9/11 Post

As the day is appropriate then here is what I was doing on 9/11. Names have been changed for anonymity.

I was a senior in high school. Because I took several AP courses between 9 and 11, I actually had 2 free periods plus lunch that year. That is about 2 hours of a 7 hour day just doing nothing. I mostly did homework or read. I was notorious for completing assignments early so I could have more time to do fun things like read or watch TV/movies. Play Magic The Gathering, Magi Nation or PS2. HS for me was peak media imbider even before binging or "I can do what I want I'm an adult" time.

One free period had a fair amount of my buddies in it. We were the geek clique. My senior class was small, 45 kids and roughly made up of 6 or so cliques

Puerto Rican Mafia "cool kids who were native islanders"

American Mafia "cool kids who were not from the island"

Stoners/Surfers

Geeks

Weirdos

Too cool for school kids

There were kids who could struggle both. I had/have a good friend named Chen who was a geek. Got me,into Magic and board games. His dad made us our own WW2 inspired tabletop game. But he was also supremely cool and also from PR but ethnically Asian so he was cool in both mafias!

Geeks and weirdos had some cross pollination. Geeks liked talking about Dragon Ball Z. Who would win? Piccolo or RGoku?! Weirdos wore those Drgaon Ball Z polyester button ups short sleeved shirts.

Anyway...this first free period only had 5 other seniors in it. None were my pals. None were enemies mind you. We just left each other alone.

I was reading in the back of the senior gazebo, what was our senior lounge. This was PR so our school did not have hallways. Instead it had a community college vibe with 2 story tall conrete buildings and some ground level double wide type structures around the central quad. The senior gazeborested over the exposed roots of a small glade of trees so it looked always craggy and knotted. Full of mystery and potential.

From the edge of the quad and up from a small slope came a girl in my sensor class, Raquel, who was the Principal's daughter. She told the gathering of us in the gazebo (it was actually 3 small gazebos joined. 3 little hexagons) "I heard in the office, something happend in New York with a plane."

Oh...whatever everyone said or thought. I did. How is that many different from some disaster 2 states over?

The bell then rings and everyone pours out. I had to walk clear across campus (over by the elementary school) for college algebra. I did not have many friends in this class becsuse mt school,had 2 tracks: smart or not smart. I did well in all classes save math. So college algebra was the "normal" math for seniors and "Pre Calculus" or "Calc AP" was the smart track. Because I got Cs in math this jacked up my schedule but I thank my mom for insisting the principal make this happen. Had no interest in failing because of "whats normal." But my friends were in calc AP and I here albeit, again, it wasnt bad. Just sucks to not take classes with close friends.

On the way down I heard people chattering about what they heard. Which is odd since it had happenrd when were in class and this before peoole were mass texting. Everyone had cells but we talked. Or played Snake!
A pair of 7th graders said it was Russian fighter jets. Most people assumed accident. I wad curious but also it was nothing in my world. I was not apathetic. I likked keeping abreast of the news but it was just that. News.

We did math class and then I went to AP English Lit. This had 8 kids in it. A lot were my friends. Neat! However that day all but me and Chen were out on a field trip to the art museum. So it was a gimme class. We told the teacher "Hey, can we go to the library and watch the news. Something big happened." The teachers refused but knowing it was BS to teach Ellison's Invisible Man to 2 kids she said "I'll go to the office and see for myself"
She did and came back 1 minute later (her room was right next door) and said "Oh my God! Go!" And she bolted from the room something I had never seen a teacher do.

We went up the small slope to the library to see a big screen TV rolled out onto the floor and a gathering of varioue teachers and students. And there I saw it.

I dont recall much of what happened the rest of the day. I had a friend, Barry, who had an aunt in NYC who was worried. Just a lot of speculating and "wow, thats life." cartoon network stopped airing the OG Mobile Suit Gundam for some reason after the attack and I remember being "wtf".

We lives thousands of miles from it. PR is part of the US for sure but to me and my family it was just news, horrible news, but just that. That is the thing about PR. Its liie America until it is not. See the Hurricane Maria phenomenon or how "the real America" never seems to be a place anyone lives.

I am not a fan of the "world changed" that day. History is living and fluid. The violence and repercussions of that day were felt before, during and now after. However, neither am I an "armchair woke folk." No one deserved to die that day regardless of what our country has done or how warped an ideology the hijackers had.

On this day I think of that day in HS and the books I was reading at the time (Passage to India, X Wing novels) and the girls I tried to talk to. I think of my mom buying a special edition of the newspaper from the street corner barker, soemthing I had only seen in movies. I think of books I read since then...Ghost Wars, The Bin Ladens, Charlie Wilson's War. My college freshmen roommate who was Muslim and Bangladeshi anf admitted to maybe not coming to the states after that. The volunteer groups I used to manage on the subsequent anniversaries. I think of tales still going on but also etched on people. Tales also lost with the victims.

Masterpiece

Warning that this post gets nerdy!  And I admit to 2 fictional character crushes!* 

This October, Magic (MTG) is going back to Ravnica in the Guilds of Ravnica set. The hype is strong for the set. It usually is for every fall release (which in the MTG world is akin to summer movie blockbuster season) but this one is high because people love Ravnica. I didnt play when it first came out but I get. The world (about the size and equivalence to a planet in our real world) is one giant city. And a city built and rebuilt onto itself with green spaces, junkyards, halls, plazas, markets, etc. It is layered with stories moving across and vertically as the cityscape changes.

So that's neat. But it also has gangs! Well, guilds. Each guild is made up of a 2 color pair in the game. This is hard to explain without knowing the game but...the game has 5 colors and your deck can be 1, 2, 3,4 or all 5 of those. Players refer to their decks, often, by the names within the game for those colors. So...instead of saying this is my blue and white deck one can say..."This is my Azorius deck." Its branding but also fun since you can identify as a color identity. Its like a horoscope or a Myers Briggs but for Magic. Like I personally identify as Bant (White, Blue, Green) and it is why I am always one of those "do the right thing" type people. Albeit the amount of yelling I do with my kids may make me a bit Boros or Jeskai

This is also the 3rd time we have gone to Ravnica so people who like that world (and people really keen on these guilds) are excited to build on it. No other world has gotten that many go arounds. MTG's original plane, Dominaria, had many years of exploration but that is before MTG committed to making planes with clear identities.

Not that MTG (technically their parent company, Wizards of the Coast, subsidiary of Habro) needs more hype but they teased masterpieces.

What are those? 

Masterpieces are cards not technically in the set but still available in packs of it. They were featured in the last few (about 3 years) big sets and they helped boost sales. They have district art, framing and often were big money cards. It was like a Golden Ticket type promotion. And rare...like 1 in every 1000 packs. For context a whole box of packs has 36. 

I only ever opened 2 from the first time they did this. One was a gorgeous Sol Ring...a card with a lot of MTG history and a lovely $300 retail value. 

For Ravnica 3, MTG has masterpieces. It is not magical items or locations but planeswalkers. This is unique to the game but they are powerful wizards/warriors with the ability to travel between the planes of realtiy at will. Like Quantum Leap! The game treats them like superheroes and villains and the story is set around their adventures.

Ok...so cool...alternate art versions of key characters. Lets go!

Well...the good news is you can buy all of them in one swoop! Neat...no more luck of the draw. Bad news...well the whole set is $250 and only available in a limited print run from the Hasbro store. MTG has had other collectors only type products but you have been able to get them on Amazon or most importantly your local game store. So while these are in the same vein as the other masterpieces they don't have that treasure feel. And I have never used the Hasbro store but I hear that it is a clunker of a website akin to how I used to register for classes in college. Can I wax my modem to try and make it go faster?

A lot of time and energy has been spent on why this move feels bad by people supremely more talented than I. I suggest reading/watching them. Mine is more personal

One of the fancy planeswalkers is Elspeth. Specifically, Elspeht Knight Errant. For certain chracters there are different versions based on their time/place in the story. 

Here is the card:

And here is high res full art by artist @zack_stella

OMG...i'm in love. 😍 Well I have always been since learning about her character. She is one of my fictional character crushes. No, its not weird! As a younger man I had a major crush on Sailor Moon. Its not weird It's not. Stop laughing. Ok, it can get weird. This is the Internet and Rule 34 but its not that here.  How is it different than liking the werewolf guy from Twilight. Is that still a thing? Stop laughing.

She is a bad ass knight who escape her home home world after it was invaded and has fought trying to keep those people off other planes. And her story has ups and downs with wins and losses and...then...they killed her off. Fuck. Why?!?!?!? If you notice in the art she has has a hole in her armor where the God of the Sun (who betrayed her after she saved him) stabbed her. It's all quite the Greek tragedy (which makes sense since this happened on a plane inspired by Greek myths) and lame. She got "refrigerator-ed" and, yes, I know she will come back one say. The art hints at it since she is in the underworld and the gold mask lets her come up to the living world but....when!? Or ever!?

But look at it! The eerie colors and general smoky dreary sfumato of he underworld cut by the fire of her torch and the glint of the mask. She is coming back! YAASSS! She usually wears a hood (Hoods make any character 100% times more bad ass. Nothing is better than pulling up a hood and running into battle!) but she looks good without. She obviously has been through a lot (note the fraying on the sash and the damn hole where the Sun God betrayed her) but she will come back! YAAASSS!

I hope...😭

Stop laughing! Laugh at the other posts!

All that said she is an awesome character. Bad ass and looks good without the "female armor" trope. She isn't fighting plane hopping monsters in a bikini. She isn't fighting to save a boyfriend. She isn't a token girl character. SHE KICKS ASS! She is awesome and I want that card but I need a combination of $250 and luck on 10/3/18 when these go on sale. Considering that I could get 2 whole boxes of the latest set and still have about 50 bucks leftover spending that at my local store (Or that I would have $250 to drop at one time on MTG) it is a pipe dream. On the secondary market the cards will likely be even more. Nearly double. And there are other versions of Elspeth and other printings of Elspeth Knight Errant with lovely artwork to. And no I don't use her in any of my decks but I may make a kitchen table casual white weenie deck and all her versions would rock in it. 

*Its Sailor Moon and Elspeth if you dont want to read all this. Don't @ me!

Some prose...Heat Wave

I was looking through some old journals and found I write a fair piece about the weather. This makes a decent amount of sense since many of these journals date back to when I was in college and would hang around the woods reading and writing. And I took maybe 3 naturalist writing classes (only outpaced by how many Science Fiction classes I took. One in Writing Dept, One in English Dept, and another as an experimental interdisciplinary course) and then a Field Bio course where we had to jot down many observations. Maybe I will transcribe these one day. That said I  am often inspired to write by weather. Which I know...thrilling. You talk about the weather either when the conversation has died or it IS the conversation. Or when you are just trying to pass through or making the most banal of casual conversation. So either...

1) "Oh, hot enough for ya. Hehehe. Ok, bye!"

OR

2) "IT IS A FUCKING HURRICANE OUT! GET INSIDE!"

OR

3) ***You just told her you don't get why you can't refer to women as "females"*** "So....um...hot enough for ya?"

But Romanticizing it? On a blog? Well this one for sure....

___________________________________________________________________________

The city rolled into Labor Day with a heat wave. In newer buildings or retail spaces it is chilly with each door swing throwing walls of angry air at each other. The heat stifling, the cold ramped as far as the coils can go. I tend to poke around in older buildings looking for a piece of scrap or earshot of interesting conversation. The bricks feel warm and the splintered beams of wood seem to crackle, each hole open agape and hurting. In darker/cooler spots, usually a bathroom, the porcelain sweats especially around the bottom of toilet bowls. I once owned a rabbit who did not like the heat and we would allow to free roam around the house. He would curl around the basin of our toilet which was a wide commercial model somehow placed in an apartment (It was a cheap apartment) and wick away the heat and moisture onto his fur.
Climbing through the tall grass of an overgrown lot I noticed the window AC running in the house behind me. It hums placidly making a family happy but I followed the fat dew drops from the corner to the ground. There they smash with the consistency of the oil splatter of a frying pan creating a tiny thick clump of grass where everything else is willowy tendrils in a patch of brown-yellow. The side of the house has peeling paint and crumbling grout between the windows and maybe if were not so oppressively hot out I could feel the nimble cold escape from the cracks. But today it feels like everything else lost in the heat that one can drink.