The Self-Interviews

What It Is

Sometimes when I watch or listen to one of these shows, I imagine how I might answer the interviewer’s questions.
— me

I’m embarking on a new series in which I answer the questions that some of the great interviewers of our time typically put to their guests.  If you’re interested to know why I’ve decided to do this, feel free to read “The Motivation” down at the bottom.  But it’s not required.

Here’s a list of of what I’m planning to do; I’ll update these so they’re links to the posts once I write them.  Note that I’ve actually already written one of them: it I have a post from nearly 5 years ago that fits right into this theme, so I’m retroactively declaring it to be part of the series.

I may add more later, as they come up.

The List

• Variation on the Pivot Questionnaire (James Lipton, Inside the Actor’s Studio)
• The Colbert Questionert (Stephen Colbert, The Late Show)
• One Question (Chris Hardwick, Talking with Chris Hardwick)
• Rapid Fire (Mayim Bialik, Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown)

The Motivation

So, it’s occurred to me that my blog is a bit like a diary.  My kids absolutely don’t read it now, but perhaps some day they will.  Now, I don’t know if any of you other readers much care what my answers to any of the questions posed by famous interviewers are, but I think that my children may find those answers interesting, one day ... maybe after I’m gone.  Not that I expect to be gone any time soon, but I do fully expect to be gone before my children ever get around to reading any of this stuff.

It’s a weird thing that we often want to try to connect with people after it’s too late to do that in person, instead of doing it while they’re right there next to us.  I’m sure there’s some aspect of human nature that explains this, but I have no clue what it is.  I just want my children to know that I did the same thing when I was younger—hell, I’m still doing it, though I’m finally old enough to realize I need to do better—so, you know ... don’t feel bad about it or anything.

Hopefully these posts give some insight into what I thought and felt, about life and living and all that jazz.

Caveats

I’m sure most of these questions are designed to be answered with brief responses.  I don’t do brief.

Also, there will be cursing.  Because, of course there will.

The Qyxling: A new familiar for your 5e warlock

You may recall that I mentioned last week that my youngest had started a new D&D campaign.  And, if you’ve been reading for a very long time, you may recall that I mentioned, upon the occasion of said youngest child’s first real D&D game (a little over two years ago), that she had actually joined us for a game a few years before that, when she was 5 or 6.  I was playing a Pact of the Chain warlock (in 5e slang, we call that a “chainlock”), and the Pact of the Chain grants your character a “improved familiar”—that is, more than just your standard cat or raven or toad.  One option is an imp, which is a type of devil, and one option is a quasit, which is a type of demon.  The other two options are more fey-oriented: a sprite, and a type of small dragon called a pseudodragon.  Now, warlocks have patrons, and you can have different types of patrons as well.  Your patron might be a fiend, in which case a demon or devil is an appropriate familiar; or your patron might be an archfey, in which case a small fey creature is an excellent choice.  Or, your patron might be a Great Old One (a legacy of D&D’s very early days, when stealing from the Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos was quite common).  In that case, there aren’t any great options ... at least not among those default options in the Player’s Handbook.  There have been a few more added in the years since 5e first came out, but of course the awesome thing about D&D is that, if you don’t like any of the options, you can just make one up.

So, for this game 4 or 5 years ago, when I chose a warlock who had made a pact with a Great Old One, I just took some of the bits of the imp, some of the bits of the quasit, gave it a bit of a tentacle-face, and tweaked a few things for flavor.  I named the resulting creature Anjeliss, and decided she was a cheeky, indpendent creature who was my companion more than my servant.  So, when my little girl wanted to join us, too young to really understand the rules, and not focussed enough to do much with the mechanics, I said to my other two kids, no problem: she can just be Anjeliss.  She didn’t actually do much, of course (I actually made all the decisions about what actions to take), but she provided a little extra personality: basically, she was just roleplaying.  Which is kind of the perfect way to start.

Now, I never imagined that she got much out of that session.  She basically just sat in my lap and delivered a couple of lines here and there—maybe I let her roll a die every now and again—but nothing earth-shattering.  I didn’t even really think she’d remembered the whole experience.  But, when it came time to start this new campaign, she suggested that I play my same warlock character from that game, and she would use Anjeliss as her GMPC.  She couldn’t remember the name, but she remembered quite a few of the other details, so it was easy enough to resurrect that character ... at least for me.  (He was a dhampir named Nicto, and a bit of a crazy person—inspired by the Joker, or any given Malkavian character from Vampire: The Masquerade—but a skilled investigator, which is what the original one-shot campaign had called for.)  For Anjeliss, there wasn’t much to go on.  But now my girl wanted to play her again, so I felt inspired to create a little something more.

Now, my faux-Photoshop¹ skills aren’t amazing, by any stretch, but I get by.  So I found a quasit with wings similar to an imp’s (I believe it’s a Pathfinder quasit rather than a D&D quasit, actually), and I swapped out its head for the closest thing that matched the picture in my mind’s eye that I could come up with by doing a Google image search for “cute Cthulhu.” Then I color-corrected things as best I could to make the colors mostly match, and you can see the results at the top of this page.

I also did a monster write-up, including a standard 5e statblock,² threw in some background flavor, and finally tossed in another image of the creature surrounded by all its alternate forms.  I struggled for a long time with the naming of it: I wanted someting that started with a “Q,” since the quasit was its biggest inspiration; I wanted something that sounded Cthulhu-esque, since that was the vibe I was going for; and I needed something that wasn’t already used for some other monster in D&D (which is very hard to come by).  And, as we all know, the Cthulhu naming convention is basically to use too many “X"s and not enough vowels, so I eventually went with a prefix of “qyx” and I tacked on a suffix of “ling” to imply that it was a little guy.  The name isn’t set in stone, so it might change,³ but it’s what we’ve got for now.

So I took all that info, formatted it like a proper monster entry from the Monster Manual,⁴ and here it is in case you were interested in using it for your own games.

Enjoy.

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1 I actually use a Linux program called the GIMP.

2 For which most of the credit has to go to a fellow on the Internet named Tetracube, who has a mad-easy statblock generator that I use for all my monster statblocks.

3 And my daughter has already pointed out to me that it sounds an awful lot like “quicking” when pronounced out loud, which is an entirely different monster.

4 For which I used my pro subscription to GM Binder, the absolute best way to to D&D homebrew write-ups.

A slow week

It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and then Presidents’ Day the following Monday.  In the meantime, nothing much has changed.  Our littlest one is still working on learning how to ride a bicycle—she’s a bit old for training wheels, but she’s getting a late start, so we’re cutting her some slack.  We got our middle child back on neurofeedback (the cutover to new insurance caused an interrpution of a few weeks), and he seems much happier.  Plus we started a new D&D campaign, with Merrick in charge.  (For those interested, it’s based on this fun little subscription.)

Next week, I’ll come up with something more interesting.  Probably.

Isolation Report, Week #100

It’s been 100 weeks since the start of the pandemic for me.  It may be a bit more or a bit less for you, but it’s probably right around the same ballpark.  Perhaps some might argue that this isn’t the same pandemic—maybe they count each “wave” or new variant as a separate one, or perhaps there are even some people that think it’s basically over now.  I’m guessing those people are the minority though.  I can tell you that it’s been 100 weeks since I’ve seen a single one of my coworkers though ... and I think that qualifies my blog post title as less than hyperbolic.

There was a time late last year when some of the folks from my old office got together to work at one of those shared workspaces (WeWork, if you’re familiar).  At least one other person and I said perhaps we’d hold out a bit longer.  Then omicron hit, and even WeWork was off the table.

Things are better in some ways: don’t get me wrong.  I no longer have to wait in line to get into the grocery store, for instance.  Every food place in my city delivers now ... but of course that’s because all the ones that don’t have gone out of business.  Even for the places where you still have to physically go there (like Target), most of them will let you order online, they’ll bag it up in the store, and bring it out to your car.  I suppose that’s more convenient, in many ways.  I have way fewer meeting to attend at work, I suppose ... but now I’m floundering, trying to look for positives.

I was never a hugely social person.  I don’t particularly care for being alone, but I also don’t like strangers.  This is probably why I spent so many years living with roommates: there’s always someone else around, and it’s always someone you know, at least a little.  The idea of going out shopping and it being a fun thing has always seemed mildly insane to me.  I sort of dug amusement parks and ski vacations and beach trips, but really only if I could go with a group of friends or family.  And I find I don’t really miss them all that much now.

But I do worry that, lacking any reason to go out any more, perhaps I’ll just stay in my house for the rest of my life.  I mean, I go out to the grocery store (although it’s only biweekly instead of weekly now), and occasionally to the chiropractor if I’m feeling particularly inflexible, but that’s about it.  The last time I had to buy gas was December 20th; the last time I had to go to the ATM was November 13th.  There are many satisfying things about having more time to myself to do things, and certainly it’s great to have more time to spend with my kids, but ...

Of course, even if things were to get different, I don’t know how well I’d do.  I’ve gained so much weight at this point that I only have one pair of pants that even fit any more.  The thought of getting on a plane, or sleeping in a bed other than my own, seems ... unpleasant.  The less I’m around people, the less I want to be around people.

And seeing other people on television is definitely not helping.  I really can’t believe there are still people protesting wearing masks.  But also I can’t believe there are still no consequences for not wearing a mask.  To me it feels analogous to seatbelts: people protested wearing seatbelts for a long time too, but eventually they got fined enough that they shut the fuck up about it.  I’m personally in favor of letting all people that want to not get vaccinated and not wear a mask do whatever they like: they just have to sign a waiver that says that they won’t get any hospital treatment once they get COVID.  If that’s too harsh for you, I would also support an alternate plan where such people have separate hospitals—all the health care workers who don’t believe in vaccination could go work there.  See? it’s a free-market solution.

I’m also somewhat at a loss as to how to feel about our current political situation here in the US.  The Republicans seem to have given up entirely pretending that they care about democracy: they just blatantly say nowadays that they’re restricting voting rights so that they can win.  Our former President is back, saying insane things (as usual).  Personally, I think that when “people who did crimes with me” is a large enough demographic that it’s worth appealing to, that ought to indicate a flaw somewhere, but I think those days may be gone for good.  And as to why someone like Kyrsten Sinema would defend an obvious tool of racism like the modern filibuster ... I think I’m in good company in being completely in the dark on that one.  I’m not sure anyone knows—hell, I’m not sure she knows.  (In Joe Manchin’s case, I suspect the answer is just good, old-fashioned racism.)  It’s a whole lot of what-the-fuckery.

In our house, we were all fully vaccinated, for a hot minute.  Now, of course, you’re not considered fully vaccinated unless you’ve gotten a booster shot, so we have to start all over again.  Appointments have been made.  But, even then: I feel like there’s just going to be another booster required eventually, and then another, and then another.  I’m of half a mind to just wait around until I can get ’em all in one go.  There’s really no hurry as far as I’m concerned.  I hardly ever leave the house any more.  I’m not really much at risk at this point.

So, 100 weeks in, some stuff is different; many things are the same.  The future is ... not bright, surely; not hopeless, exactly; not really anything other than inevitable.  It shall be what it shall be.  I know many folks out there are happy to go back to eating at restaurants on a regular basis, or happy to go back to the movies on a regular basis—some have even done so already.  But I don’t think I’m ready for that, and I don’t know how much I miss it.  I miss eating out for lunch with my colleagues, and going to museums with my kids, and our annual Heroscape tourney.  But we’re doing okay.  And we’ll survive.  And, perhaps one day, we’ll get back to being around other people.

One day.

Another month gone

Well, the first month of 2022 is behind us.  I have to say, so far I’m not impressed.  But it’s early days yet.  It might get better.

Maybe.

Next week, something more substantial, I hope.

Distaff Attitude I

"Warm Us Up and Watch Us Blow"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

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.]

I have a very clear memory from a few decades back: a friend, excitedly trying to describe a great new song he’d heard on the radio.  “It’s this woman, and she’s singing to her ex, and she’s ...” and here he faltered, unable to find the right words.  He finally came up with “she’s so mad.”

The year was 1995, and the song, of course, was “You Oughta Know,” by the then little known Alanis Morissette, and it ushered in a whole spate of pissed-off women singing about being pissed off ... so much so that the original title of this mix was “Angry White Female.” I’ve captured the greatest hits of that musical movement here: Tracy Bonham’s glorious screamfest “Mother Mother” and Patti Rothberg’s bluesy take “This One’s Mine” from the following year, all the way through Veruca Salt’s amazing punk-grunge-pop anthem “Volcano Girls” in ‘97.  Louise Post and Nina Gordon can do it all, but I’ve always felt their unique combination of harmonizing, screaming, and sick guitar licks really reached the perfect crescendo in “Volcano Girls”: when they sing “warm us up and watch us blow,” it’s kinda the perfect expression of this mix (and that’s why it’s the volume title, natch).

Of course, there were other women singing during this period, and they weren’t always pissed off.  For instance, I don’t think Gwen Stefani was actually angry when she sang “Just a Girl” (released just a few months after “You Oughta Know”) ... but then again she doesn’t seem very happy about it either.  “Oh, I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite, so don’t let me have any rights,” she sings, and the mockery is crystal clear.  At the other end of the spectrum, while No Doubt was making fun of people who dismissed women for being emtpy-headed in ‘95, Natalie Imbruglia was making fun of the women who were giving those people those impressions in ‘97; “Don’t You Think” contains lines like “there’s more important things than making sure your shoes walk just right” and “your second-hand opinions don’t make you look any smarter.” What all these women had in common was not necessarily being angry, but having a certain ... attitude.

Of course, women singing with attitude didn’t magically start in 1995, nor end in 1997.  Even just a few years before, there were a few pretty important precursors to Alanis Morissette, like Julianna Hatfield’s growling “Dame with a Rod,” which was always my favorite tune to crank up to the max from Become What You Are, which is turn was one of my favorite albums of the ‘90s: throughout the entire decade, if you took a road trip you took with me, you could pretty much count on hearing the entire album at least once.  Certainly I feel like you can draw a pretty straight line from Hatfield to Veruca Salt.  And, for an example of a woman who can scream with power and artistry and still make it sound beautiful, it’s tough to beat PJ Harvey; “50ft Queenie” is only one of many awesome candidates from Rid of Me; produced by Big Black’s Steve Albini, it’s raw and noisy and just amazing.¹  Among those that came after, I was actually somewhat surprised when I went back to dig out Michelle Branch’s “Are You Happy Now?” to find that it was from 2003—it mirrors the Morissette-Bonham-Rothberg period so perfectly that I was sure it had come from the same time period.  And, while I can’t recall how I first discovered Marina and the Diamonds, I do recall the first time I heard 2012’s “Bubble Gum Bitch”: I thought, damn this song rocks so hard.  And I remember thinking it had to go on this mix.

And then there are the “bad girls” of rock.  One couldn’t possibly do a mix like this without including Amy Winehouse, and “Rehab” is the obvious choice.  Luckily, it’s a top-notch song too, even though the lyrics are quite sad in retrospect.  Perhaps less known (outside her native New Zealand) is Gin Wigmore, who I first heard of when I just had to look up who was singing the awesome theme song for Crazyhead.²  Then I heard “Black Sheep” and I was blown away.  There’s a good reason she holds the #2 spot on this volume.

But I would say the undisputed bad girl of rock has to be P!nk, and I put my money where my mouth is by giving her 3 tracks on this volume, which I rarely do.  But she has plenty of songs to spare when it comes to attitude.  Possibly my all-time favorite P!nk song is “So What,” where she sings to an ex “I’m just fine, and you’re a tool.” Seriously, how can you not sing along to this song?  It was the perfect opener.  “Trouble” is also a lot of fun (“I’m trouble, y’all!”), but pride of place as the centerpiece of the mix goes to her best diss track, ”‘Cuz I Can.” While I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed that she appears to have actually written down “ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff” as an actual lyric, you can’t beat insults like “I could fit your whole house in my swimming pool,” and especially “my life’s a fantasy that you’re not smart enough to even dream.” Chef’s kiss.

But I knew I had to also pay some respect to the OG bad girls: Pat Benatar and Joan Jett.  Benatar was one of my first rock crushes: 1980’s Crimes of Passion was one of the first albums that I developed a fondness for when I began developing my own musical tastes.³  And it was also the first time I realized that an album could have more than one or two hits: featuring not only “Treat Me Right,” which I showcase here, but also “You Better Run,” “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” and “Hell Is for Children,” Crimes of Passion is jam-packed with radio fodder, and the rest of the tracks—such as “Out-a-Touch,” the weirdly wandering “I’m Gonna Follow You,” and the amazing Kate Bush cover “Wuthering Heights”—are pretty dope too.  As for Jett, “Bad Reputation” was tailor-made for this mix, and it’s always been one of my favorites of hers.  Sure, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” gets all the love, but I always thought “Reputation” was underrated, and I was pleased to hear it used as the theme for Freaks and Geeks nearly 20 years later.  And, while I’m not sure anyone ever accused Debbie Harry of being a “bad girl,” Blondie is certainly OG in at least my conception of rock, and I always felt “One Way or Another” had a certain amount of attitude.

Distaff Attitude I
[ Warm Us Up and Watch Us Blow ]

“So What” by P!nk, off Funhouse
“Black Sheep” by Gin Wigmore, off Gravel & Wine
“Uummannaq Song” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Just a Girl” by No Doubt, off Tragic Kingdom
“Rehab” by Amy Winehouse, off Back to Black
“Bubblegum Bitch” by Marina and the Diamonds, off Electra Heart
“Mother Mother” by Tracy Bonham, off The Burdens of Being Upright
“A Dame with a Rod” by the Juliana Hatfield Three, off Become What You Are
“Kiss with a Fist” by Florence + the Machine, off Lungs
“Are You Happy Now?” by Michelle Branch, off Hotel Paper
“Treat Me Right” by Pat Benatar, off Crimes of Passion
“'Cuz I Can” by P!nk, off I'm Not Dead
“Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett, off Bad Reputation
“50ft Queenie” by PJ Harvey, off Rid of Me
“Johnny Feelgood” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Don't You Think?” by Natalie Imbruglia, off Left of the Middle
“Volcano Girls” by Veruca Salt, off Eight Arms to Hold You
“You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette, off Jagged Little Pill
“Wild Woman” by Imelda May, off Tribal
“One Way or Another” by Blondie, off Parallel Lines
“This One's Mine” by Patti Rothberg, off Between the 1 and the 9
“Trouble” by P!nk, off Try This
“Tell That Girl to Shut Up” by Transvision Vamp, off Pop Art
“That's Not My Name” by the Ting Tings, off We Started Nothing

Total:  24 tracks,  78:55

Now, I’m not sure Liz Phair and her spiritual successor, KT Tunstall, ever really embody the anger of Morisette, the brattiness of P!nk, or the growling power of Harvey, but I love their music so much that it felt weird to exclude them altogether.  And one can define “attitude” however one wants, no?  “Johnny Feelgood” appears to be about an unhealthy relationship (“he knocks me down and he orders me around”) but it still portrays a strength in the singer.  Meanwhile, in “Uummannaq Song” (Uummannaq is a small town in Greenland), Tunstall sings lines like “did you see it, that I needed to prove that my stinger always stays ...” Just as I did on Sirenexiv Cola, I drew from the best albums from each: whitechocolatespaceegg and Tiger Suit.

Likewise, Florence + the Machine’s output primarily consists of soft, sparkling pop gems like “Dog Days Are Over,” the big hit off of Lungs.  But, somehow, right in the middle of that album that Wikipedia assures me is “art rock” or maybe even “baroque pop,” there is the stripped-down, almost punky, glory that is “Kiss with a Fist.” Another abusive relationship song, in this one the singer gives as good as she gets, and produces a song that is short and brutal, like the relationship of its subject.  Contrariwise, Irish-born Imelda May is known for a sort of rockabilly revival style.⁴  But with lyrics like:

I knew a feral girl, once upon a time.
She grew into a werewolf: that monster was all mine.
She was incarcerated, to the inside of my skin,
And then I sat and waited, for my nice life to begin ...

“Wild Woman” is quite perfect for this mix.  A wicked, wicked, wild woman, dying to be free ... that sort of says it all.

Finally, we close with a pair of pop-punk songs that I’ve always felt were spiritual sisters, despite being separated by 20 years and about 2½ hours on the M1.  London’s Transvision Vamp has strong opinions on your current girlfriend—“to be a musician, she goes to school”—and advises that you better “Tell That Girl to Shut Up.” Over in Manchester, the Ting Tings are not happy about how women are treated: “they call me ‘hell,’ they call me ‘Stacey,’ they call me ‘her,’ they call me Jane.” But of course “That’s Not My Name.” Her name, in fact, is Katie White, and while Wendy James was singing about how you better tell that girl she’s gonna beat her up, White was busy being 5 years old.  Still, I feel some sort of connection between the two Brits and their vocal styles.  Of course, it might just all be in my head.

Next time, let’s get dark.

Distaff Attitude II ⇒

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1 My second choice, for what it’s worth, was “Me-Jane.” Perhaps we’ll see that one show up on volume II.

2 Gin Wigmore’s music is also featured in Wynonna Earp, yet another show about badass females—or “hell bitches,” as Crazyhead’s Raquel refers to them—kicking demon ass.  Obviously there’s a trend here.

3 As distinct from just listening to the music of my parents.  I delve into this topic a bit more in my intro to 80s My Way.

4 We first head from May on Salsatic Vibrato III.

Day 3 of 4

This week I took Friday off in order to have a four-day weekend.  I’ve been taking advantage of those days to catch up on a lot of things I’ve been putting off lately, and I’ve been getting a lot of cool stuff done so far.  So I’ll continue the streak and not post anything here—other than this brief message, of course.  More exciting content next time, hopefully.

A Second Cento

Time ... Isn’t

I have lived to see strange days.  Which side are you on?
Have we reached the point where time becomes a loop?
Somebody must have said nobody.  When you’re laughing, nothing matters ...
but inspiration is hard to come by: time is a weird soup.
You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose,
and when (or even if) it stops, no one really knows.

Now, some say time is a circus, always packing up and moving away,
or that there’s a time to every purpose, and that everything has a season.
But what if there’s no tomorrow? (there wasn’t one today ...)
Because time is a flat circle, the dreaming eyes of a demon.
Some say you can’t step into the same river twice, but those people are imposters:
time is not a river; time is a jungle, filled with monsters.

Time is a storm, liquid and simultaneous; time is a feathered thing, a jewel;
the whole design visible in every facet, yet all moments quickly run away.
Still, an unperceived dimness in thine eyes makes me believe in yesterday,
and that we are all lost—though it can be loved, the truth is cruel.
This is the school in which we learn; its sword will pierce our skins.
This is the fire in which we burn; it doesn’t hurt when it begins.

Perhaps I should say that I accept Time absolutely.
that here or henceforward it is all the same to me and my designs,
or perhaps I should observe, even more astutely,
that I reject linear time and all the other lies of the beforetimes.
Is it merely a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments?
Or is the future is never truly set: our fate defined by countless choices?

You run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking; the time is out of joint.
We are thrown down here at random, between the stars and matter’s profusion.
The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of ... look, that’s the point:
Night’s whatever you want it to be.  Time is an illusion.
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Dear beautiful eternal night: no sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again.

But time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.  Time ripens all things.
There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space,
except that our consciousness moves along it, and you can hear the sound of her wings.
Time makes fools of us all.  Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
Day and the angel Life circle the worlds of air ...  Yes, life is fleeting,
but also eternal; it will always find a way to begin again.
Our sole purpose to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The Story of a Cento

I’m hardly the first person to notice that, since the pandemic hit, time has gotten ... strange.  In fact, so many people were making note of it that it became hard not to think it significant when you come across some piece of culture referencing the weirdness of time, even though many of them predate the pandemic itself.  I’ve no doubt that the fungibility of time during the pandemic was top of mind for Ashley Johnson when she made the brilliant observation that “time is a weird soup” in episode 1 of Exandria Unlimited, but then surely it was a coincidence that shortly afterward I decided to rewatch John Dies at the End (a movie that plays with time quite a bit), or that I finally got around to season 3 of Legion (which features a time travelling mutant), or that our family rewatch of Steven Universe just then hit the episode where Sour Cream (voiced by the brilliant Brian Posehn) makes his own observation on time ... surely just coincidences, but they started to feel like more, and I started to jot them down in a file, along with other observations about time—Worf’s, from STNG; Rust Cohle’s, from True Detective—and I started to become intrigued at how they seemed to fit together, to form a narrative ...

The last time I did one of these, I talked about what a “cento” actually is.  Go read that again if you need a refresher; basically, centos are the found object art of poetry.  I took the pieces that matched up and put them together; took the pieces that didn’t match to anything and found things to match them to; I even filled in a line here or there to add ryhthm or rhyme.  But I kept it very loose: the meter is very irregular, and the rhyme scheme fluctuates from stanza to stanza.  (In the latter, I am quite inspired by J. Patrick Lewis, a much better poet than I; if you haven’t read The La-Di-Da Hare, I highly recommend it.  While it’s ostensibly a children’s book, the poetry is very sophisticated.)  In many cases, I used slant rhymes instead of perfect ones; sometimes this was necessary (because those were the quotes I had), but sometimes it was just fun.

I also did something quite different this time around (vs my last cento, I mean): I rearranged the quotes.  Not all of them, but I didn’t hesitate to twist things around to make them fit my form and flow.  For instance, the actual line from “The Raven” is:

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

which I rearranged to “the dreaming eyes of a demon” (because that way I could use it to rhyme—sort of—with “season”).  And French historian André Malraux actually wrote:

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

which I condensed and rearranged to:

We are thrown down here at random, between the stars and matter’s profusion.

because I needed something to rhyme with “illusion.” In this case, I actually started with the word “profusion” and searched out quotes containing it.  Why?  Hard to say, really ... I knew I needed something to fit that rhyme, and I wanted a word that might be somewhat unexpected (not “conclusion” or “delusion” or “confusion”), and I thought that surely somebody had once said something about “profusion” that would fit this theme, and I found it.  I had no clue who André Malraux even was before I started; but now I do, and that’s a good thing.

My most ambitious rearrangements were in the third stanza, where the first line is actually 5 small pieces pieces of four different quotes, strung together to seem like they are all cut from the same cloth.  The bulk of those four quotes—the meaty bits, if you will—are then shuffled back in: the first half of line two matches the 3rd and 5th parts of line one; the second half of line two matches the 2nd part; the first halves of lines three and four match the 4th and 1st parts, respectively.  Then lines five and six are just two rhyming couplets (practically doggerel) spliced together.

I think my favorite rhymes in the whole piece are in the fourth stanza, where I rhyme Walt Whitman with B. Dave Walters, two sages separated by nearly a century, and yet their words contrast so beautifully.  (Note that this is a favorite phrase of B. Dave’s since the pandemic started; my link below is to but one example.)  I had to tack on a new ending to Whitman’s quote and write a whole additional line for this one, but I’m happy enough with it: I think it works well, in context.

About the only thing I’m not happy with here, other than maybe wishing I could tighten up some of the places where I just threw the meter completely out the window, is that I’m not sure I’ve got the order of the stanzas right.  I think each one is good on its own, and I think there’s a narrative that they form, but I’m not sure I’ve nailed the progression of that narrative.  Then again, given the nature of the subject matter, maybe telling the story slightly out of order is just par for the course.

Anyway, it’s not a first draft, but it may not yet quite be finished, so I once again ask that you be a bit gentle with it.  Still, if you have thoughts or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Credits:

First Stanza:

• Line 1.1: The Lord of the Rings.
• Line 1.2: I’ve Got A Nietzsche Trigger Finger!
• Line 2: Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Line 3.1: Winnie-the-Pooh.
• Line 3.2: Julian Barratt.
• Line 4.1: Bob Dylan.
• Line 4.2: Exandria Unlimited.
• Line 5: John Dies at the End.
• Line 6: traditional.

Second Stanza:

• Line 1: “Elegy for Wonderland.”
• Line 2: Ecclesiastes.
• Line 3: Groundhog Day.
• Line 4.1: True Detective.
• Line 4.2: Edgar Allen Poe.
• Line 5.1: Heraclitus.
• Line 5.2: original.
• Line 6: Legion.

Third Stanza:

• Line 1.1, 4.1: William Carlos Williams.
• Line 1.2, 2.2: Kurt Vonnegut.
• Line 1.3, 1.5, 2.1: Watchmen.
• Line 1.4, 3.1: Jasper Mayne.
• Line 4.2: George Santayana.
• Line 3.2: the Beatles.
• Line 5.1, 6.1: “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day.”
• Line 5.2, 6.2: M*A*S*H.

Fourth Stanza:

• Line 1 – 2.1: Walt Whitman.
• Line 2.2 – 3: original.
• Line 4: B. Dave Walters
• Line 5: The Devil’s Dictionary.
• Line 6: X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Fifth Stanza:

• Line 1.1: Pink Floyd.
• Line 1.2: Hamlet.
• Line 2: André Malraux.
• Line 3.1: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
• Line 3.2: original.
• Line 4: Steven Universe.
• Line 5: Alice in Wonderland.
• Line 6.1: e. e. cummings.
• Line 6.2: Maya Angelou.

Sixth Stanza:

• Line 1.1: “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
• Line 1.2: Don Quixote.
• Line 2, 3.1: The Time Machine.
• Line 3.2: The Sandman.
• Line 4: Eric Temple Bell.
• Line 5.1: Richard Henry Stoddard.
• Line 5.2, 6: Circle & Cross.
• Line 7: Carl Jung.