado toast remembers the series. Not only has it one of the coolest intro songs of all time, but the animation was much better than I was used to. It's what introduced me to characters that would make me excited for when X-Men, the Bryan Singer movie, released at the turn of the millennium. And, perhaps most importantly for my consumer-based identity, it's what primed me for the Spider-Man cartoon series--the conduit into the web-slinger's world that has made one of the largest differences in my life this side of religion. So, back to Christmas. In the weeks leading up to that blessed day of sleep-deprived desire, I, like most middle-class kids of the era, pored over the toy catalogue from Toys 'R' Us, looking at all of the kid models enthusing about whatever toy was placed in front of them. One of the pieces I saw was a set of X-Men action figures--a total of ten (provided memory serves), standing on two tiers of plastic-molded-to-look-like-metal-or-something. It was $50. Fifty dollars is not a small amount of money--for me now, even, let's be honest--and so this would instantly classify as a "Santa gift"*. I remember sitting at our counter, doing my best fifth grade math (and who says you don't use math in your daily life?). "A normal action figure," I probably said, "costs $4.99. That's more than five dollars after tax. But there are ten action figures in this, Mom!" (Mom was in the kitchen, listening casually and taking detailed mental notes, I'm certain.) "That means that, because of taxes, it probably would be cheaper than buying each one of these characters separately!" That, by the way, is probably the apex of my mathematical prowess. Anyway, I was both hard selling the present and expressing my enthusiasm. Since I knew that $50 was about the limit for a Santa gift, I figured that I was probably going to get what I asked for. After all, it was cheaper than buying each one of those characters separately! Christmas day came. The gift was under the tree. I was quite excited and happy. Until it came to taking the toys out. Now, for me, I still like buying action figures. I have displays on my desk at school…on three or four shelves at school…on my shelf by my desk in my home office…on the shelf above my closet in my home office…on another shelf by my desk in my home office…I have a lot of toys, is what I'm saying. In fact, I have so many that Demetrius sometimes comes in and wants to borrow one of my old-school action figures, if only because they're different than the kinds of toys he gets to play with. And were I now to buy a set of action figures like the one I got in 1993, I would most likely be pretty content with them. But not when I was ten. See, the thing was, these were a display of action figures. It wasn't the ten superheroes from the normal packaging, just discounted and put into a tasteful arrangement. No, they were stuck to the display. Like, completely non-removable. My heart sank. Tears started to creep into my eyes, which I didn't do very often by the time I was ten, and happened even less as the years went by. I stared at my "toy", realizing that my Christmas joy had been dashed. As I looked closer to each one, I saw that not only were the action figures glued onto the display, but they weren't even equipped with their mutant power actions--Wolverine didn't have claws (who makes a toy of Wolverine that doesn't have claws? Who does that? Honestly!), Cyclops' visor didn't light up to show he was using his heat vision (or whatever he calls the optic blasts that come from his eye-hole). When I explained that the characters didn't come off, my dad said he could probably find a way to remove them. But what was the point, I wondered, if they didn't have their mutant powers? (At that point, I remember him looking kind of confused.) There was nothing for it: I had to go through Christmas, enjoying the other presents that I received, and basically trying to be a good sport about being so horribly wrong about what I was getting from "Santa". It was a hard day. My dad got a new bit of technology that Christmas: a handheld camcorder, which he enthusiastically rolled constantly throughout that day. We have footage of a very young little sister babbling in her Christmas bathtub, the detritus of the Big Day's excesses in the front room, my mom chatting to Dad whilst making a Christmas breakfast, and more as Christmas '93 went on. What lives in family memory, however, would have to be the five minutes or so of me trying to cajole my younger brother into letting me borrow his Power Rangers toys for ten or fifteen minutes. His toys, of course, were actual toys that could be played with. I kept begging him; he kept refusing in the obstinate, one-word rebuttals that five year olds are so adept at: "No." I, sitting with my Miami Dolphins pajamas, red bathrobe, and Dolphins hat, plucking at my little brother's shoulder, trying to get him to lend me a toy for a while--seriously, it was only for, like, fifteen minutes--is one of those iconic family video moments that gets trotted out and played with a disturbing amount of frequency. At last, I noticed a chuckling sound. There was my dad, watching the exchange with amusement and a video camera. "This is for posterity!" crowed my dad. I buried my head in my lap and shoved the newly acquired Dolphins hat over me eyes… …so that Dad couldn't see me crying. The video cuts after that--Dad found something else to record--but I remember burning with sadness and embarrassment. I hadn't meant to pick a Christmas present that wasn't as advertised. I didn't want to bug my brother for his toys. I just…didn't have any of my own that day. On 26 December 1993, my mom and I made the seven mile (I'm guessing) trek to the closest Toys 'R' Us, receipt and re-boxed X-Men action figures in hand. As we stood in line to return the present, she pointed out a couple of other parents holding the same item. "I guess we weren't the only ones," she said. I can't remember if it made me feel better. The item exchanged, I went through the store and picked out some different toys--what they were, I can't remember. Maybe a Power Ranger? Maybe a Wolverine with retractable claws and a Cyclops with heat vision (or whatever he calls what comes out of his eye-hole)? What I replaced it with doesn't stand out in my memory very much, though I want to think that I was mollified. Now that I'm a parent, I'm always hopeful that what we decide to get our kids will be appreciated, that it will be memorable and enjoyable. That they will feel like they're noticed and listened to and remembered. And, in the case of the X-Men action figures, I definitely felt noticed, listened to, and remembered. So, at least on that level, it was a successful Christmas. I can be grateful for that. --- * I think that's familiar nomenclature, right? The "Santa gift" is the big thing that you've always wanted, left unwrapped by the Christmas tree with your name on it…so called because eventually you figure out the whole "Santa's not real" thing. At least, that's what we called it. And, by the age of 10, I'd figured out that Santa Claus isn't really stalking me. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! There's a book series that I read when I was a kid. In it, two boys buddied up and went on random adventures through their town. I think they may have solved mysteries, too.
The books were short--even as a young kid, I could read through them in an hour or two. They had, if my memory serves, a very nineties' style of artwork on the cover--the kind where it's highly detailed, yet exaggerated. They were formulaic, but I enjoyed the formula quite a bit, reading every available copy from the library. I have no memory of any specific plot (though I liked the Halloween one the most), but there was one detail that has stuck with me throughout the years: The sidekick boy character was an idiot. More than that, however, he had a very specific quirk, one that ended up getting the boys out of trouble--and into it, I'm sure--more than once: Anytime he heard a bell ring of any sort, he thought that it was a telephone call from the girl in his class on whom he had a major crush. The girl, of course, had no idea the kid (I can't remember any of their names) even existed. The love-smitten stripling, on the other hand, was convinced that she did…she just was really fickle. She would call him (in his imagination, apparently) but only have enough patience to let the phone ring once. (Clearly this is a pre-cellphone era; in fact, the gag really only works if you remember that phones used to have physical bells inside of them that would emit their metallic rings every time someone called.) If Doug (we'll call him Doug) didn't make it to the phone in time for the "all important first ring" (not a direct quote), then she would hang up on him. Because Doug (I really don't think he was called Doug) didn't want to miss Melissa's (I don't think she was called Melissa) call, he would go through bizarre, cartoonish efforts to get to the phone before the end of the first ring. In his enthusiasm, he would inevitably crash into tables, trip on rakes, or--I think this happened--get his head stuck in between the doors of a moving bus. Now, if you're thinking that I'm building up to a large reveal about this book, perhaps with a picture of the cover of one of the many episodes in the series…you're wrong. I can't, for the life of me, remember what these books are called. I don't remember the author, the character names (obviously), or even when I read them--so no idea about publication dates. This is, honestly, an unusual occurrence. I typically have a better memory when it comes to books I've read--especially ones that I liked--even if some of the memory is fractured a bit. While it's not as effective as it once was--maybe because I've read so many books since I was a kid--I used to be able to remember which side of the page, left or right, a particular image or event would take place. Now, since I don't think I ever bought any copies (though maybe I did? I seem to recall that it wasn't my preference, since they were so short), I don't have them sitting on my shelf. I don't think they were put in a box and donated to my old elementary school. So I can't work through the gauzy mist of memory and try to reconstruct enough concrete details to hunt down any of the copies. And it's really kind of bothering me. Not only because I'd like to reread them and see if they were as fun and bizarre as I thought they were when I was, like, nine or whatever, but because, if they are, I'd like to share them with my boys. We've read a lot of different kinds of fiction over the past couple of years together, and I'm always on the lookout for exciting books that fit in with the interests of my three boys (eleven and under). Another thing about this is the whole "stuck in my craw" feeling. It's the thing where you turn to IMDb because you can't quite place where you've seen that actor before, but it's bugging you so you can't enjoy the movie until you figure it out? It's like that, except that no one seems to know what I'm talking about. My Google-fu has failed me--I can't get so much as a cold lead to chase down. I've asked a librarian, who gave me a pitying look and said she had no idea what I was talking about. Like a splinter in my mind, I want to pry it loose so that I can again rest easy--okay, I'm not actually losing sleep over this, but still… And maybe part of it is that I don't want to feel like I imagined it…though if I did, then maybe I have a great premise to use to write my own fiction! But every time I think of that angle, I can't really settle on that as satisfactory. I'm not crazy, and I know I read those books. They weren't a dream I had back in 1993. And maybe I feel so strongly about that is because there's already enough question marks about things that I definitively remember one way, only to learn that things really weren't like that at all. As a history teacher, this is one of the great perils of my profession, and it's frightening to think that what we know is only what we think we know and the fabrication of the past--maliciously done or through the process of being human with imperfect powers of recollection--could be more real than the memories on which we rely. Though the human mind is capable of up to, perhaps, 2.5 petabytes of information, the "files", as it were, aren't foolproof. They corrupt easily, for lack of a better phrase, and though I can still access them, I might be accessing a degraded copy that is giving me false information…false memories. With that in mind, maybe it isn't surprising to see that I really want to figure out what that one book really is. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! While I never had great aspirations to go into filmmaking, I really liked movies as a kid. Jurassic Park was probably the first film to really capture my imagination, which came out when I was ten. I would go over to my good friend's house, Steven Aaron, and we'd watch something from his father's expansive Betamax (and, later, VHS) library. We'd watch "Weird" Al Yankovic music videos, episodes of Saturday Night Live, and UHF…also by "Weird" Al, now that I think of it. I first experienced Back to the Future whilst at Steve's house, as well as portions of The Twilight Zone Movie (which, though I closed my eyes during the really scary moment, the goblin on the wing of the airplane was enough to haunt my dreams for years). We sometimes would rent what wasn't on tap, with my brightest memory being of when we decided--and why my parents allowed this, I don't know--we were going to watch the entirety of the Jaws franchise. We biked down to the Allen's grocery store, which was about a mile away, to buy snacks. Taking the videotape out of its Blockbuster (or, depending, the Hollywood Video) case, we'd pop it in and watch the film whilst munching on the goodies.
Many a good day was passed that way. Steve was always, it seems, a film aficionado, no doubt because of experiences like those. When it came to ninth grade, it was time to shift gears: We had a chance to make a film. Or, rather, a video project to go along with our reading of "The Most Dangerous Game", which, if you're unfamiliar with it, is an adventure story in which a guy gets marooned on a deserted island, only to find out that it actually does have an inhabitant: A fellow named Zaroff. The man ends up getting released on the island so that Zaroff has the chance to hunt him. The story was ripe for a hyperactive teenager's imagination, so Steve and I set about--and I want to say with our buddy Mike along for the fun, but I can't remember now--remaking the story but with my superhero action figures. Rainsford, the prey, ended up being Carnage for some reason, and an Arnold Schwarzenegger action figure was Zaroff. Or maybe a Peter Parker figure was Rainsford, and Schwarzenegger turned into Carnage? It's a bit hazy. The point is, we took the idea from the short story and adapted it to our own bizarre point of view, much of which being dictated by what we had on hand. At one point, I wanted to have Carnage scale a castle toy set that we had. In order to do this, we did some stop/go animation--a technique I'd learned from a different friend--wherein Carnage slowly worked his way toward, then up, the castle wall. When it came to having Carnage actually clamber up the outside, however, we couldn't get the toy to stay in place long enough to take the shot. So for a frame or two, you can see me trying to hide behind the castle playset while holding onto Carnage so that he could "climb" the exterior. Another shot involved the demise of Zaroff, who, in the short story, gets stabbed by a cleverly laid trap (if I remember correctly…I'm going off dim memories of one evening in 1997 and a quick scan of the short story in 2018, done enough to catch some names). We wanted to do the same, so I got a small pump ready. However, the Aarons did not, that particular night, have any red food coloring. We had to use green, which we mixed with some water so that we could squirt it out of the pump. Since we didn't want to make a mess, we filmed the shot of Zaroff getting stabbed and bleeding gruesomely in the Aarons' kitchen sink. All told, it was one of the more enjoyable--and, clearly, memorable--school projects that I did. We turned in the project--recorded from our camcorder onto a blank VHS tape, then played via the school's VCR/TV combo--and, so far as I recall…didn't, like…fail it or anything. I think we got good marks. The point is, I think, that both Steve and I got a taste of the format. For me, it's slipped into a consistent appreciation--though not necessarily participation--in film as an artform and storytelling device. For Steve, he went on to graduate from directorial school. But more than it providing a type of trajectory for our lives, I remember those days--and we had many other days where we passed countless hours trying to ad hoc a story as we filmed--with a great deal of fondness. We were being expressive, focused, and entertaining ourselves, all attributes that make for worthwhile childhood memories, I would say. How much footage remains is anyone's guess. I know that a different movie we made one night about a father and son's relationship becoming really fractured because the son wouldn't eat cookies, as the dad wanted. It's…quite the blast from the past. (If you're friends with me on Facebook, I went ahead and shared the post from Steve that has the video in it. You can poke around and try to find it that way, if you'd like.) Aside from this video, I don't think any of my old stuff survives. That's both a relief (nothing is quite as embarrassing as seeing one's youngest work) and a sadness, as I can't share more of my past with my own kids. In fact, I pulled my three boys into my office and forced them to watch "The Cookie Movie" with me, if only so that they had a piece of my childhood. I don't really have a strong, profound conclusion on this. It's more of an exercise in reminiscing, a chance to stop for a few minutes and reflect on the blessing that was a childhood, graced with opportunity, friendship, and enough parental non-intervention as to let us make such insanity. And maybe that's enough of a moral, anyway. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! One of the great things about being a kid is that you can Baskin Robins your future: There are so many options, possibilities, careers, and identities that you can choose from that it's both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. And there are moments, I think, in most people's lives that give them a sense of whether or not they would fit into one particular field or another. If the sight of blood makes you queasy, then it's clear that nursing or doctoring won't be an easy career, for example. And what kid hasn't, at some point or another, thought that she might one day become a detective.
As a youngling, I had that idea at one point. Cracking cases, putting together clues--it sounded pretty exciting. One day, I was poking around on the family computer. It was a Macintosh Apple computer, meaning there were limited options for entertainment on the system. We had Marathon (still, in my mind, one of the best video games of that era) and a handful of other games, but they were slim pickings. I noticed one file called "MOOD" floating around. I stared at it. What was that? Was it a game of some sort? I didn't open up the file, as my brother came in at that moment. "What's "MOOD'?" I asked him. He smirked. "It's 'DOOM' backwards, so Mom and Dad don't know that I have it." "Oh," I said. It was at that moment that I realized I probably wouldn't make a very good detective. Maybe part of the fuel to that fantasy came from the Encyclopedia Brown series. There are more of them than seagulls at the city dump, each one having ten to twelve mini-mysteries that the reader can enjoy. At the end of the book, you can look up the answer to the mystery. They all involve fictional Idaville's premier boy detective, Leroy Brown, whose sobriquet is Encyclopedia. Because he's read so many books, even though he's only ten, Encyclopedia has a great eye for detail. The stories are quick and fun, packed with the pertinent details that a person needs in order to solve the case. I'm listening to different books--we're on the third one right now--and, after each chapter ends, pausing it so that the boys can try to guess the solution. About eighty percent of the time, I can figure out the clues, which lets me coax and question the boys until they can cotton on to the correct answer. Sometimes they jump on the discrepancies fast enough that I don't have to worry about it. Other times, all of us are stymied. The thing about these stories is there's always one tiny detail, one important part of the tale that gives the clue (or, as is often the case, the lie) to the whole case. It's nice, because it means that there isn't really a lot of external know-how you need to bring to the stories. While this isn't always true, most chapters are about refining the reader's (or, in this case, the listener's) ability to envision and keep track of details. The story has a consistent cast of interesting and eclectic characters, from Bugs Meany, the local bully to Sally, Encyclopedia's bodyguard and junior partner. The kids get into lots of hijinks and idyllic adventures that tap into the imagined nostalgic of baby boomers--for whom, I think, Donald Sobol wrote. It makes for a wholesome kind of world where wrongdoers are caught, good guys win, and kids make a difference. And that's one of the downsides of the formula. While it's lots of fun to puzzle out the clues and answers, sometimes the incongruity that Encyclopedia Brown notices is so small or potentially circumstantial that a person could compound their lie by simply saying, "I'm sorry, I misspoke." Here's an example: There's one case where Encyclopedia catches the liar by pointing out that the liar's story was obviously false because the backdoor had a spider's web spun around it. Had the liar been telling the truth, the web would have been broken. The end of the story is usually, "Confronted with the truth, So-and-so confessed and returned the stolen goods." But if there's a kid who was caught lying but a spider-web was the counter proof, the kid would probably say, "Well, he must have run through a different back door! Or a side door, I don't know." Being caught in the lie wouldn't likely be enough to drive kids into a confession. And that also turns to the comparative stupidity of the people of Idaville. Encyclopedia's dad is the chief of police, but the man comes off as an incompetent bumbler, since some of the cases that his ten year old son solves are simple enough that my eight year old figures them out, too. This isn't a slight against Sobol, necessarily: His formula is specific for his age group and demographic, and what better way for young kids--mostly boys, so far as target audience goes--to feel empowered than for them to feel smarter than the grown-ups? That slight critique aside (that and Sobol's penchant for bizarre similes can be as irritating as often as it is enjoyable), I remember the Encyclopedia Brown stories fondly. I'm glad that I stumbled upon the audiobooks so that I can share* this sort of attention-refining practice with my own boys. If you haven't checked them out before, you should give them a go. They're a lot of fun. --- * On the whole, the stories are fresh for me. But there are some cases that I remember so well that, despite the fact that it's been over twenty years since I read the book, I can recall the details I needed to pay attention to in order to crack the case. I don't know if that's a hats off to Sobol for writing memorable cases, or that I have a strange tendency to remember random stuff I read from when I was in the single digits. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Tonight, my family and I went to the kids' elementary school's "family skating night". It's an annual tradition with the school, plus my boys really enjoy the time. I, personally, would be happier watching a movie at home or otherwise relaxing. Parenting, however, is very often a matter of skipping over one's personal feelings in order to accommodate the whims of the youth.
I rented some rollerblades, which I used when I was a kid. I used to skate down the short porch on my parents' house, then leap off the steps, landing on the driveway one stair down. The driveway is slanted, and the rest of the sidewalk is downhill. Timid Steven never really garnered enough chutzpa to pick up that much speed, but I did learn how to rollerblade with sufficient confidence that, some twenty-five years later, I can help my two older boys on the endless circling of a skate night. (My youngest rode his scooter the whole time, which required less help and supervision.) One primary difference between skating as a kid and skating now is the addition of PVC pipe-constructed walkers. They have rollerblade wheels on the three joints and they assist neophyte skaters with keeping balance. Obviously, the kids still topple into painful piles every once in a while, but it meant that one parent could be with Demetrius, another with Puck, while Oberon kept himself upright with the walker. Then things would shift. In short, the walker acted as a third parent for the purposes of keeping our kids from crashing to the ground. The 'blades I rented, sadly, were not the best. They didn't rub wrong or anything; instead, the arch of the 'blades and the arch of my foot met in a Venn diagram of discomfort. I could never get my feet in a position that wasn't uncomfortable. I didn't want to squelch my kids' enthusiasm, so I put up with it for as long as I could. And, to be honest, it's an enjoyable experience to zip around the circle, navigating among the teenagers who are way too talented at skating and the kids who are there just to have fun. As I worked to pass on my knowledge--all stored in my muscles' memories rather than my mind's--to Oberon, my second child, I held his little hand in mine. I wondered at that: Was I squeezing too tightly? He was slipping and sliding and tumbling and wobbling. Were my interventions helping? Did he need to be free to fall in order to pick himself back up again? Where was the line between "letting him learn his lesson" and "being negligent"? Our connection was physical, but--in my mind, at least--tender. He would flop and sprawl onto the ground, then grin up at me with the kind of gap-toothed smile that most eight year olds sport. He maybe got some bumps but it was never too much, never tear-inducing. By the end of the evening, he didn't use the walker and he wasn't interested in using me. He wanted to be making his laps on his own, sink or swim. He fell a lot. A lot. But he always got up again. Maybe I could trust him more, let him learn his limits on his own. But that means letting go. And of all the things I've practiced in my life, I've never been good at letting go. One of the lies that I tell my kids is that they can't cross the parking lot or street without me. It's less because they can't do it (though the five year old still needs help and protection) and more because I want to be able to hold my children's hands for as long as possible. They're so well trained about the hand-holding that they don't think twice. I, on the other hand, always think about their hands in mine and how fleeting the time is. Once my agèd bones could no longer handle the agony of my footwear, I sat myself on a bench and watched the stream of humanity flow before me. Little kids no more than, maybe, three years old would zoom between wobbly pre-teens. Teenagers would stand around and talk or dance to the tinny music (loud, but not particularly good speakers are a hallmark of places like this). Adults would bend over awkwardly, glimpses of their underwear or skin peeking over their waistlines, trying to help their kids along without toppling themselves. Some held hands. I watched them go about. There was a straight couple, a diamond glinting on her finger, whose whispered conversation and entire air was one of recently conjoined. There were girls who held each other's hands, fingers barely laced together, their attitude one of best friends--maybe even pack behavior because it is a frightening thing to be a woman in this world and there is safety in numbers. There was one lesbian couple--I'm guessing on this one--whose hand-holding had an intimacy that I saw as young love, the kind of teenage reliance of two who looked like they lived on the margins finding solace in that shared deterritorialization. One boy held his boyfriend--good friend? Impossible to tell--as the boyfriend shuddered and shook on his wheels. The boy held one hand, the other on the boyfriend's back, steadying him as he looked on with concern and compassion. I don't know if they really were dating or were simply two people who cared about each other, but it was one of the most beautiful moments of the night. I didn't expect to see such depths of compassion at the skating rink. Puck turned around and used his walker and his body--albeit inadvertently--to dam the flow so that the young stranger, no older than Demetrius if I had to guess, who had fallen hard on his face could shed his tears until his dad made it around to comfort and console. In its own unexpected way, seeing so many people holding hands in so many ways--some literal, some metaphorical, and some (let's be honest: It's a skating rink, after all) because it was "Snowball" and so it was an excuse--did a lot to help shore up my faith in humanity. I'm reminded of the lines from one of my favorite Dave Matthews Band songs, "Cry, Freedom": "Hands and feet are all alike/But walls between divide us." Would that I could remember that better. Would that we all could. Aside from a brief summer in my grandparents' basement, I have memories of growing up in two locations. Both houses were blue, and my parents still live in the second one. Nevertheless, I have memories of the first house, which I lived in, essentially, until I was about five and my younger brother was born. That little place had a living room, kitchen, carport (not a garage), a master bedroom, a bathroom, and my bedroom, which I shared with my older brother. There may have been another room in the house, but I can't remember it. I don't even know where my mom did laundry. Was that a part of the bathroom? *shrugs* Being born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that I was introduced (if you're feeling indulgent; indoctrinated if you're feeling feisty) to praying from before I left the womb. For Mormons, prayers are a way of communicating with God that run the gamut from unofficially rote (prayers over meals) to dictated by scripture (the sacramental prayers offered every week in any LDS chapel are identical to every other congregation the world over). While we tend to teach that we don't recite prayers, much of what we say in prayers are formulaic. This is by instruction: The format for an LDS prayer is to begin by addressing Heavenly Father (the intimate nomenclature of Mormons to God is something else worth looking at, but not here), referring to Him in the informal voice (using Thee and Thy as pronouns). The expected order is to first thank God for His blessings--acknowledging the Divine's hand in one's life. That done, requests for assistance, additional blessings, and other implorations suffice. Once completed, the pray-er closes with the phrase, "In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen." If anyone is listening to the prayer, they echo the amen. Mormonic attitudes toward posture tend toward a nonce necessity: If a woman is stuck in traffic and praying that she gets home in safety, that person isn't likely to follow the formalities of folding her arms, closing her eyes, and bowing her head. If a fellow is in their own house, kneeling down in no particular direction is also considered correct behavior. While some Mormons hold hands whilst praying--say, around the dinner table before a meal--that is more a matter of personal taste. There are even more types of prayers within Mormondom, but I won't worry about those here. Suffice to say, there is a lot to keep in mind whilst in the act of praying, if one is a member of the Church. As I mentioned before, I grew up in this environment, so praying--and the postures of prayer--are familiar to me. When I was quite young--still in the first house--I remember being encouraged to voice my own prayers, rather than repeat my mother's spoonfed version. Early on, a parent tends to ask the child to repeat after her, letting them get used to how to construct the pieces of the prayer. Eventually they move to generating their own thoughts and prayers. It was at this point that my memory kicks in. The bedroom I shared with my older brother, Jesse, had a wooden bunkbed to help conserve space. As the oldest in the family, Jess got to sleep on the top. I slept on the bottom, obviously, and I said my prayers next to my bed before slipping between the sheets. One night, as I was working through my prayers, I did as my teacher (whether it was in Primary School during Sunday meetings or my mother, I don't know) advised and tried to picture in my mind the things I was talking about in my prayer. I believe the purpose was to make it so that I wasn't simply rattling off a memorized orison before I fell asleep. The instruction was to get me to be more involved in talking with the Supreme Power of all the universe. Unfortunately for me, there is an English homophone that came into play this particular night. As I was trying to conjure up a mental image of God--a task that has only gotten harder for me as I've aged, if I'm honest--I reverted to the only understanding of the first word in my invocation that I could picture: Dear. Only I didn't know that the phrase, "Dear Heavenly Father," addressed much like a letter, was using a different type of dear than the one I imagined. I thought it meant deer. So this night, as I was trying this new idea of imagining my Heavenly Father, I (for lack of a better phrase) misspelled the first word. "Deer Heavenly Father," I intoned. Instantly, an image formed. Just the way I was supposed to! What I pictured was the moment from a movie that I had seen. In it, the agent of salvation, power, authority, and grandeur entered, bathed in a resplendent glow. The main character, in dire need, sees the entity that would save him… …I pictured Bambi's dad. This ended up being something that stuck with me for a time afterwards. I couldn't quite figure out why God was a stag. In many ways, my childish image of what God looked like was similar to a creature in Princess Mononoke. In the thirty-odd years since that night, I've often thought about how often I've tried to infer something, only to get it completely wrong. Just today, actually, my wife invited the in-laws over for dinner. They're good company, so that was fine, but I had assumed (erroneously) that Gayle needed the evening without guests because she has a lot of work she has to do and very little time in which to do it. I made the assumption and therefore hadn't recommended to her to invite her parents, which I had thought that she should do.
This has led me to wonder about all of the other areas where I've made a mistake--a crucial one, perhaps--in my imagination that I took to be indicative of reality. Though God no longer looks like a Cabella's trophy in my mind, and though I think I understand some of what a Heavenly Father might be, I'm no closer at coming to a belief about what He looks like. I do think it's important--and I'll explain why another day--but it's not crucial for me to find an answer yet. I mean, there are plenty of people, I think, who would claim that there's a connect-the-dots method for determining the answer, but those types of assertions usually don't convince me. I feel as though there's enough ambiguity and "culture-turned-doctrine" that I'm reluctant to stake any claims at all about what I might see when I relocate from the blue to the black. |
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