D&D and Me: Part 1 (The Time Beforetimes)

[This is the first post in a new series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[This series is about my discovery of and (occasionally stormy) love affair with D&D.  You may wish to think of it as an alternative to 23andMe, since D&D is embedded far deeper in my DNA than any silly “chromosomes.” Or think of it as a complement to my series on the Other Blog “Perl and Me.” This will probably be a bit shorter than most of my series.  Probably.]

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with Dungeons & Dragons—or “D&D” for those in the know—for most of my life.  For a long time, I took a detour into Heroscape, and I still love (and play) that game too.  But I’m entering a more “on-again” phase, mainly in that I’ve (finally!) discovered the joy of watching people play online.¹  As I’m always interested to find out more about the people behind the art I enjoy—whether that’s musicians, authors, filmmakers, or what-have-you—I’ve also spent a little bit of time listening to some of these people I’m watching talk about how they got into D&D.  And that made me want to tell someone how I got into D&D.  So here I am, telling you.

Because I never met a tangent I didn’t like, I have to start with the pre-D&D stuff.  There were lots of interests that came before I even heard about D&D, and lots of intersecting interests and interests that grew out of it.  Any story about a thing is always about more than just that thing.  For me, as a very young child, the two most important pieces were no doubt fantasy and horror.  And for that we need to talk about books.

I was an only child for the first 11 years of my life, and, while I loved games, I rarely had anyone to play with.  I didn’t make friends very easily, and I was a very short kid, and quite sensitive about it.  So I spent a lot of time by myself, and most of that time I spent reading books.  In my house, movies were awesome, and we went to see quite a few, and television was awesome, and we watched quite a lot of it, and music was intensely important—I may have mentioned before that my father was a record collector—and we listened to a shit-ton of that, but books were king.  No one ever discouraged me from reading comic books, or watching cartoons, or any of that stuff (my dad, in fact, had been fond of comics himself as a kid, so I think he was secretly a bit happy when I started to get into comics), but it was just always clear that books were the ultimate medium.  Everything else was second tier ... at best.  We had entire walls of our house devoted to books, as well as books in cabinets, books in boxes, bookcases stashed into odd corners ... books everywhere.  I had a bookcase in my room as well, of course, and the very first book I can remember reading, after all the Dr. Suess and P. D. Eastman and Berenstain Bears, was a book on Norse mythology.  It was a book aimed at younger readers, so it was a bit watered down, but I learned a lot about Odin and Thor and Loki before I ever saw them in the pages of a Marvel comic.  From there I gave up on the kids’ versions and starting reading Bulfinch’s and Larousse.  It was a short hop from there to The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Probably around the same time, I started getting into comics.  However, I always had a very weird approach to buying comic books: if the cover featured anyone even remotely recognizable—your Supermans, your Batmans, your Spider-Mans, your Fours of the Fantastic variety—I didn’t care much about them.  I wanted comics with pictures of heroes I had never seen before, never even heard of before.  The first comic I can ever remember buying was Atlas #1: that Jack Kirby artwork is always an eye-catcher, I was of course familiar with the name from my studies in mythology, and I had inherited enough of the collector gene to know that a #1 issue could become a valuable commodity ... even at 8 years old, which is how old I must’ve been, according to Wikipdedia’s publication date.  From then on, I would buy anything that had a superhero or two—or, even better, a whole bunch!—that I had absolutely no idea who they were.  It’s why I bought the “origin” issue of Black Orchid, and Ragman #1, and Moon Knight #1, and absolutely why I got into the Legion of Super-Heroes and the original Guardians of the Galaxy.  Teams of misfits with weird powers appealed to me, and really the only truly popular characters I ever liked were the X-Men, and that was only because they rebooted the group with a a whole new batch of crazy unknown heroes—mostly non-American, even!²  Not my fault they got all popular after that.

It’s worth asking why I was only interested in the weird, unknown heroes, and I’m not entirely sure I have a good answer.  But I have a theory.  See, as a kid, I was a little OCD—had I been born 25 years or so later, I might have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, at least a little.  ADHD at the very least.  But, anyway, one of the ways in which my particular brand of OCD manifested was in my obsession with lists.  My mother would indulge me in this (or maybe she was indulging her own predilection for having children able to recite things back to her, who knows) by teaching me various lists of things.  First she taught me how to count to 10 in Spanish.  Then in French.  Then in German.  Then in Malaysian.³  Then she taught me the Greek alphabet.  Then the books of the Bible.  Then all the US Presidents.  Then she sort of ran out of things to teach me and I started chasing lists on my own.

I always loved animals, so I started reading this set of wildlife encyclopedias we had lying around.  But trying to come up with a list of all the animals in the world isn’t like coming up with a list of all the presidents: we don’t even know all the species of animals at any given time—a fact which was already blowing my young mind—not to mention the fact that the list is constantly changing as new species spring into existence or go extinct.⁴  And when it comes to classification, the classic Linnaean taxonomy (phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) held strong appeal for my orderly brain, but it turns out that people were always fighting over what went where.⁵  The main controversy I recall was that rabbits were put into the “new” order of lagomorpha, although the books made it clear that some taxonomists might still be hanging on to the “outdated” idea that they were rodents.  This pretty much blew my mind, since of course my mother had taught me that rabbits were rodents, and common sense told me they were rodents: I mean, come on, they’re small furry creatures with big buck teeth—of course they’re rodents!  But apparently scientists not only knew otherwise ... they had once believed it and then changed their minds.  Insanity.

I fared no better trying to learn the countries of the world.  Surely this was an area where one could come up with a clear list.  And yet ... was Estonia a country?  They had an embassy in the US, but the UN didn’t recognize them.  What about the Bantustans of South Africa?  The opinion of my brand-spanking-new World Book Encyclopedias was that two of them (Lesotho and Swaziland⁶) were countries, but the remainder (such as Bophuthatswana and Transkei) weren’t.  Plus South Africa had two capital cities: how was that supposed to fit into my nice listing of countries and their capitals?  And it continued to get worse: every year they would send us “year books” with updated and entirely new articles, and they actually came with little sheets of stickers you were supposed to stick in the margins of the main encyclopedias, alerting you to an updated section for this article or a whole new article between these other two articles.  I very diligently applied all these stickers for many years, and I distincly remember when the update for 1979 came in and there was a whole new article for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which was apparently an entirely new country ... one year, no country; next year: country.  Mind.  Blown.

Somehow I didn’t melt down and throw a tantrum when I discovered this.  I just began to chase the lists even harder.  I think I somehow (probably subconsciously) believed I could eventually find all the members and learn all the classification controversies and make my own decisions and then I—alone in the world!—would be the knower of the complete list of X.  Where “X” might be animals, or countries, or perhaps superheroes.  Thus my theory that the lists were responsible for my comic-book-purchasing habits.  No point in buying a “regular” issue of Spider-Man—I already knew who that guy was—but an issue with these new guys Cloak and Dagger ... now there was something adding to my quest to know the complete list of superheroes.

Surely even you, dear reader—used to my tangents are you no doubt by now are—are wondering how on earth this relates to D&D.  For that, we need to look at the other half of my interest: horror.

My parents loved horror.  They enjoyed fantasy, and sci-fi probably even more so, but horror was their true calling.  I started reading Stephen King and Peter Straub and Dean R. Koontz⁷ at a very young age, and we would go see horror movies like crazy.  I saw The Exorcist in the theater, at a time when I must have just barely turned 7, and The Legend of Hell House, and Jaws, and Burnt Offerings, and Prophecy, and Grizzly, and Day of the Animals, and It’s Alive (in roughly decreasing order of quality) ... all in the theater.  At home on the small screen, we watched even more: I remember Twilight Zone reruns, and I remember Night Gallery, and most of all I remember Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which a Chicago reporter for a tiny newspaper managed to encounter a different supernatural threat every single week.  His editor (who was properly grumpy and talked primarily out of the side of his mouth, as all good Chicago news editors should) would yell at him about his “cockamamie stories”⁸ and how “ya got no proof!” The problem with a monster-of-the-week show that you’re supposed to be taking seriously, though, is that unless your protagonist is actually some sort of professional monster hunter (see also: Buffy), or perhaps even is one of the monsters themselves (see also: Dark Shadows⁹), it starts to strain credulity after a while.  Of course, as a kid, that was not an issue for me.  The bigger problem was that you eventually start to run out of monsters ... or at least out of monsters anyone’s ever heard of.  Partially they solved this problem by occasionally making up monsters—my favorite was the updated take on the Headless Horseman, who was now a headless motorcycle rider with a big sword, zooming around decapitating people—but also they went scouring the cultures of the world for more obscure monsters.  Manitou, rakshasa, succubus ... all these I first became familiar with as a result of avidly watching The Night Stalker.  It was only on for one season, but it was a pivotal moment in my personal history.

Because now, you see, I had a new list to make: a list of all possible monsters.

Next week, we’ll see how that pretty inexorably leads to my discovery of Dungeons and Dragons.

__________

1 Most likely we’ll get into why it took me so long—I mean, Critical Role has been a thing for 4 years already—in a later entry in the series.

2 I can’t remember whether Thunderbird considered himself American or not, but at most 2 out of 8.  Still nearly 90% male, of course, but it was still the seventies: “progressive” hadn’t yet progressed all that far.

3 My grandfather was stationed in Malaysia during WWII and taught her when she was little.  It’s the only one of the four languages I can’t remember today, as it happens: I don’t remember much, but I do remember that the words for numbers were multisyllabic, and that always seemed really weird to me.

4 Honestly, there were similar problems with some of my other lists—Ancient Greek had some letters that didn’t survive to the modern Greek alphabet, so do we count those letters or not? and don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha—but I was never aware of those at the time.

5 Nowadays, biologists have all but abandoned this amount of orderliness for a much more flexible system: clades.  While it’s a much better system for trying to organize the multiplicity of life, which is by its nature chaotic, it would have been anathema to my OCD mind at that age.  Luckily, while the book that would eventuallyt inspire cladistics had apparently already been written, it didn’t start to gain traction until I was out of college and could no longer be offended by its conceptually infinite branchings.

6 Note that modern-day Wikipedia tells us that these two countries were never Bantustans; perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall the World Book making this fine distinction.

7 A.k.a. the first 3 of what would ultimately become my pentagram of literary idols.

8 Note: not necessarily an actual quote.  My memory does not really extend back that far, although I have rewatched a few episodes for nostalgia’s sake.

9 Which I also remember watching, at least a bit.

The End of an Era

Well, tonight was the final episode of Game of Thrones: after 7 years, 73 episodes, and countless character deaths, it’s all over.  Hopefully next week I can present my summary on the final season, but right now it’s just too fresh ... too raw.  Plus it’s an off week anyway.  So, next week.

By the way, I totally spaced on the post two weeks ago; sorry about that.  It happens rarely, but it happens.  The Mother and the kids were gone for a few days, and I was treating myself to a bit of a staycation, and I guess my laziness just sort of kept right on trucking.  But we’re back on track now.  See you next week.

Push Poetry (a history)

It started with one word.

At my last job, there was this computer process that would go rogue and the team would get an email and someone would have to go manually kill the job.  It was considered good form to reply to the email, letting the other team members know that you’d killed it, and that way none of them had to worry about doing it themselves.  After a while it became a weird competition as to who could kill the job and report back the fastest, so naturally these reply emails were inevitably brief.  Just the single word: “Killed.”

Now, obviously we should have just fixed the damn problem and then no one would have had to do anything manually at all.  But we were not allowed to fix things at that job without having a properly prioritized ticket (which, as you can probably guess, is a big reason I no longer work there), and besides: we were having fun.  It was always a big race to see who could kill it first, and report back.  “Killed.” “Killed.” “Killed.”

Of course, eventually we got bored with just saying “killed” over and over, so some bright soul replied one day with something like “Squashed.” And then someone else went with “Crushed,” and there was “Executed,” and “Exploded,” and so on.  Finally I was interested.  Here was a competition I could really get into.  Here were some of my entries:

Hunted down while shambling along, sloughing off rotten pieces of itself and moaning “Braaaaiinsss!”, and decapitated with a chainsaw.

In the parlor, with a candlestick, by Colonel Mustard.

Shrunk down to bug size by an experiment gone wrong perpetrated by a bespectacled, absent-minded scientist who looks suspiciously like Bob McKenzie, accidentally taken out with the trash and dumped out in the yard, chased by the cat, and finally gruesomely decapitated and eaten by a praying mantis.

Those are just a few I saved.  There were many many others: I remember one where I actually looked up the model number of a sniper rifle so I could write a long paragraph about tracking it down through the woods and putting a bullet through its left eye.  When I wrote this one:

Taken to the vet, told it was too late, loved and petted and comforted while the injection took effect, and ... dammit, I’m going to miss that little guy! <sniff>

a friend of mine told me he actually thought my dog had died for a minute.  Obviously I had to write these ahead of time so that I could manage to be the first to kill-and-reply, so I always had a few in the chamber and ready to fire.  I always thought it was super-fun, and considered it a personal challenge.

So, fast-forward to new (and still current) job, and there was no such weird runaway job to worry about killing, and no chance to write insanely weird missives to my coworkers.  It was a bit of a bummer, but I figured I’d survive.

Not right away, but eventually, I became the person who pushed our code to production, affectionately (I think) called the “pushmaster.” To do this, I utilized a creaky old collection of ancient scripts, command snippets, and glue-and-duct-tape bits, which I began to refer to collectively as “the push machine.” When initiating the push process, it was necessary to let everyone know what was going on by posting in our local tech channel, because there were things you really shouldn’t be doing during our push: probably if the whole process was a bit smoother and/or more idempotent that wouldn’t be an issue, but it ain’t, so it is.  The very first message I can find in the old logs is this one, from November of 2014:

okay, firing up the push machine ...

From there, it gradually got more descriptive, and began to reflect my growing suspicion that our push process needed some serious work that nobody on the team had the time to concentrate on.

push machinery winding down.

the great push machinery is waking back up ...

push machinery shutting down.  sounds of settling mettle and trailing steam.

and the great grey-green grinding gears of the push machine slowly settle into the sludge.

the strain of the mighty push machinery lowers in pitch as the metal grinds back into motion after being held in place by its backstops and giant rubber bands ...

and the push machinery settles down, its plaintive whine gradually decreasing in pitch, until one final burp of steam and electronic squeal puffs into the air.

and, with that, the foul, fetid fog of the push machinery and the choking, charnel chaff charcoal from its charcoal chimneys, located on the banks of the great, grey-green greasy limpopo river, slips sluggishly into slothful slumber once again.

You can see where this is going.  I no longer had the competitive angle, but I was now engaged in an bizarre attempt to one-up myself by getting weirder and more surreal as I went along.  (You may also recognize my theft of some of the imagery from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child.”)  Here’s a few of my favorites plucked at random from the logs:

the push machine stops its ceaseless, frantic dashing around and slowly starts to melt, greasy black smoke and the horrific stench of burning plastic oozing from its slowly disintegrating form.

the push machinery lets off a final blast of its steam whistle.  it’s quitting time, and all its robotic parasites scurry back to their flap-enclosed maintenance bays.

the push machinery carefully folds its aluminum aprons and puts away its tin pots.  some steam still spouts slowly from a few scattered pressure vents, but the humidity is dissipating, and the whining and grinding of cogs and gears is fading in the soft summer breeze.

the push machine gradually slows its motion and begins poking out its sensors aimlessly in random directions for a while, but is soon reduced to accosting various woodland creatures.  they hurry away, avoiding eye contact.

the push machine sits in its rocking chair, looking longingly out over the water in the fading light.  condensing steam forms on its metal flanks, rolling down the sloping planes underneath its dimming visual sensors.

la machina del empujón cerra sus ojos metálicos y piensa de la pérdida.  la noche está tranquila ahora, pero la soledad tiene un filo plañido que casi se escucha.  agotada, la machina gira y roda despaciamente de regreso a su caverna.

the push machine stutters gradually to a halt, its jittering metal pincers still intermittently drumming on the soft banks of the misty river.  the soft susurrus of a large body sliding surreptitiously into the water is barely noticeable amidst the fading whine of gears and pistons winding down.

the push machinery freezes.  for several microseconds that seem to stretch on for eternity, there is absolute stillness.  then it explodes in a burst of sound and fire, sending out a hail of clattering metal fragments which rain down incessantly, making soft plopping noises as they land in the mud.  as the sonic echoes fade away, a small beeping begins, and each tiny piece of metal begins laboriously converging on the blast epicenter.

the push machine walks along the shore of the limpid river for one quiet moment at the end of its labors.  hearing a sudden sound, it freezes, straining to keep its metal limbs from scraping against its rusted chassis and giving away its location.  then, startled by its own reflection in the water, it suddenly bounds off, clanking and squealing, to seek refuge in its muddy den.

the push machine begins to hum and spark.  soon, bright fizzles of light are shooting from its metallic body accompanied by long, sizzling splashes of sound.  with a long, whistling scream, a jet of smoke shoots straight up into the gathering gloom, and, then, with an ear-shattering bang, the twilight is turned back into day as the green fire of an enormous catherine wheel spirals across the sky over the riverbank.

the push machine color-shifts slightly; were there any eyes here to see it, it would seem to be viewed through a broken prism.  slowly its edges grow fuzzier and its center becomes more translucent.  after some amount of time which seems to stretch forever but is probably very brief, punctuated by whistles and hisses which are simultaneously lowering in both tone and volume, it has vanished completely.

the push machine begins to jerk and stutter.  there is a loud whine, sharply ascending in pitch, then a sound of large metal gears grinding against each other in a disturbing fashion.  as its echoes die away, all that remains is the soft hum of a servomotor rhtymically interuppted by the quiet click of the push machine’s many limbs resetting to start positions.  tick ... tick ... tick ...

the push machine aims its ocular sensors at the disappearing visual indication of the nearest plasma spheroid.  a single drop of cooling fluid rolls down its front-facing planar surface.

the push machine slowly begins to crumple, drawing inward upon itself until nothing remains but an ever shrinking metal ball, which gradually becomes a brief, glinting period before winking out of existence entirely.

the push machine suddenly begins belching thick, purple smoke.  an alarm which has the exact pitch and tone of a whooping gibbon begins to sound.  chartreuse lights blink in morse-like patterns, and the intertwined smells of sandalwood and stinkbug slowly drive all the surrounding fauna back into their hidey-holes.

the noises from the push machine start to fade, as if coming in from a distant radio station as the tuner moves farther and farther away from the source.  its metal body gets smaller and smaller, its colors fading out to a grainy sepia tone, until eventually it can neither be seen nor heard at all.

the push machine ends its wash cycle and goes into the spin cycle.  shortly, scraps of metal are being flung in all directions.

the push machine thumbs its olfactory sensor at the overseer unit, which re-emphasizes its electronic call that, while the push machine does not necessarily have to return to its den, it may not remain in its current position.

the flames bursting forth from the push machine are quickly extinguished by the foaming chemicals sprayed by its attentive minders.  clouds of thick, oily smoke roll away on the evening breeze, accompanied by the smell of burning plastic and the popping sounds of cooling metal.

the push machine slowly sinks into the bubbling tar.  lonely electronic beeps and whistles grow fainter as the lights dim and more and more of the rust-flecked surface is consumed by the grasping pitch.

the push machine begins to liquefy, shedding bits of its metal hull in great, shining globular beads of teardrop contour and plasmic consistency.  after a long period of squelching noises and oily black smoke which drifts away on the breeze, there is nothing left but a large puddle of goop in the muddy riverbank.

the push machine shudders, shimmers, then seems to drift slowly out of focus, its disintegrating image seeming to distort as if reflected in a funhose mirror.  with one final blinding flare of color, it winks out of existence.

the push machine slowly topples over onto its back; the motorized treads on its undercarriage rotate feebly, seeking purchase and finding none.  emitting a series of irritated electronic chitters, the maintenance bots surround it and drag it slowly back to its docking bay.

the push machine’s seams are venting steam at an alarming rate.  the fact that it no longer appears to be leaking oil may just mean that all its oil has now leaked out.  the squeal of its internal belts has almost reached a pitch only audible to canines.  it may be trying to stagger back to its maintenance bay, or perhaps it’s just shaking itself to pieces where it stands.

the push machine begins to pitch, then to yaw, then to roll.  its rotations and revolutions blur into a complex möbius strip while its minders look on, motionless, as if pondering what support mechanism allows this particular range of motion.

the treads of the push machine roll slowly through the mud as the drizzling rain continues to come down, and slowly, ever so slowly, it sinks deeper and deeper into the muck, the treads desperately trying and failing to gain purchase in the viscous mire, until, eventually, the highest points—the tips of the radio receiving antennae—are the only parts of the machine still visible.

the push machine fades to monochrome and rotates 90° in all dimensions, causing it to effectively disappear.  its confused maintenance bots scurry hither and fro aimlessly, beeping forlornly in a fruitless attempt to locate it.

the push machine moves so fast that its rust and faded chrome are only a blur.  at some point the oily smoke of its dirty engines and the stinking cloud produced by the friction of its metal parts rubbing together become indistinguishable, and the glow off its body is reminiscent of a rocket on re-entry.

the push machine settles into the sludge as the sun slowly sinks below the great, grey-green greasy horizon line of the limpid limpopo river.  as the flaming fiery sphere fills the darkening twilit sky, a single drop of oil leaks from the ocular sensor of the quiescent quasicontraption, then all is quiet, and quelled.

the push machine freezes for a fraction of a second, then immediately resumes its frantic movement.  this only lasts for a few more seconds, however; then it halts again, quivering slightly, then bursts into motion for perhaps a full minute, only to stall once again.  small scurrying robotic tenders hover on the outskirts, waiting for the frenzied motion to resume once again, but it never does ...

the push machine slowly grinds to a halt with various ear-grating creaks and groans.  various multicolored fungi begin to grow out of the cracks where its metal plates no longer fit together seamlessly.  rust spreads preternaturally quickly across its pitted surface, and what little paint has not already chipped away steadily fades to a sun-bleached gray.  in mere moments the accumulated aging of a hundred years appears complete on its frame.

the oily steam from the push machine begins to coalesce in the cool night air, its surface tension gradually forming a vesicle which surrounds the shuddering metal body.  slowly, ever so slowly, the heat of the atmosphere inside this utricle achieves sufficient differential to cause the whole to lift, and eventually the push machine floats gracefully away on the billowing breeze.

the push machine keels over dead.

Over the past 5 years or so, I’ve pushed to production, by my count of searching through the logs, 168 times.  I’m pretty sure every one of these was accompanied by some sort of message, although many of them of course were simpler than the ones above.  But, as the years went on, it became harder and harder to come up with clever messages.  I started to paraphrase bits and pieces of popular culture:

the push machinery downshifts to idle, and reflects:
from there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

the push machine keels over and clatters into a million tiny little pieces.  and each of those pieces bursts into a million tiny pieces.  and, although at that point i stopped counting, i shouldn’t at all be surprised ...

the push machine runs screaming into the murky woods.  the crying tires, the busting glass, the painful scream ...

the push machine rides slowly off into the sunset, slumped forward in its saddle, ignoring the slowly receding cries of “push machine! push machine! come back!”

here, at the end of all things, the push machine is glad just to be done.

the push machine slides the rounded chunk of metal the final foot, reaching the apex of the incline.  suddenly its forceps limbs slip on the mud-slickened surface, and its visual sensors track the downward progress as the large obstacle rolls back to its origin.  after a short, low blast of steam, it begins to caterpillar down the slope to begin again.

as the push machine becomes motionless and start its soft blinking, its maintenance bots slowly gather round it in a circle, stretching out robotic limbs to connect with each other.  is not the spirit of the holiday within their grasp, so long as they have pseudopods to grasp?

That’s Dr. Suess, The Young Ones, “Last Kiss”, Shane, The Lord of the Rings, Sisyphus, and Dr. Suess again, respectively.

I’ve also experimented with drawing from several sources and combining them in unique ways.  Here’s one that combines references from Colossal Cave Adventure and the Zork series:

the push machine is lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.  it’s pitch dark.  the shiny brass lamp is turned on, but flickering fitfully.  eventually, the push machine will be eaten by a grue.

This one begins with The Scarlet Letter and somehow ends up in “Shaft”:

the push machine knows not of what you speak.  do not talk lightly of a learned and pious conveyor of code like the push machine!  shut your mouth.  i’m just talkin bout the push machine.

Many of my coworkers refer to these messages as “push poetry,” although one of them has more correctly pegged it as “purple prose.” Still, there can be a certain poetry in it, and, more recently, I’ve decided to try my hand at writing some actual poetry for these push messages.  Now, as I’ve talked about before, I’m not much of a poet, really, but I dabble.  And I tend to like structured poems.  Here’s an attempt at a haiku:

grey drizzle on riverbank,
the push machine waits there forlornly—
a barren tree in winter

Note that I subscribe to the point of view that haiku is not defined by the number of syllables, but rather by its contrasting images, generally using nature imagery, separated by a full stop of some kind.

Then I tried rewriting existing bits of poems to recast them as push messages.  Here’s a bit of “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll:

the push machine engages with snark, every night after dark,
in a dreamy delirious fight;
is served with greens in those shadowy scenes,
and is useful for striking a light.
but after meeting with boojums, by day,
for moments (of this be assured),
it softly and suddenly vanishes away—
and such a notion cannot be endured.

And continuing with the Lewis Carroll theme (he’s one of my favorite authors), here’s a longer piece drawn from several verses of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

the push machine and tender bots
were walking close at hand.
it sweated grease and fluids green
upon the slimy sand.
“fear not, machine!” the bots cried, “your
performance has been grand.”

“if seven suns with seven stars
shone for half a year,
do you suppose,” the tenders asked,
“that all this mist would clear?”
with forlorn beeps, the push machine
shed an oily tear.

“oh, push machine,” bemoaned the bots,
“you’ve had a pleasant run.
shall we be heading home again?”
but answer came there none.
and this was scarcely odd, because
the push machine can’t talk.

Tired of Carroll?  How about some E.E. Cummings?

push machine lived on a pretty how bank
(with up so greasy many miles dank)
mist cloudy rainy mud
it clanked its didn’t it dripped its did.

Maintenance bots(both spat and hissed)
cloudy rainy mud and mist
guided gently and back to den
rust slime grit grim

But here’s my absolute favorite, and the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

This is another combination of disparate sources, and it’s probably the closest to my previous attempt at a cento, although obviously much smaller.  Here’s where the lines come from:

• Line 1: Cheating a bit and reusing the same opening as my previous cento; this is from Peter Straub’s Shadowland (although he was merely codifying a much older meme).
• Line 2: This is paraphrase of a line from Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
• Lines 3 and 4: This is a phrase by Clive Barker, describing the dream-sea Quiddity (probably from Everville, but I suppose it might be from The Great and Secret Show).
• Lines 5 and 6: This is a lift from Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman.
• Line 7: From the opening of The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft.
• Line 8: This is a fun one.  Pretty much everyone has heard this, and thinks it comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But in fact, it isn’t in the book, and it also isn’t in the movie.  When Arthur C. Clarke did the original screenplay for the movie based on his book, so the story goes, he included this now infamous line (“My God! It’s full of stars!”), but it got cut in later drafts.  But somehow the line survived into popular culture despite never actually appearing in any publicly released medium.

I really loved how this one came out, and I felt it was a bit of a shame to consign it to the fleeting ephemera that is our #tech Slack channel.  So I wanted to move it somewhere more semi-permanent, and I also wanted to share it with you guys.  So now I have.

So there’s a sample of my so-called “work poetry.” Hopefully there will be several more years of push poetry to come, and perhaps I’ll do another post about it once I’ve accumulated some further examples.