New Cocktail Minted in Honor of Dead Belt Indie TTRPG: Redline Cowboy

You’re going to die, so make it citrusy and full of desert odors.

Tonight Breakup Gaming Society proudly launches a new cocktail in honor of the hopeless character classes from A Couple of Drakes’ Dead Belt Solo (or maybe more) game:

The Redline Cowboy
The lights are all going out, Belter. Just make sure they’re a flicker at the periphery of your massive buzz. Yee. Haw.
• 1 oz. orange/clove mixer
• 2 oz. mezcal
Combine in shaker and pour over ice in rocks glass. Then watch your prospects vanish in the bulkhead window. It’s OK.

Talking Musical Outliers with Novelist Jonathan Evison: A Discussion and a Playlist

Novelist and all-around golden human being Jonathan Evison indulged me in a months-long back-and-forth about songs we love that aren't necessarily in genres we listen to a lot.

Also discussed: the velocity of subculture co-option, the joys of being a kid in Seattle and S.F. during the heyday of American Hardcore, and shit that makes us cry.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: one-offs on my lifetime playlist. Genre breakers.

Example: Def Leppard's "Photograph," which is one of my top 100 songs of all time in any genre. But I can't sit through any of their other songs and I'm definitely not sticking around if you think we're listening to the Scorpions or some shit after that.

JONATHAN EVISON: I never liked any of that roller-rink metal, but now I find it nostalgic. I have a soft spot for the anthemic bangers that speak to teenage angst. The stupider the lyrics, the better. Quiet Riot's Metal Health, for instance:

"I'm like a laser, six-string razor, I've got a mouth like an alligator...bang your head! Metal health will drive you mad!"

I mean, how can you not love that? And it goes to eleven!

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I dated this girl in Denver a long time ago who knew all the indie bands and 24-year-old me was gobsmacked when she put on Ratt’s “Round and Round” in the car one day. 

I was like, “Why?”

“Because it’s beautiful,” she said. I quietly marked that as a demerit, but turns out she was right.

And speaking of silly lyrics, probably the my favorite YouTube comment of all time, posted in the comment thread of selfsame song: “he never tells us why”

And I thought, “Kid’s got a point. Tell us why, Stephen Pearcy.” But he’s not going to because whatever, it’s time for the next verse now. I like picturing some dude from the band (or some flogged-half-to-death writer from the label stables) tapping his notepad furiously with the pen at 2:32 a.m. He’s got “I’ll tell you why” and he’s straining for a payoff, there’s 50 different crossed-out lines beneath it, but at the end he’s just “fuck it” and turns in the lyrics.

Or maybe he did come up with it, but they realized the chorus was one line too long and they just cut the song like it was. Who cares why when you’ve got an advance, a studio deadline to hit, and the A&R dude just came through with a chunk of flywing the size of a healthy walnut.

JONATHAN EVISON: I'm actually sorta pissed off that you made me spend the better part of my morning contemplating the lyrics to "Round and Round," which are as indecipherable (to me, anyway) as anything you'll find on a papyrus scroll. 

And let me just say that revisiting the video (apologies to Milton Berle) didn't clarify matters much. My lone observation here is that our spurned lover sure does talk a tough game for a guy who just raided Olivia Newton John's wardrobe. 

Hair metal fashion has always confused me in this way. If we're talking about the New York Dolls or Bowie, I can contextualize the androgynous stylings associated with glam. I get it. But once we throw machismo into the mix, I'm profoundly confused by the messaging. There is nothing remotely menacing to me about a scrawny dude in red Capezios and silver yoga pants traipsing around in a fog of Aquanet. 

How do I resolve this fashion statement with the lyrics of, say, Warrant's "Cherry Pie?" I guess in order to answer that question, we'd need to delve into the symbolic interactionist framework of masculine individualism, and I'm not sure I'm ready to do that after only two cups of coffee.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: The quick-cut style of ‘80s videos sure helped the lead man a lot. All the presence of a log.

Yes, the insane cultural alchemy of hair metal was to steal the glam look and somehow talk about chicks and partying enough so that your high school's lacrosse team captain and the heshers would go for it. I was into hardcore at the time. I wouldn’t listen to anything else. Seemed to me that the puissance of Minor Threat and Charged G.B.H. came much more honestly. 

I remember watching the videos for bands like Ratt and I never understood how such flimsy theatrics and preening were a trigger to let loose, go “Fuck yeah!” Adored nonetheless by certain macho peers who would hip check me and call me a faggot during passing period. It’s a hell of a stew, J.

But here was the cool thing about getting a tad older: I got to re-encounter some of the music on my own terms — when I was no longer burdened with the social identity overlay — and my own time. It’s nice to be surprised by things you thought you knew.

Summers home from college, The Moms got me a job at The Denver Post printing plant. I was a duckling and they put me behind the wheel of a twin-speed split-axle truck from midnight-6 and 10 p.m.-4 a.m. with one night of training, which consisted of me lapping the plant once in first gear (during which I threw it into reverse, giving my trainer the fantods). We delivered to the deliverers who assembled predawn at 20-odd district stations across the city. There was only the radio, so I listened. The R&B station was fucking up one night on I-70 East, so I switched over to 103.5 The Fox, and “Give Me All Your Loving” by ZZ Top came on.

It was one-something in the morning. I listened again to Beard’s efficient timekeeping and the guitars (especially the way they layered the rhythm guitar on Gibbons’ opening lead). And producer David Ham adds this synth to give it more heft and movement and space; just the right daub of lacquer on a ‘70s blues rock band that was in danger of fading away, and I was like, “This is a great fucking song.”

I’d forgotten I was just supposed to hate it because I used to hate the people that listened to it.

I still listen to it.

JONATHAN EVISON: Yeah, I started with the hardcore in the early '80s, too. Had a fanzine, and a band (March of Crimes) who actually played with G.B.H. back in 1982 or '83. I partied my fourteen-year-old ass off with Jock, Ross, Colin, and Wilf in a hotel room after the show. Actually stayed in touch with those guys for like ten years afterward, they were fun. 

The Seattle scene was uniquely un-stratified back then, a lot of metalheads and goth kids and mods and punks all hung out together at the all-ages clubs: the Metropolis, Graven Image, Gray Door, Monroes, the Eagles Nest, and a bunch of other places that came and went fast. My old man lived in the Bay Area, so I'd go down to San Francisco in the summers and hang out at Mabuhay Gardens, On Broadway, etc, and it was a much different scene. 

You had your mods hanging out front with their scooters, your skinheads along one wall, your leather punks along another wall, your straight-edgers in their little clique. The kids didn't seem to mix as much as we did up north, where we had no self-consciousness about our place in the context of the larger culture. 

Of course that all changed six or seven years later when the A&R guys showed up and started signing everybody. A lot of my friends became rock stars. By the early '90s, the Seattle scene was a tourist attraction. Not that it wasn't vital as hell, it just lost something when it lost that backwater innocence, when we were just a bunch of bored, energetic, and yes, angry kids sounding our barbaric yawp in musty little basement venues with no real sense of possibility as to what any of it meant to anyone besides ourselves. Sigh.

I feel bad for the teenagers today. The idea of organically developing any kind of vital subculture seems like it isn't even a possibility anymore. The corporate algorithm would eat it up five seconds after its genesis. Culture accelerates. As recently as 20 years ago, The Man was still a couple years behind the underground. Go back 50 years, and they were a good five years behind the underground. Think about it, Coca-Cola taught the world to sing six years after the Monterey Pop festival, which the real hippies will tell you was the apex of ‘60s counter-culture. The Summer of Love and Woodstock were afterthoughts. At that point the hippies were profiting off themselves. Fuck, I don't really know where I'm going with this, but globalism blows. I miss regional culture.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Dude. You opened for Charged G.B.H.? I’m more jealous of that than even your literary plaudits.

OK, I’ll bite. Please reply with your favorite song by them. I know mine, but I want to see what you pick.

JONATHAN EVISON: That's a tough one, prolly something off of Leather, Bristles, Studs, and Acne. To tell the truth, I was more into the OC sound: Adolescents, Descendents, Bad Religion, Agent Orange, Angry Samoans, etc . . .

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Ahhhh, well I’ll step into that gap: It’s “Race Against Time.” Heard it on one of those Punk & Disorderly comps and it changed my life.

JONATHAN EVISON: Yeah, I need to pick up those Punk & Disorderly comps. I've managed to replace most of the seminal comps: Let Them Eat Jelly Beans; Not So Quiet on the Western Front; the Rodney on the ROQs; Rat Music for Rat People; This is Boston, Not L.A. You know i have a stupid big record collection, right? Thousands across all genres. Finally have a place to keep them all!

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Glorious. Any outliers in there?

I inherited my Pops’ vinyl. He had his outliers, too, which stood in high relief as he was a withering music snob — which I also inherited. I tend my own playlist like some kind of radicalized anchorite and harbor violent feelings about most other people’s choices in music.

In the midst of all that world music and fusion and jazz and Little Feat in the boxes he gave me, I found a Bel Biv Devoe 12”. I even brought it up later (he gave me most of his collection years before he passed).

“You like Bel Biv Devoe?” I asked him.

“I like the way they harmonize.”

That was all he said about it.

JONATHAN EVISON: Hmm. It's difficult to think of an outlier in a collection that covers so much musical ground. I've got thirty-odd peach crates that each hold about 120 records, and pretty much every conceivable genre is covered, at least summarily. 

If I'm understanding the context of outlier here, I'd have to pick something in my collection that I love in spite of everything going against it, like, say, Nino Tempo and April Stevens' “Deep Purple,” which is about as vanilla as anything in the Lawrence Welk catalog, and yet, I find it irresistible with its perky vocal interplay and laxative-smooth commercial sheen. Think “The Fleetwoods meet Donnie and Marie in a world made of cotton candy.” 

Ridiculously, the recording earned the 1965 Grammy for "Best Rock and Roll Record," though it is about as rock and roll as a marshmallow cream sandwich. Still, it gets my toe tapping every time, and makes me want to share an ice cream sundae with my girl.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: This is an effervescent little confection. I’m down with it. Forgot that ‘60s-‘70s technique of having the singer do a sad or flirty speech on the bridge. Bellissima.

My biggest outlier crept into my ears two years ago and has now burrowed into my bones.

So you remember the era about a decade ago when bacon was in everything and niche marketing agency founders were wearing tweed driving caps and starting new firms called Cupcakes & Strategy and shit. I hated all that shit, particularly the indie Americana, which usually drove me right out of the room.

But this one popped up on my music app a few years ago. Kept it because while it sounded a little too third-generation Neil Young, I liked his voice, the simple chords, and the weeping guitar they use to play the lead melody. Then it kept coming up last summer, when the stars aligned and I hit the “lose your job, girl, and mind” rural trifecta, it would come up on nights when I was drowning myself in brown liquor on the patio and watching the moon and clouds change all night, and the hook was set.

Both the original by Songs: Ohia and the elegiac tribute cover by Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee are burned into me. If I’m in my cups, it is not unknown for me to break down in sobs by the time the “Mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws” line hits. The whole-body sadness and incandescence with which Katie Crutchfield belts and lilts her verses makes this an all-night repeater.

But to the earlier point. This is not somebody’s cue to start playing this genre all night. Not an indie folk fan. I’m a This Song fan.

JONATHAN EVISON: Yeah, I love that song, that whole Songs: Ohia record kills me, all the more so knowing the way things ended for Jason Molina. Man, there are SO MANY songs that make me cry every time I hear them (and I don't even need to be gooned), sometimes because I have such strong associations with them — like, say, anything off of Carol King's Tapestry because it was one of my sister's favorite records when she died at 16, along with Don McLean's American Pie, but often just because songs are so achingly beautiful they trigger that emotional response in me. 

I could be in the fucking supermarket, and they could be playing Sammi Smith's version of "City of New Orleans", and I will mist over without fail because my mom used to sing me that song when I was a toddler. Or, you know, that "Three is a Magic Number" Schoolhouse Rock song, because when my son (now 13 and officially a mean-ager), used to sit in my lap when he was a baby and I'd play him that Schoolhouse Rock video on the laptop over and over, and man, he loved when that big football player crashed through the wall, and oh, the fullness I felt at finally being a dad. 

Or take Leonard Cohen: I mean, vocally the guy has the emotional range of a sump pump. If you're just listening to the music, he literally sounds like a guy burning his arms with hot candle wax in a cold water flat somewhere. But the words! My god, the guy can write about despair in a way that rings so damn true that I'll just start weeping every time I stop to listen. This, to me, is maybe the great gift of music: its ability to register emotionally in unexpected ways. 

I think it is actually fair to say that music informs my writing more than books. This also might explain why my works are so wide-ranging tonally and structurally, because my musical tastes are all over the map. I love soul, punk rock, classic country, alt-country, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, zydeco, dub, ska, rockabilly, doo-wop, you name it, and that genre will be well-represented in my stacks. And even on a sentence level, music is my barometer. I don't wanna work every damn sentence until it's black and blue trying to achieve that "luminous" effect, I just want the words to swing, you know?

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Returning to something you said earlier about the joys of being in a scene in the pre-digital era and the accelerated cycles by which things are co-opted — I was thinking about the upside to this: the profusion and breadth that accompanies this speed. You can still only fit so much in a human brain or pump so much shit into a culture blog timeline, and there are so many scenes and so much content and niche weirdness that multiplies just as fast as “sell $20K worth of shirts I made with a meme that blew up this morning.” Like zooming into the Mandelbrot Set, there’s always some hilarious piece of coastline nobody’s ruined yet.

And, of course, the power of forgetfulness. I play in the puddles of the digital firehose still, digging back, back and under. Sometimes I share an old guitar swing song with a Zoomer friend on Twitter and it blows their fucking mind.

My latest project has been mining the thrash revival stuff from about 2008-2013 — this flared in and out of existence so fast — while I was in my tryouts to be a husband and stepdad — I barely caught a glimpse of it until three years ago. And that’s how I learned about Obscene Extreme, the music fest put on by this Czech dude who started it as a lark for his birthday and is now going decades strong. You can go to a former battlefield in the Czech Republic and buy absinthe lemonade and smell absolutely as bad as you want and the promoter makes every band agree to let the fans run around on stage whenever they want.

He won’t book venues in the U.S. because they’re too lame and expensive and he won’t agree to the clauses that let their rent-a-gorillas do whatever they want to a fan who dares cross the stupid barricades they put up.

My friend: This shit is not over.

P.S. There’s another clip somewhere of these girls’ set where the costumes get even weirder and some guy gets up there with a large custom box he made, wearing a lab coat and writhing as if the thing in the box were electrocuting him or giving him ecstatic seizures. That’s the only clip I’ve found of this event where security has a presence. Couple staff intercepted him like, “Dude, we can’t do the mad scientist box thing today, sorry,” and dude politely dismounted.

JONATHAN EVISON: Hahaha! How can I not love it? It sounds like G.B.H. with a deranged muppet singing. I dig what you're proposing about the upside of speed and iteration in cultural acceleration, and I think it is a hopeful take. 

Please don't make me consider any more fractals, though — math was never my strong suit (I admire its elegance, but it gives me a headache). As a guy who spends most of his time in the woods, I find myself feeling a little besieged by all of this; not so much by the permutations themselves, but the rapidity of them. I'm a guy who likes context, and it seems to get harder and harder to find one's bearings in a TikTok world. 

Don't get me started on technology and Late Capitalism. My mania is through the roof, so my whole goal in life is to slow down, which is why I've been self-medicating with beer and weed since I was fourteen years old, and why I've managed never to go off the deep end with addiction, because it has never been about the high for me, more about finding an equilibrium. Like context, I yearn for clarity, and its hard to find when your brain feels like it was shot out of a fucking cannon. And it's not that I don't like unpredictability. I'm not that old yet. If you were to ask me what that equilibrium might sound like right now, if I could ever achieve it, it would probably sound something like this:

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: One day I will locate your mountain redoubt with some brown liquor and I don’t give a fuck if we listen to anything but Slim & Slam all night because I love everything I’ve ever heard by them, together or separately. What inviolable joy.

But yeah: Sometimes I’ll knock a beer and a shot down at The Trinidad Lounge when it opens at 4 p.m., but I get out after that because a) I have not yet interacted with the local gendarmes and have no desire to b) I ache for The Temple.

The Temple is when I throw on the six strategically placed LED accent lights in my hideous kitchen, set them on a whimsical and soothing color, and uncork whatever I have around. Finally I can detach and Listen to One Thing and Only Think About One Thing. The wind tunnel of unwanted input and useless, bifurcating thought falls quiet. I can sit in the middle of this one thing, this song, and for just a few hours it is both the absolute center and far boundaries of my consciousness.

I’m good and buzzed by now, a patient sifter. Nothing except the glittering salvage. It feels both reverent and virtuous to wonder if Billy Idol's Rebel Yell LP had any good non-hits on it because the Gen X version of 'Dancing With Myself' was fine in its original incarnation and nobody needs to hear the stupid, boring title track ever again. So I listen to the whole damn thing. And there’re two of them! What plunder! “Blue Highway” and “(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows,” and I marvel at the production muscle they armed him with, and Sweet Mother of God, did his axe man have command of that instrument. It did whatever he wanted. And they have him overdub himself on the later choruses, adding glissading, dying-bird tremolos and controlled, clipped rockabilly fills — sometimes I laugh out loud at how ungodly slick it is. It’s borderline shameless.

It’s maybe the 10th replay?

I don’t know. 

Who cares? 

My patio is now the observation deck of a starship and I can see the gods’ blueprints and their deliverables, all at once, all overlaid and not a screw loose and I can’t tell the difference between the craft in which I am borne and myself.

The rest of the week is just bullshit by comparison.

JONATHAN EVISON: I would go one step further than "borderline shameless" and just call it shameless. I like the song, and I don't always object to blatant overproduction, but for me, it's an "if the shoe fits, wear it" argument — ergo, if we're talking about Huey Lewis and the News, go ahead, overproduce your heart out. 

But with regard to anything with (ostensibly) punk rock or counter-culture roots, it's often a bridge too far for me. In short, I would much prefer a Jack Endino remaster of "(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows" to the glaringly slick, albeit proficient, excess exhibited here. But then, I thought G.B.H. was overproduced. 

On the flipside, some of my favorite "budget rock" bands, like, say, The Mummies, would in my estimation benefit from better production. My problem with the moniker "budget rock" is that I know from experience that it is very possible to produce sonically appealing (and highly apropos) recordings on zero budget, whereas some of the Mummies records are purposefully produced to sound like somebody dropped a ghetto blaster in an aquarium, which is its own sort of artifice. If I had my druthers, every Mummies recording would sound like this:

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: I have been using YouTube Music for a couple of years because — while file quality and volume can vary aggravatingly — I’m more likely to find the weird remixes and mashups on which I fixate, unlike Spotify et al. And I couldn’t find the Jack Endino track you mentioned, not even on YT Music, so this seems as good a point as any to say, “You stumped me, sensei.”

Before we go, the floor is yours: What should readers of this interview do next to support your fine work?

JONATHAN EVISON: Haha, no! Such a recording does not exist. That's my point! I'd much prefer "(Do Not) Stand in the Shadows" were it produced by Jack Endino rather than someone from the Mutt Lange school. I like my punk rock with a little hair on it, you know? Not muddy, mind you, just sonically unbridled without any slick veneer. I want my layering natural, and I don't want any range compression or a bunch of multi-tracking. 

Gimme the live sound, performance-wise. Same with my soul music. Some of those late '60s soul sides are as punk rock as anything the Stooges or MC5 were laying down. Like this, for instance:

Dig the room sound, the slightly off-key horns, those trashcan lid drums, that wobbly, weaving bass, and of course, Lee Moses's singular, off-the-rails vocal barbarism. Put it all together in real time and it just sounds like a bash I wanna be at.

Ok, my books. Thanks for asking. I don't talk about them until people make me. There's a bunch of them, eight now, I think. Go buy them, so I can keep spending all this money on tequila and records. 

If you want literary ambition, maybe start with Small World, or if you want humor and pathos, maybe try Lawn Boy (the second most banned book in America the past couple years), or The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (and no, I didn't have anything to do with the film version with Paul Rudd, but it was a cute film). If you like cave people sex and survivalist stories, maybe try Legends of the North Cascades. Old ladies on cruises? Try This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Bodybuilding Twins? All About Lulu. Novels about place? Try West of Here.

Just buy them, because as you know, wax ain't getting any cheaper and I can't drink bottom shelf liquor!

-finis-

AppleHammerBee’s 40K Fiction

Disclaimer: Like Games Workshop would have anything to do with this. Nobody is going to make money off this half-assed travesty. Come on, let's use our brains here.

Assistant Shift Sister Leader Sergeant Ashleighcus paused for a moment, isolating and quickly analyzing the all-feeds vox chatter in their helmet.

Pandemonium in the pits of the Microwave Banks. 65% already reporting in high as hell.

The squad doing a sweep of the Dumpitorium was on the verge of breaking, reporting chudsplatter that somehow reached the three-foot mark of a wall. 

"This…this shouldn't be possible!" came the Sanitation Militarum commander's voice, crackling in and out. "Who could have done this?"

"Shut it down," they barked, cold and gravelly. "Let the rest shit their pants boothside like the others."

Not losing their focus on squad comms, they sidestepped a wave of shitlings who had escaped their booth containment.

It was then that Squad Host Fetal Benjamin, with whom they doggedly had maintained line of sight through the horror of early lunch, turned grimly to face them from his station. He didn’t have to say anything. Not 20 yards away, the first waves of doughy evangelicals disembarked from their shiny transports, milling about in benign-looking patterns that belied their utter lethality.

Another Sunday. Another slaughter.

They could feel their Greater Flair Gland — implanted within them via a Sanctioned PowerPoint delivered centuries ago, but still as fresh as a grill burn — responding instantaneously, blasting precious Auxiliary Fucks into their bloodstream.

This is the kind of trial that would have splintered an Applebee's.

But Store #773 was no normal Applebee's.

This was an Applebee's Astartes.

Hearing Pianos from Different Rooms: A Discussion and a Playlist

When a piano makes a chord, how far can it echo through your tissues?

To find out, I enlisted @TheJK — Breakup Gaming Society's Chief Spiritual Officer and author of the excellent Me Being Serious newsletter, which tracks both I Ching and cultural currents — for an interview.

We began with this quote I found in Hampton Hawes’ autobiography, Raise Up Off Me, and just went from there.

The piano was the only sure friend I had because it was the only thing that was consistent, always made sense and responded directly to what I did. Pianos don’t ever change. Sittin’ there every day. You wanna play me, here I am. The D is still here, the A flat’s still here, they’re always going to be there and it don’t matter whether it’s Sunday, Ash Wednesday or the Fourth of July. Play it right and it comes out right; mess with it and it’ll make you back up. A piano don’t lie. Check the prancing players with the sparkles in their eyes and the pretty fingernails flashing up and down the keyboard — listen closely and that’s all there is, just flash and icing, no more depth or meaning than a wood chip dancing down a waterfall. A keyboard is more consistent than life, it gives you back what you put into it, no more, no less. In the forties Bud Powell had grease in his veins and burned the motherfucker up; Thelonious Monk plays it strange and beautiful because he feels strange and beautiful. The piano was the first secure and honest thing in my life, I could approach it on my own and fail or be good. Straight to the point and quick.

THE JK: That's interesting about "It gives you back what you put into it." To me, the piano is a movie instrument. It's like a film camera.

You can say any instrument can paint a picture, but a piano with the right fingers can create sudden suspense, peace, or chaos (many will say any instrument can do this, and that's fine).

Other instruments, to me, often feel like they announce themselves coming and going more than a piano does. A piano feels slippery, and sneaky.

If piano was a planet, to me, it'd be Mercury. It can trick, it can communicate, it can be incredibly fast, it can be malleable.

Electric guitar or drums I'd probably say belonged to Mars. The microphone to the Sun, a sampler, like an MPC, to Saturn, since it can deconstruct and manipulate the dead.

But, piano, I'd say belonged to Mercury.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: OK, that was a lot to chew on and I want to get into some of this with you. I also love the piano, and know you to be both a serious head and a cerebral person. 

But I’ve noticed that while we share that reverence for music, a lot of the stuff — even within genres we both love, like hip hop and jazz — we gravitate to is wildly different. Like when I get drunk and text you all those random tracks and am stunned to learn that I was not, in fact, listening with your ears. 

I like the boogie and swing and stride. You like the fusion and funk and experimental stuff.

So what piano song these days is painting the trickiest pictures for you these days? 

Or help me understand a piano song you think of as classically mercurial and cinematic.

THE JK: Yeah, we do have different tastes with that.

There's nothing new at the moment that comes to mind, but I thought about some older stuff:

That DJ Premier beat sounds like a tiger creeping through an NYC alley.

Or for piano used a bit differently, you have "Runaway" by Kanye West.

There was an original version that doesn't have the buildup, but the album version has a plink that keeps hitting like a drop of water in the sink until the rest of the song comes rushing in.

As far as cinematic, the first thing that comes to mind is an actual movie (my favorite movie of all time): Eyes Wide Shut and this song: 

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: When you started talking about piano snippets in Golden Era joints, the first thing that bubbled up in my head was “Hip Hop Rules” by Boogie Down Productions off their Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop LP. It’s funny, not to oversimplify, but I feel like I’m drawn to the percussive qualities of the left hand while you’re thinking about how the right hand leads and makes moods.

Speaking of which, I haven’t watched Eyes Wide Shut since its theater release, but I do remember that piano figure that keeps repeating — it definitely seemed to carry the themes of menace and alienation in the movie. Halting, haunting, spare.

I had a buddy who was a true polymath who could write and play for piano and guitar. One summer he taught me how to pound out simple left-hand octaves with my left hand and mirror them with three-finger chords and he was always like, “Remember, the piano is a percussion instrument.”

One night we got wrecked in my folks’ home in Park Hill when they were gone somewhere and he videotaped us pulling off some stupid duet where I played the one thing I could do with the technique he taught me and he just effortlessly followed along. I didn’t have any knowledge, but I did have rhythm, and we just knocked the living hell out of that basic-ass melody until past midnight and that was probably one of the best nights of my life.

THE JK: Honestly, Return of The Boom Bap is probably the KRS album I return to the most, so I wasn't familiar with that song, but it's good. 

That is interesting, especially if the left and right hands serve different purposes while playing, because I wasn't aware of that. I dropped out of my piano class (along with many other classes) in college.

That's also interesting about the percussive instrument stuff. 

It sounds like a good time. I don't have any first-person stories like that, but my grandfather used to tell me his dad would play the piano drunk, sing songs in Austrian (or Czech, or Slovak, I don't know which one my family was using) and put his arm around him on some "My son!" shit.

That's one thing about piano, I guess, as shown by your story: It can be a collaborative instrument.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: We were piss poor on the farm in Missouri, but The Moms did have a piano. She tried to teach me. I was lazy and I quit. The plodding folk melodies in the beginner’s books blinded me with boredom. Trying to read the sheet music. Quarter notes, half beats, all the notation…it made me insane. I just wanted to boogie.

But before I ever got sat down for a lesson, I have this memory of approaching the keyboard with “Yankee Doodle” in my head. So I thought I was just going to sit down and play that shit. I started pecking at the keys thinking it was just going to come out. I was horrified at what I heard. How could this be? Why couldn’t I just bang out the song? So I think that’s one of the things that spoke to me in the Hawes passage, that envy of someone who can just sit down in front of that tool and work it, make what’s happening in their head happen with the keys and pedals.

I cannot tell you the size of the impression that hearing boogie woogie made on me when they’d play it during evening programs on the radio on whatever NPR affiliate my parents liked. I was transfixed. I revistied the giants of the ‘30s — Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade Luxe Lewis — and I not only was still in love with it, but it started a growing sense in my mind that maybe I belonged to that time and not here. It leapt out the speakers with such immediacy that I swear I could understand being in the room the day it was made.

And back to that left hand: eight beats to the bar like a jackhammer, never tiresome in its repeating (well, because the right hand flourishes bring the melody out and the soloing was…basically rock and roll, except it’s 1938 or something). Like Freddie Slack said in “Down the Road a Piece,” “If you want boogie woogie, then you’ll get your fill/It’ll put the eight beats through you like an old steam drill.” That’s what happened. I am still marked by it and still return to it weekly and I love it so much it hurts me.

When people treat old jazz like ambient brunch music or lazy cultural shorthand or irrelevant, it makes me feel very lonely, it feels like I’m the only person alive in the room.

THE JK: Yeah, sheet music is a little too much for me. It feels like math. And this is coming from someone that dedicated their life to the I Ching.

I feel you, but I think we all have one talent or skill that would cause someone else to say "Wow," if they saw us putting it into action. Not to discount any masterful piano players or anything, I just think we all got a little something.

That's interesting you can pinpoint when exactly it was that the instrument put you in a headlock. I'm not sure I can do that.

I think a lot of people don't realize just how many styles of jazz are out there when they look at it that way. Of course, it's all dependent on personal tastes. There's a lot of masters in the past, but if the style isn't my kind of jazz, it won't really resonate.

Rap album liner notes were my gateway drug, and it led me to people like Ahmad Jamal.

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Yes, tracing samples back through time is crazy fun. That’s why I think I may get one more tattoo before I die: the Beatnuts logo, which they lifted off the Hank Mobley “Turnaround” LP. It’s all right there: the spirit of jazz and hip hop in one beautiful, organic, swirling arrow. (Funny side note: When “U Can’t Touch This” broke, did you ever meet anybody who heard that song before they heard “Superfreak” and they were like, “Heyyyy, he stole that from Hammer!” XD XD XD). I guess we could get on a different thread about the vanishing of historical awareness, but yeah.

So Ahmad Jamal. He algorthimed into my rotation last year. Now we’re back at the piano. 

My jam by him is “Poinciana” from a live ’58 recording. It’s miced exquisitely. The percussion is so crisp and warm at once. I kept it in my Likes because it is fairly long and it defied my expectations of what a ’58 cut would be: minute after minute, I’m waiting for the piano or a lead sax to erupt in solo, but it…just keeps gliding and gliding with subtle fillips here and there to keep you tickled. Patient and buoyant. Full of light. I love that song.

THE JK: I didn't realize they got their logo from that. Haa, I was only three years old when "U Can't Touch This" came out, and while I knew of the song when it dropped, I wasn't privy to those kinds of conversations. I did, however, get my uncles ribbing me about all of the stuff Puffy sampled in the late '90s, like "Kashmir."

I don't know that one off the top of my head, but I may have heard it. I don't know if there's someone I'd rather hear on the piano than him. 

It made me remember, though, that in my producing days I think I sampled him on this track I did for a friend: 

BREAKUP GAMING SOCIETY: Wait a goddamn minute. 

Did you just cap this with an original beat? Was not ready for that. God bless you. That’s a good loop.

One final question: you said drum and sampler energy issued from fundamentally different planets. So which planet belongs to the TR808 kick drum? Does it reside in the MPC/sampler bucket, the drum bucket, or does it have a star of its own? Your ruling will be accepted as final for purposes of this conversation.

THE JK: Thank you, man.

Haa, I mean, I'd say the sampler is a Saturnian device, but the 808 sound itself, I'd still say is a Mars thing. There's a reason crunk music threw that shit into everything. It's an inciting sound. 

It's a Martian ghost summoned by a Roland Ouija board, possessing us with the same conflict that caused the apocalyptic event that turned that planet into a red desert that billionaire neo-feudalists lust over.

-finis-

I’m the President Now, Check Out These Cool New Laws

Elections take too long and you never get to vote for anything cool, so I’m just declaring myself President of the United States now.

I am a deeply flawed man, but evidence suggests there are absolutely zero standards for inhabiting the Oval Office, plus a bunch of sitting Senators declared that elections where their guy doesn’t win don’t count anyway, so fuck it.

We are going to start doing a simple three-pillar policy now. I call them “Super Laws.” You can cite them in arguments. Just keep shaking your head and be like, “Not according to our New President’s Super Laws.”

1. ”Revolution” by Lazarus A.D. is now the National Anthem
Don’t worry about it if you don’t like thrash or if some members of the band turn out to be chodes, we can change it to a different song later if we want. For now we just need a song that’s not boring and racist.

2. Medicare for All
Of course we can pay for it. The UK has it and that island has a hollowed out economy and is chock full of belligerent subnormals. We can figure it out.

3. Texas is expelled from the Union.
Why wait for heavily armed diaper babies to make a move? Boot ‘em now. I will relocate all military bases to surrounding states and post the 7th Fleet up in the Gulf of Mexico in case they’re feeling themselves and want to try some cute shit.

Please enjoy these new Super Laws.

Chaotic Cocktails: Warped Drink Ideas Your Friends Will Hate

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only rehab.

Breakup Gaming Society proudly unveils the complete cycle of cocktails/shots dedicated to the four Ruinous Powers of Warhammer: 40,000.

Neither Games Workshop nor any of these fine distillers recommend doing any of this.

Fetid Haze (Featured on Ep. 5, “The Fruits of Decay”)
• 1 oz. Pikes Peak Hill Shine
• Generous dash of El Yucateco Green Chile Habanero Sauce
• Easy Cheese Cheddar 'n Bacon Cheese Snack.
To Prepare:
Shake Shine and Habanero then strain into shot glass rimmed with the cheese stuff.

The Butcher’s Nail (Featured on Ep. 27, “Debauchery at the Black Monarch Hotel”)
• 1 oz. Deviation Mountain Herb Gin
• Splash of Clamato
To Prepare:
Pour all ingredients into empty 12-gauge shell. Cover top with hand, pop on counter, down the hatch.

The Prince’s Palindrome (Featured on Ep. 19, “The Slaaneshi Super Shot That Gave Xian PTSD”)
• Boost Canned Oxygen
• Slaaneshi Combat Drug
• Yukon Jack Perma Frost Schnapps
To Prepare:
Arrange on table one shot glass of schnapps, then small pile of combat drug, then oxygen, then more combat drug, then another shot of schnapps. Chosen cultist must work their way through entire palindrome in less than 30 seconds or face the disfavor of Slaanesh.

Inoculation Against Predictability (Featured on Ep. 57, “I’m Tired Tell Me What to Drink and Play”)
• 1.5 oz. Basil Hayden Bourbon
• .25 oz. Galliano
• .25 oz. Goldschlager
• Angostura Cocoa Bitters
To Prepare:
Pour liquors into shaker with ice, add a few dashes of the cocoa bitters, strain into glass. For heightened effect, chase with one capsule of ground Psilocybin. Repeat four or five times, then call your parents and record it.

Check Out This Original Poem I Wrote

Flaptoast
You can keep your tendies and sauces

Tonight it's fresh off the wing
writhing and crunchy
and tearing holes in the bread with its final struggle

You thank the bird eye to eye
before the incisors snip the hollow neck
but only if you bear down like you mean it

This night is like no other

No you cannot connect to my speaker
we're not listening to your shit

Stop talking about Costa Rica
you were boring when you went to Costa Rica
and you were boring when you got back

The stars have moved again over the patio
and you're still sitting there
with your warbler on Sara Lee ready to go 
like you don't even know how to party

Bitch
I just made you flaptoast

Halley’s Comet: Hexagram 42, Line 3

“There should be a big book listing all the families that benefited by Halley’s Comet and all the rest of us that it doesn’t give two shits about.”
@TheJK, Breakup Gaming Society’s Spiritual Advisor

Persona-Based Podcast Marketing: Thoughts for 2022

In just two minutes and 27 seconds, I lay out the core strategy for keeping your listener base as small as possible.

Norman Invasions Reveal the Weakness of a Tattered Mind: Thoughts on Learning a New Solo Card Game

I’m playing as the Saxons in the Battle of Hastings.

The Normans are cranking out more and better units than I have. My central formation is about to collapse. I’m fine with this. Satisfied and proud, even, because getting this far required me to:

• Win a battle with my resentful and frenetic squirrel brain

• Accept that for this phase of my life, I chose to be a solo gamer in every sense of the word

Things already off to a poor start in my central formation, where the Normans (blue markers) are piling on damage faster than my forces.

A few years ago I deleted both my Twitter and Facebook accounts when I found myself unable to finish a long piece in Harper’s. I couldn’t focus long enough to follow a thought through one paragraph. It was like years of scrolling had left me neurologically damaged, deaf to the form I claimed to love and practice.

I have been feeling that attenuation again — finishing a day of scrolling irritable and distracted, like my body wanted food and instead I just ate AAA batteries all day.

So I carved out a recent morning to stay off the laptop and glue my ass to the chair and play several solo rounds of Tristan Hall’s 1066, Tears to Many Mothers.

I leapt from the chair often to pace and mumble or futz with dishes in the sink. My brain started to tell me I was hungry. I wasn’t. My keening pleasure centers just wanted something with a faster payoff.

Backing Into Self-Reliance
My pride and instinct for refusal has driven me further down Colorado’s I-25 corridor for decades. When I came to rest at this location just 11 miles north of the New Mexico border, all I had were my clothes and board games — and the fantasy of a golden bachelorhood where I would conjure acolytes and debauchers out of the desert soil.

The dusty games would spring back into motion under the paws of the newly amazed. I would hit this ZIP code like a comet, architecting unforgettable nights anchored by racks of my cherry wood-smoked ribs, straight moonshine and ruthlessly vetted beats.

This has been harder to do than I thought.

Once in a while The Chaplain (and another gent who I’m provisionally calling Nasty Naz, The Cajun-Flavored Ork) shows up on the doorstep and we have a proper ripper, usually while playing Space Hulk: Death Angel.

But The Chaplain works seasonal gigs around the region and is a sporadic communicator. There are a few dozen people in town who recognize me and will chat me up, but not anybody who seems interested in learning Spartacus or Splendor or Bohnanza, even when I dangle free liquor and a summer feast alongside. (In one of the least-employed counties in Colorado, there seems to be an awful lot of wildly busy people. Or maybe they’re going crazy and need ¾ of the day to contend with themselves, as I do.)

This is my second winter here; I need new strategies to reanimate this empty table and the figure in the mirror. Nobody’s coming over. The fantasy does not nourish. I must bear down and work this soil anew until a different shoot pokes through.

When you’re running this game solo, that dial in the background has six different difficulty levels labeled and tells you how many resources the enemy has to deploy cards on each game round. In the foreground is a bunch of mom tears.

The State of the Battle

1066, Tears to Many Mothers* is a card game for two people or one irascible divorcé. There’s a big deck of cards representing Norman stuff and another deck for the Saxons.

I saw echoes of my favorite game of all time in it: four categories of card in your hand; you must manage placement of these cards and the timing/cost of their effects to not only beat the other player, but do it in a gamespace that is a story unfolding on a map. (I will bet almost anything that Tristan Hall played Warhammer 40,000: Conquest at some point in his life.)

The cards depict fighting units, key nobles and vicissitudes of the season, all of which contend for dominance in three wedges — wedges being columns of cards that can be imagined as not only major formations and their leaders, but where the influence of off-battlefield actors and events manifests.

This is accentuated by a sideboard of objective cards for each player that represent major pre-battle events: As you develop your three wedges, you simultaneously have to “destroy” objective cards until you get to the Battle of Hastings, at which point the wedges transition from positioning and harassment actions to a pitched battle.

My job today is to place enough damage markers to knock out two of the three Norman wedges or kill their CEO, Duke William FitzRobert of Normandy, who has brought hundreds of ships across the Channel and is not fucking around.

As it stands, my second wedge is due to collapse any second. Duke William cleared his objective pile two full turns before I did. The Norman deployment machine, as regulated by the dedicated rules that automate its decisions, is already spitting out ranged units and cavalry.

On my side of the field, poor Harold Godwinson, Saxon King of England, barely has any fighters. He’s wounded and he’s already been screwed over by his brother, Tostig.

I’m playing on easy mode, and will finish out the remainder of this slaughter as a learning exercise. Minor gripe: It’s especially slow going as the solo rule booklet is essentially a concordance to the two-player booklet; you can’t dive in just using the solo rules, and I’ve spent many an hour with both booklets open, scanning back and forth for all the base-game directives and solo exceptions.

All that said, I like my new winter companion so far. The flow of the game has gelled. I need another play or two to iron out some minor steps I’m probably doing wrong. I need to get more familiar with the card effects and then I’ll start to form something of a strategy. Only then will I stop reading the sheet music and start hearing the song.

But it’s only December. Plenty of cold evenings ahead to work through it and eat the occasional bowl of soup. What’s the rush? I’m too tired to flee any further south. I might as well stay here and figure it out.

Analysis: The Saxons would have done much better at the Battle of Hastings if they’d gotten their Ork elites out earlier

*Special thanks to Jason Moore a.k.a. @A_deck_of_51 a.k.a. repairmanjack, whose prodigious body of solo game reviews was pivotal to rethinking how I enjoy my hobby and settling on 1066, Tears to Many Mothers.

Half-Assed Review of a Forgettable Whiskey

It was hot out. I was irritable and tired of pretending to care about this whiskey.

Or pretending that I knew anything about anything.

Several half-attempts here at reviewing Blue Note Juke Joint Whiskey.

100 Mandatory Golden Era Hip Hop Tracks or You Get Mindwiped: Tracks #51-60

Mr. Inquisitor Hip Hop Understander is at it again, abusing bourbon in the Fortress Monastery and trying to tell everybody else what to listen to.

Below: Writeups for tracks 51-60.

51. "I Own America, Pt. 1," Slick Rick
He of the eye patch and imperial drip, he of the singular style: lilting, louche delivery; pornographic imagination, literary scene-sketching and, lest you think he's soft, one of the sharpest pens in the game when it sensed a pretender's jugular in the room. Surgical savagery from The Ruler, one of the best MCs of all time. (Somebody in some magazine said one of the rhymes on this track was one of the year's worst, but why that one? In '88, he said he was going to let his dog fuck your wife if you're wack on the mic, so I'm not seeing anything egregious here.)

52. "9th Wonder (Blackitolism)," Digable Planets
That drum track is so laid back, sometimes it feels like the snare's not going to hit on time, but like many of the tracks from Blowout Comb, the silky vibe can be deceptive: check how the mood deepens with that squelchy monotone sample in the leadoff (same sample source, I think, from "Public Enemy No. 1"), and the confidence of these MCs. This is precision craft; subtle, but not soft. (Also: "Black Ego")

53. "The Main Ingredient," Pete Rock and CL Smooth
The Golden Era kind of died for me when these two split, but before they did...this issues. On an album level, CL sits down on his flow more than in the first LP; more sure-footed, less hyper, more cohesive and effective. I picked the title track because, while nothing Rock puts his name on ever disappoints, this sample is the most addictive hook on the LP.

54. "Represent," Showbiz and AG
A friend of a friend was so passionate about Runaway Slave at a party that I bought the CD. Years later, "Represent," is still my fave. The sampling across this album is generally rowdy and raw, which I liked, and this track moreso because I'm a sucker for anything that has Big L and Finesse on it, and AG always has personality to spare.

55. "Jbeez Comin Through," Jungle Brothers
This drum sample never got old for me, especially the way the producers set it up with that noisy horn loop and heavy rhythm scratch. A liquidy sproing of a vocal sample, then we're off to the races and I'm thinking for a few seconds it stands up to any of the '90s Big Beat/breaks work. Sleight-of-hand across this album, it gets more interesting every time I hear it and these cats made it sound so easy. This is all work directly from the center of the heart.

56. "Disk and Dat," Kwest Tha Madd Ladd
Another brilliant artist partially doomed by late release/label bullshit. "101 Things To Do When I'm With Your Girl" is probably the most well-known, but I played the hell out of this one, too, with its rollicking drums/keyboard sample and time-capsule tribute to the studio tools and processes that made the tracks. I don't know if Eminem ever listed him as an influence, but listening to this, it seems he owes Kwest a debt: hyperactive, troubled and funny microphone scamp from around the way, alike in spirit and cadence.

57. "Mr. Goodbar," LL Cool J
LL and Kane were the preeminent crafters of the ladykiller/MC killer personas. Kane had the better pen overall, but he never quite purred and cooed through tales of nailing your girl the minute you turn your back like LL did. "I'm That Type of Guy" from Walking With a Panther is another great example, but this track is meaner (and also the best off Mama Said Knock You Out, you can have your boomin' systems, 'round the way girls and the title track.)

58. "It's All About Me," D-Nice
D-Nice had the looks, the voice, the confidence and the Boogie Down pedigree. Hook him up with a James Brown "Mind Power" sample and he creates one of the most irresistible examples of pre-1990 MC chest thumping around.

59. "Wordz of Wisdom," 3rd Bass
One of my favorite kinds of late '80s cuts is when they decided they finally got the track hypnotic and catchy enough (thanks to ace plundering of some Gary Wright hooks) and just piled on bars, bars and more bars, unconcerned with running time. Seems like a microphone workout like this was table stakes if you wanted to have a serious hip hop album, and Serch and Nice deliver.

60. "Sally," Stetsasonic
Every year I get older and have more frames of reference, and still, every time I hold this up to the firmament of 1988, the production still relegates other production teams to the dim recesses. Such depth. Such sparkle. Such joy. Such movement. In my version of Blade Runner, they play this for the replicants and if they don’t dance, BAM, right in the dome.

Painting My Way Out of Depression With These Merry Apocalyptic Trucks

When I get depressed and the sun sets before 5 p.m., I paint miniatures to pass the awful hours.

In this case, all the character trucks from Pandasaurus’ Wasteland Express Delivery Service.

Here are Gat’s (rear) and Big John’s (foreground) rigs

Here is Gat’s rig, more or less finished

Big John’s truck is declared road-ready

Primed Zero’s and Tweek’s rigs in tan and green, respectively, to give them a differentiated base from previous two and break the pattern I fell into with previous palettes

On Empathy, Toxic Masculinity and Selling Stuff Online to Men

Celebrate the death of the B2B marketing white paper by reading about my awesome insights into dudes.

Nobody knows how to talk about this issue, but listen to me and you’re going to make a mint.

The Chaplain’s Heroics in Space Hulk: Death Angel

Only two Marines left and a tide of Genestealers (including Adrenals) everywhere you look. The Chaplain is undetterred.

“It’s a wrap,” I told him. Both of my squads of Blood Angels Terminators had been wiped out, leaving only my teammate’s diminished squads against a hilarious amount of seething Genestealers.

The final room (in which you have to stay alive long enough to hit a victory condition) wasn’t even in sight. There were many Tyranid spawns left to perform. God knows how many attacks left to weather. I was drunk and tired and noped out.

But not the Allfather. While I stumbled room to room, drinking more, going outside for cigarettes, hypnotizing myself with music surfacing on shuffle, he stuck with the mission.

Still not sure how he did it, but he stayed at the table and stared holes in those cards, using what abilities his Blood Angels had left to pry open microscopic windows of opportunity.

And the fucker won. I stumbled through the kitchen and noted he was in the final room with one remaining fighter: Chaplain Raziel, the fighting holy man, all alone with his shredded armor, still cursing from behind his skull mask and swinging his Crozius Arcanum through thickets of xenos.

I gaped while he executed the action card that fulfilled the final room’s victory condition.

When he first came on the show, he dubbed himself Allfather in a nod to Norse mythology, but he became the Chaplain that night, incarnating the unshakeable faith of the Space Marines’ fighting priests.

Sanguinius would have been proud.

Masturbating When You’re Drunk Is Too Complicated

“My Macintosh looked like it had been dipped in beef tallow.”

Outtake from last episode that was too gross to include

The Heartbreak of a Would-Be Warhammer Dad

My best childhood friend, Jesse, had a WWII Navarone playset in which two combatants could stage an American assault on a cross-section of fortified seaside cliff, complete with German troops and two big artillery pieces in balconies of heavy-gauge molded gray plastic.

For scene-setting, it was a step above: the person setting up the Germans could position men in two or three tiers of mountain bunkers, with the rest of the combatants arranged on a plastic playmat that had some printed beach and water features.

There was a good assortment of troops: flamethrower dudes, infantry in various poses, even a few (I loved this) casualties in agony’s repose on their plastic bases. I think the Allied forces may have had a half-track.

The setup was thrilling, the quasi-godhood of miniaturization and negated time.

“Playing” was depressing; the minute the battle would start — each of us in a race to make sound effects and turn active enemy threats on their side — the magic of the setup was degraded.

There was some residual excitement in examining the carnage, but I would have been happy setting it all up again and just admiring it together. But the shooting always had to start because I couldn’t take Jesse to that place in my pre-pubescent head where possibility was nourishment enough.

Let’s Put Some Structure In Here
Large-scale tabletop wargames like Warhammer: 40,000 serve as the ideal bridge between the 12-year-old who loves the detail of exotic warriors in dioramas and the kid who, 20 years later, needs a defined structure to Pew-Pew-Pew! Yeah, Unit X is a fearless whirlwind of destruction who inspires terror across the sector with the dread whine of their whatever-cannon, but how badass is it when firing into cover against my also measurably badass dude? (Large swathes of the hobby love the lore and the painting and never bother getting an army on the table at all. I think I’m starting to understand these people. Even civilians understand: they’ll ogle at a model waaay longer than they’ll sit to learn how hits v. wounds work.)

It doesn’t hurt to have coplayers in that age-spanning psychographic: In 2010 I joined the household of my then-girlfriend and her two kids. EZ, the eldest, was 14 at the time and I knew by some of the Warhammer jokes he would crack that I had a shortcut there to quick rapport.

I was at Barnes and Noble one day and saw a copy of Space Hulk: Death Angel. About the size of a paperback. $20. It became our whole summer. He kind of screwed the pooch in his spring semester math class, so he had to dedicate a portion of each morning to online catchup courses. I had LOS to him from the kitchen table, working on client shit, and my peripheral vision was sharply attuned to the moment, usually late morning, when he would close his laptop.

“You ready?” I’d say. I would already be sorting cards before I asked. We charged our Blood Angel Terminators through the masses of Genestealers waiting in the twisted guts of the Sin of Damnation again and again. By summer’s end, the cards had a friction patina of white.

Sifting back through those sessions, I see the same piece of char bob up again and again: the pangs of not ever having had a son; the antechambers of my personality that needed not just to have companionship, but to be revered. Now, it seemed, I had an acolyte and a pal and a hobby. I upped the ante by getting him the Black Reach W40K starter kit for one of his birthdays.

The first time he broke it out in earnest, his longtime homie, R, was visiting for the weekend. Those last sweet weekends before driving age, full of monstrous fast-food orders and constant laughter. I assumed I would be in the Warhammer clubhouse. They were pitting the Orks against the Ultramarines on the living room floor, chucking dice, cussing at each other; I pointed out something about the rules that didn’t match up with what they were doing. He snarled at me. I spent the rest of the evening in the bedroom, staying out of their way and sulking like someone a fifth my age. 

The Clubhouse Schism
As he aged and eventually moved out and then the marriage failed, my foothold in this charismatic, hot-tempered and capable young man’s life shrank again. But we seemed on the verge of a Renaissance when he started coming to the first few recordings of this podcast, partying with us and playing games. It was at the tail end of one of those nights when he drunkenly said, “I’ll put together a Kill Team army if you do.”

He chose to play the elite Space Marines Deathwatch. I chose the Death Guard’s Plague Marines: putrid demon soldiers. We painted together at first under the tutelage of game shop veterans. He was setting up the game at his house and walking through solo games to learn the rules.

But those nights in the Colorado Springs clubhouse were sometimes more like a night in the trap than a boardgame get-together, and I was recklessly self-medicating through the first winter of being separated from his mom. Costly medicine.

The night he showed up with all his gear and books, I had not brought my Plague Marines (I brought them the week prior, but he didn’t show. EZ either shows or he doesn’t, and courtesy updates are not on offer.) I was drunk and high, and also distracted by all the manic cross-talk, seven people in the room, loud beats and multiple games being played on the table at once.

I didn’t understand the execution of a rule. I could tell he was hot, because he just started stripping pieces off the table and into his carry box. Let’s proceed with your interpretation and figure it out later, I tell him. It was no good: He later dragged me and my game group to his Mom and never came again.

I tried to coax him back by making contact with a young officer from one of our two local Air Force bases. We started doing booze-free Sunday tutorial sessions to eliminate distractions. He was a competitive tabletop player who got bored with routinely vaporizing my Death Guard by overcharging his Tempestus Scions’ plasma rifles. Once we increased the point ceiling and he added an Ogryn to give him some melee capability, I was tits-up. EZ never showed at any of these. Barring cartwheels in his front yard, I was out of ideas.

I moved to Southern Colorado; the remaining connective tissue dissolved. The last time we were supposed to hang out, I thought I had talked him into coming down to the Southern Command Post for the weekend. I had bought food and our favorite liquors and had been going at the kitchen linoleum with a scrub brush all morning. Noon and 1 p.m. passed. I called him. “Oh, I’m at work,” he said. That was my last effort, aside from one call of concern when his mother reported he was dating a woman who thought it was acceptable to ask for attention by holding a handgun to her head or telling her friends that he’d beaten her up.

Other material amassed for no purpose other than its own suspension: I went to OfficeMax and had all the relevant pages to my faction copied and bound so I would waste less time thumbing through the Codexes as a reference. I bought and cleaned out an old ammo box from a surplus store, custom cutting foam slabs from The Gamer’s Haven so I could carry all my Plague Marines and Blightlord Terminators and Poxwalkers and terrain in one neat martial case.

On the occasions a guest happens through, I’ll still pop it open and show them the figurines. My first few Death Guard are mostly carried on the strength of Death Guard primer and a few competently highlighted pieces of equipment, but by the time I got to my Poxwalkers, I had a magnifying visor given to me by my jeweler and I was hitting crazy detail.

I have mentally conditioned myself to the fact that my stepson has no room for me in his life, but still stew about it from time to time, the chest ever three sloppy steps behind what you know. I try to be conscious of it and chat myself through it, hoping the next high tide of sadness and bile brings more acceptance and recedes a bit earlier than before.

Still I thrill at that vile little army in the ammo box, posed in mid-step, bolters Plague Spewers and brutal blades forward, unconcerned with the intensity of Imperial fire and impervious to loss.

These seem the only things sturdy enough to bear the weight of the magics I invest in them.

Learning to Sing with Drunk Theory

The Zoom subscription earned its keep: Hopped on last week with the most hospitable crew over at Drunk Theory.

We played Encore remotely — which worked quite well over Zoom — and had a hoot.

One of the most fun BGS nights on record with some great folks. Truly.

Ken Buck is a Fucking Pussy

Get Tight, Get Loose: 13 Paintings of a Man at Drink, Vignette 1

Vignette #1: Escape!

We meet Eric Devereaux for the first time. All he does in this part is sneak out of work a bit early to have bourbon for dinner, but this kind of thing can be exhilarating on the right kind of day.

Original fiction that our founder wrote a long time ago: semi-autobiographical series of word-sketches made of himself from 1999-2006.

First one’s free.

Donations required to unlock subsequent vignettes.

Trying to eat over here.