I keep thinking about slitting my wrists.
I don’t want to die. I know that.
It’s a desperate cry for help.
I want someone to come save me.
I want the people who hurt me to know.
What they’re doing has injured me.
They just can’t see it.
Yet.
The snow is gone, but a chill lingers in the evening. She wraps her coat a little tighter around her, hating that the leather is colder than the air for the moment.
It’s only seven in the evening, but she’s too drunk to drive. As soon as she was done work, she walked across the street to the pub and started drinking. It’s been one of those days. She drank alone, turning away the attentions of every man who approached her with a cold distance she’s been working on since she was thirteen. It’s a surivival trait, that. All men are evil. Men in bars are eviler than other men.
The bus is twelve minutes late, and she notices him leaning against the bus stop shelter. He’s tall, a few extra pounds around the middle, wrinkles forming in the corners of his narrow, tilted eyes and grey streaking through the black of his hair. He isn’t so much pretty as perfectly groomed.
A long silence stretches between them, the strange silence of two dogs meeting in the woods who aren’t yet sure of one another. He shifts, shuffling his perfectly polished shoes across the pavement. She adjusts her bag, makes herself interested in the nothing that’s in there. Gum wrappers are awesome. Her wallet, completely kick-ass.
“Rough night?” he asks. She doesn’t say anything, but she feels herself answering; she looks at her feet, and fiddles with her keys in her pocket. “Guess so. You alright?”
“I’m fine,” she says, hoping that the venom in her voice is convincing.
“Good for you,” he says. “I’m having a pretty piss-poor day, actually. Car got stolent.”
“Ouch,” she says.
“Yeah. Could have been worse.”
“I suppose…”
“I could have been in the car at the time,” he says with a smile. “That would have been an awkward conversation. ‘Hello Mr. Thief,’ ‘Oh, well hello Mr. Chau, how are you today?’ ‘I’m a little perplexed that you are thiefing my car…’ I figure he’d probably leave, then.”
She laughs despite herself. “Or he’d offer to buy you coffee or something to make up for the inconvenience.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I get the impression he wasn’t really all that concerned with inconveniencing me.”
The conversation died there. The bus was sixteen minutes late. She steps out, looking down the road for it, but it’s nowhere to be seen. It’s Wednesday; do the buses stop running early on Wednesdays?
“Need a ride?” he asks.
“I thought someone stole your car,” she says, looking at him incredulously.
“Nah,” he says, smiling a wry little smile. “I just made that up so you’d like me. I’m parked across the street.”
“Next time you decide to flirt with lies, you might want to choose something that won’t be disproven immediately.” Despite herself, she likes him. Men are evil. But this one seems so strange and sweet. She starts walking across the street. “Yeah, okay. But I get to keep my pepper spray out.”
“Rape tastes better with pepper spray,” he said, smiling.
“Rape jokes aren’t funny.”
“Sometimes they’re funny.”
“They’re not funny right now.”
“Yeah, they sort of are.” He smiled, opening the door for her. She steps in, hating that she likes him.
First thing I’ve written in a while, especially that I actually sort of like. I don’t know who these people are, but I hope they’re awesome. I stole the picture, but I can’t remember who I stole it from. Otherwise, there would be more credit going around.
Connoisseur
He has eaten sushi in Tokyo, yebeg tibs in Mogadishu, lamb ravioli in Venice, a monkey’s brains in a small village in the south of Congo, bison steak in Calgary. The meal that will never leave him, though, the highlight, the culinary experience he will take to his grave, was a slice of roast from the rump of a young man in Wisconsin. He was no killer, he wouldn’t dream of it. But when the boy died in a violent crash, a restaurateur of his acquaintance purchased a portion for the culinary elite.
The honey-herb glaze was to die for.
Drabbles are stories one hundred words in length. Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of a longer writing project, I’ll throw together a few hundred-word stories to warm me up, and I happened to like this one enough to share it with the good folks of Tumblr.
This city, he loves me. The way he talks, in siren’s songs, thumping music, illucid words over illicit acts; he speaks in the poetry of Big Town, and I find myself swaying to his rhythm.
Hey.
Got a light?
Sorry, don’t smoke.
Got some change?
Sorry, I don’t.
Need a bag?
I’ll be alright.
Looking for fun?
Thanks, not tonight.
I swagger with the timing of it. I’m most at home on empty streets, late at night, when it’s me, empty buildings and the stars. There are scatterings of people out now. The bars are slowly closing. I buy some oysters and some vegetable thins, a lottery ticket and some beef jerky. I don’t need it, but it’s an excuse to be out.
You’re not where I’m at.
I don’t need to be.
You don’t understand.
Man, you don’t know me.
C’mon, cross the street
Look, I don’t know…
What’s up sweetie?
I might go home.
This city, he loves me. I can tell in the way he talks to me. He whispers his secrets in morningsong, the sounds of birds and garbage trucks, the rush of cars in the rain or the crunch of feet on half-finished sidewalks. I can never quite bring myself to say “I can’t love you…” I’m afraid I might hurt his feelings.
I got a random phone call today from Meagan. She’s out living in Peterborough now. She told me to check my e-mail in a few moments, and when I did, I found this:
Although from far apart we may have sought
Orion, and the Bear, and seen alike,
What comfort could I draw from such a thought?
The stars give only warmthless, pinprick light.
Nor moon, desiring constant wax and wane,
With fearless heart could I depend upon,
Though round and massy, it will not remain -
‘Tis thus but once a month, and then ‘tis gone.
Though star and moon art spheres, with heat and mass,
But(t) substitutes, they hold no joy for me -
I cannot think of them as Kris’ass,
I may but sate my lust with memory.
For warmth, and shiny-white, and meaty-chunk,
Peerless it stands – the junk within your trunk.
I found it quite amazing. ^_^
This is the first game review I’ve done in quite a while on the blog. The most recent one was the digital “toy” MyBrute. Today I’m going to talk about a free MMORPG called Voyage Century, which may be the best FMMO I’ve ever played. And I really like FMMOs.
The model is pretty basic. You have a character that represents yourself within the context of the game. This characer is the captain of a ship in mediteranean in the 16th century. You can be a merchant or a treasure hunter or a pirate or a privateer, and each of these classes is fundamentally different in how in they gain experience, behave in relation to their ships, and the types of activities they are uniquely suited for. Myself, I play a merchant.
The game is free-to-play, pay-for-awesome. By this, I mean it follows the Korean model of FMMO play in which you are allowed to play the game for free for as long as you like without any strange restrictions. However, if you want to, you can purchase skill advancements, pets, gear, or the materials required to make certain gear from their cash shop. I’ve never felt the need to buy any of these things.
Character creation is very simple. You select a body model from a group of four, two women and two men. None of them are minotaurs or elves or any such thing. You can change the face and hair of your chosen model, but nothing else. Attribute and skill advancement come through playing the game more than choices made a character creation.
Once you have entered the game, you can do a few quick quests (the first is to choose your job, which rewards you with some money and a weapon suitable to your job), buy some gear, provision and crew your ship and set off into the wild seas. Depending on what it is you’d like to do in the game, there are some skills you may want to train up first. For instance, if you’re going to be a pirate, you should probably brush up on some combat skills.
Now, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the idea of jobs in an MMO, something that this game has done incredibly well. One of the things that originally inspired me to play Mabinogi was the idea that I could specialize in a trade or a skill and advance through that rather than through the normal method of kill-everything-you-see. I expected that leveling through professions and part-time-jobs would be inherently slower than leveling through instances and grinding, but I expected that, should I wish to become a master tailor, I would not have to deal with instances or grinding at all. Sadly, in Mabinogi, this is simply not the case. Every profession involves resource gathering to some extent (even tailoring, which is what I went into the game wishing to do), which means you have to go out and get stuff from monster drops. For someone who wants to excell at a game in ways that don’t usually involve combat, this sucks.
In Voyage Century, if you want to be a trader, you can do that. Without combat. If you want to harvest resources, you can do that. If you want to sew, and then sell the things you’ve sewn, you can do that. And all of the materials can be bought in shops, meaning you can completely bypass combat if you’d like to. In the entire time I’ve been playing the game (about a week now) I’ve been involved in a total of three ship-to-ship combat scenarios. Pirates have attacked me, trying to steal my cargo. Each time, I’ve run away. Then I sell my cargo, make a fortune, and gain experience. It’s enough that I’m levelling. Slower than the pirates might, sure, but I’m getting better at my job, and I’m getting better at the game as I go about it. The game does not punish me for not wanting to be involved in combat very often.
The economy system is quite amazing, involving purchase of goods from one location and transport of those goods to the next location. The farther you travel, the more money you make for each item. I’ve been making regular runs from London to Reykjavik with insane financial success (the area has no pirates, very few players and the distance is enough to make beef sell for three times my buying price).
All in all, I’m loving the game and would heartilly suggest anyone who likes a good non-combat-focused MMO give it a try.
A chilled October morning, and the bus is late. I am late for an Economics class, a fact that doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. The professor has done little more than parrot capitalist rhetoric for the last month and a half, and while I respect capitalism as an idea, I have difficulty agreeing with the principle. I wish I lived in Sweden.
When the bus finally comes, it’s packed with people, mostly students with a peppering of older people on their way to work. There’s no place to sit down and little room to stand. I’m wedged between a pretty girl just close enough for me to smell her shampoo, and a hideously obese man I could smell from across the bus.
People stare out of the windows or read papers or books, nearly a hundred people in close proximity with nothing to say to one another. I think about saying something to the pretty girl behind me, and my throat closes up with fear. The bus sways, and strangers bump into one another, muttering those Canadian apologies that translate into “Fuck off,” or “Watch where you’re going.” First I bump into the pretty girl and I blush and I mutter. Then I run into the fat man, and I give him my best “You completely disgust me.” It sounds like “Sorry,” but that’s not how you’re supposed to hear it.
Another stop, more people cram in. I’m uncomfortably aware of my leg touching the pretty girl’s. I try to forget that the rest of me is pressed against the fat man on the other side.
The bus pulls away from the stop and my mind goes off to find whatever it can in the hinterlands of my imagination. I try to think about whisking the pretty girl off to Aruba and living the rest of my days as a bartender on the beach. Someone is yelling at the back of the bus in a language I don’t speak, distracting me. He looks like a student in a winter coat and a back-pack.
He disappears in a burst of fire. Glass shatters in a visible wave from the back of the bus. Crushing pressure and searing heat push into me, and the smell of burnt hair assaults my nose. Confusion sets in, pandemonium, a press of arms and legs and bodies. The fat man is on top of me, the pretty girl beneath us both, and I feel a sharp pain in my leg. I hope it’s not broken. I can’t afford a hospital visit, and my Alberta Health Care hasn’t been paid in ages.
The back of the bus is in tatters, streams of wrecked smoking metal and plastic. Trinkets of glass cling to the sides of the windows where the rubber frame hasn’t come off completely. Someone’s hand is on the bottom of the stairs. The arm it’s supposed to be attached to is a couple of stairs above it, ending in a ragged stump. The people at the back of the bus are all dead, charred husks oozing blood and fat. Some of them are still burning, the smoke billowing out of the back of the bus and sifting into the front. I realize I’m breathing people, and I throw up. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Usually it makes me feel better.
People are pushing at the doors, fumbling at the emergency latches, forgetting how to open them, even though they’ve read the instructions a million times while bored. Now that it matters, they might as well be illiterate.
Me, I’m frozen. There’s a five-hundred pound gorilla on top of me, and a pretty girl pinned beneath. I think I may have puked on her. She’s struggling and pushing and beating on me to get free. My face is covered in people-ash. I can’t figure out what I should be doing. I should push the fat bastard off of me. I should hide beneath him until the EMTs and Paramedics and Fire Fighters arrive. I should do something. I just can’t figure out what that something should be.
My leg hurts. Most of me hurts, but my leg hurts the worst. I should chew my leg off and hobble to safety. I should chew the fat man off of me and hobble to safety. I should just pound on him futilely.
The reporters arrive before the rescue workers. They always do.
Flashes go off all around the bus, and I have a vague sense of people speaking, but I can’t make anything out over the fire and the screaming. A helicopter is thumping above the bus, and I’d bet it’s not a rescue chopper. The sirens are still distant, and they don’t sound anywhere near as urgent as they should.
The girl beneath me grips my shoulder, hard. Faded red fingernail polish tips each of the fingers of her hand. Was the pretty girl wearing fingernail polish? I can’t remember. Something pushes the hand down hard, and my leg throbs with the change in pressure. It’s definitely broken. I hate casts. They’re expensive and they’re itchy.
The pretty girl wriggles out from under me and starts screaming for help, punctuated by the flashing of lights. She could be on a runway.
One of the passengers figures out the emergency hatches. I can’t see the driver; I hope he’s alright. A wave of humanity rushes the open door. The door is too small to let everyone out at once, and the press of bodies plugs it. In a rush, the relatively unharmed survivors are out, some face first on the pavement. Flash! Front page pictures are captured in digital perfection all around us.
The sirens get closer. A few police are on the scene and an ambulance from the University Hospital. Neither is enough. There’s no one to arrest. There are too many injured for one ambulance crew; two people can only do so much.
They start triage. That’s something. They move through the human wreckage and make pronouncements of judgment. The word “Black” is repeated like a mantra, said over and over until I’m sure they’re not describing the shade of the seats. It doesn’t really bother me until they walk past the fat man on top of me.
“Black,” the paramedic says his voice neutral. I hadn’t even noticed when he stopped breathing. He’s still so warm. His body changes as I look at it: before he was a terrible inconvenience; now, it is as though I’m covered by some huge and disgusting maggot.
The paramedics go through the whole of the bus. They ask me how I’m doing, and I confess I probably have a broken leg. The make me a secondary priority and go about helping the people who need it the most.
So I wait. I wait in an exploded bus with a five hundred pound dead man weighing down on me. These bombings have a reputation for being exciting, fearful affairs. Sure, there was that. But then the adrenaline’s worn off, and you spend a couple of hours waiting for the paramedics to decide a busted up leg is more important than the girl with abdominal hemorrhaging.
I start to feel a little woozy. My head spins like I’ve had a few too many before deciding to get blown up. I ignore it until the medics decide to pick up the fat man. I do not envy paramedics their jobs.
“Well shit,” one of them whispers as the fat man rolls off of me. The two of them (were they the first two, the triage medics?) begin speaking in medical code and working busily around my leg. One of them picks up a severed foot.
It’s covered in gore and wearing my shoe. I lose consciousness wondering if I’ll get discounts at shoe stores for only needing the one…
I wrote this quite a while back. It’s an alright story, I suppose. Thought I’d share it with you here.
