paul·a·ver

Roll 1d6.  Remain silent for that number of minutes.  Gary Gygax is making the to voyage to Valhalla.

Today ends the Saga, which began in 1974 when a group of nerds in Southern Wisconsin first published Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D gave millions of glasses-wearing, sci-fi-reading, boys born in the late 60s with no athletic promise something creative and productive to do with our time between band camps.

Gygax’ game still fuels my imagination, and I still have nightmares about oozes and beholders.  Much of what I know about mythology and human history comes from hours in the library stacks after inspiration from rolling dice in a friend’s basement for critical hits.

Thanks, Gary.  Godspeed.

If you are a nerd who listens to dad music on public radio in Louisville, Kentucky, then you might want to consume the WFPK playlist as an RSS feed. I know I did, because I hate going to the website for the answer to “Who’s playing this song?” I’d rather just have it show up in my RSS reader or a Yahoo! widget or something.

As forward thinking and nerd-positive as public radio is, WFPK has not made it obvious that you can actually subscribe to their playlist.

But I am willing to help you out.

The WFPK site was created in WordPress, and the playlist is category 7, so just point your feed eater here: http://www.wfpk.org/CMS/wp-rss2.php?cat=7.

There. How cool/easy was that?

Evan has been bathing for what seems the same span of time that homosapiens has walked the planet. (I regard this as closer to 200,000 years than 10,000 years, but take your pick: It’s a long time.) He refuses to wash his hair until his mother returns from work. He’ll wait longer tonight, because she’s stopping to pick up milk on the way home, which strikes me as a quaint rockets-, flattops-, and martinis-era kind of errand with gender role reversal.

Graham is reading Captain Underpants. He has read it only as many times as he’s gotten up at 6:00 am to tickle me in my bed with his cold feet over the last seven plus years, which is most every morning, or approximating something just over 2,675 times, and which means he has multitudinous Captain Underpants readings to go before he gets bored. We are all Dav Pilkey fans in this house. Well, all of us but Jennifer, the dog, and cat, and the dog and cat only look at the pictures.

I am sitting next to Graham, admiring his crooked grin and twisted eyeglass frames, and I am finally reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson’s memoir of a boyhood in Des Moines, Iowa. My dad gave me the book for my 40th birthday last summer, and it’s been waiting for me in my to-read stack since.

Bryson is a Midwestern baby boomer. My dad was born off to one side of the Boom, 1942, and I to the other, 1967, and together, we regard the generation between us much as we do pickled jalapeños. One is intriguing, even wakes you up a bit, but several make you sick. The trouble is, of course, that we have over 76 million of them in this country. The nation has a bad case of GERD, and the cause keeps running for president. How about someone over 65 or under 45? Please.

I am thinking how much Erik might enjoy Bryson’s memoir. We’ve shared several conversations about A Walk in the Woods, and I’m wondering how he’s doing. I’m also missing Des Moines, where I lived near the Dahl’s at the corner of Ingersoll and 35th for many years. I certainly never thought I’d miss Des Moines. I’d have thought Des Moines would be much more like my gal bladder, which I don’t miss at all, except after eating a bucket of fried chicken.

When I lived in Des Moines, I considered it something like living in a cozy but huge retirement community of a quarter million residents still eating off melamine plates, drinking out of space-age aluminum tumblers, and avoiding anything that one might consider ethnic food, such as a spaghetti.

Des Moines has changed, of course (Now, they consider tacos ethnic food; spaghetti is home cooking). I miss Des Moines because I have changed. Melamine plates seem pretty cool to me, except for that bit where you can’t put them in the microwave. That’s a source of frustration, confusion, ruined dinner ware, and mild burns in our household.

The boys are getting baths because they are boys, and they get dirty. They’ve been home today for a snow day, a very rare occurrence in Kentucky indeed, and they’ve carried the slushy mess at the end of our drive inside on their skin.

We had tortellini for dinner, ring-shaped pasta filled with dried cheese, ethnic food by Des Moines standards. I glopped it with sauce from a can. Graham asked for more, but insisted on foregoing the sauce. “The sauce is spicy,” he explained, and I concluded he must be half Iowan.

I’ve not been keeping up with my routine for something like 9 months. That means, I’ve done little running or biking, and I’ve played racquetball almost not at all. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve been out to the climbing gym, and I barely remember how to hold a foil it’s been so long since I’ve parried, thrust, or lunged.

The university where Jenn and I work offers a program to reduce our health insurance premiums if only we’ll submit to inquisition from somebody called a “health coach.” The health coach probes your psyche for weaknesses. Then, she asks for information that makes you take the phone into the basement, where your wife can’t hear. You admit to your sins and ask hopefully for forgiveness, and she dispenses a penance of three five-mile walks each week and tree trunks for breakfast. I am familiar with this routine because of a similar pattern I recall from my upbringing in Our Lady Queen of Peace parish.

I took a group guitar class last fall through the university’s continuing education program. I pulled my old acoustic from a corner deep in our basement scary closet, liberated it from the weight of discarded infant car seats that we’ll never use again and luggage that’s long out-lived its purpose. I vacuumed the mouse poops out of the case, and I took it to a repair shop to have one of the tuners replaced. I restrung it carefully, clumsily, and enthusiastically–like a boy unbuttoning his first brassiere–with Martin Lights.

I played October through December half-an-hour at a time about five days a week and reached the point at which I could play chords to popular songs, such as Red River Valley, My Old Kentucky Home, and Nazi Punks Fuck Off. It was fun, but it’s hard to find the time to continue. Soon I’ll be out chasing 7-year-old soccer players with a whistle, and shouting things like, “Get behind it,” and “Nice trap!” That will leave even less time.

Still, I’ve managed to reclaim another past time. (I’ve practiced self-pollution regularly since age 10 without cessation, so no, it’s not that.) I’ve actually read several good books lately: Monkey Dancing, by Daniel Glick, which describes the adventures he shared with his two children on a trip around the world and explores his recovery from divorce and the loss of his brother; Norwegian Wood, a straight love story by the usually experimental Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami; Nature Noir, by Jordan Fisher Smith, about his career as a forest ranger in the Sierras, and which I can’t recommend enough; and David Sedaris’ surprisingly (to me at least) twisted collection of stories and essays, Barrel Fever, which was lent to me by Matt from work.

I’ve been catching up with Carl, who now lives in North Dakota, over IM in the past few weeks, and that’s been stimulating as usual. Carl sticks to his convictions–outrageous as others of us might consider them–with bulldog tenacity. He struggles, but I find his struggle inspiring, and I encourage him regardless of the consequences to his well being. It is very selfish of me.

Carl is not working for the man at the moment because of ethical concerns, but he is working hard writing (harder than most I know in the real world, including all the 70-hour/week wage-slave bitches) and living with a minimal footprint. He is like a monk, only less antisocial and with an actual girlfriend. I too believe Carl’s simplicity gospel, but I am too addicted to Target, QDoba, and REI to actually follow it myself.

Jenn is home. Evan is getting out of the tub, and he looks like a naked little wet seal. Graham pushes his glasses up, and I wonder how he sees through all the thumbprints. I still have a three-foot to-read stack, so it will be some time before I am forced to live up to my promise to stop buying books and start going to the library.

We return home from a trip to the local ice cream shop, the four of us piling out of the big white cross-over vehicle that Jenn drives, and that I affectionately call the hearse.

The kids bound over the lawn and hop over the frost-burned monkey grass that lines our walkway.

I look at the sky. The clouds are moving fast.

“They said we’d have wind coming in tonight,” I nod at Jenn. “I guess they weren’t kidding.”

“Yeah,” she says, “let’s get inside.”

I follow the kids to the door and let them in.

Flipping on the lights, I holler, “Who’s first bath?”

“I’ll take a warm bath,” Evan tells me. “Maybe it’ll make me feel better.” He’s been home with a stomach bug all day, and he does seem to be moving a little slowly.

“Graham,” I say, pointing to our office, “sentences.”

“OK,” he sighs, and makes his way into the office turning on the computer monitor.

Moments later, Graham and I are working on his homework, and Jenn is helping Evan in the bath. The lights go out. The carbon monoxide detector emits a piercing beep, and the UPS sounds its warning.

“Better save,” I tell Graham.

The dog whines, and I pat her head. “It’s OK,” I tell her.

“I’ll get you candles,” I shout to Evan and open the closet fumbling for a flashlight.

Then, the roar, like I am standing directly beneath Tahquamenon Falls.

The house shakes.

“Get downstairs, now!” I shout pushing Graham toward the basement steps. He trips on his way, wondering why I’m suddenly so loud and abrupt.

Jenn steps from the bath and her color goes from ruddy to putty in an instant. She spins and grabs Evan from the tub. He emerges wearing only a jacket of foamy soap suds. “Go.” Jenn yells, “Now!”

Evan is bewildered and shivering.

“You gotta hustle, Buddy,” I tell him and smile, I hope, reassuringly.

I grab Jenn’s hand and tell her, “Take him, I’ll get a towel.”

The wind rattles across the threshold of our front door. Our windows purr. I hear the painful rip of a tree trunk twisted and torn by the hand of nature.

I grab a pair of towels, pick up the candles I’ve pulled from the closet, then snag matches on my way through the kitchen.

I jump the steps to the basement.

The storm leaves as quickly as it arrived. I’ve left the weather radio upstairs, and we’ve really no information about what’s going on, no idea what things might look like outside. “It’s funny how fast you can feel disconnected from the rest of the world isn’t it?” I ask Jenn in the candle light.

She has her phone. I often wonder whether it’s become a part of her body, but I am glad she has it now. She calls a few friends to see if they have power, if they know what’s going on. Leslie has power, but they’re in the basement. They live on Hycliffe, which we’ll later find is one of the hardest hit streets, though they’ll escape with little damage. No real news on the television–just strong winds.

After 30 minutes, I head upstairs in the shocking quiet. I feel in the dark for the LED headlamp the boys gave me, put it on, and open the door.

It’s pitch. No one will recognize the extent of the damage until morning.

I walk out into the street and trip over a branch. I haul it to the side of the road, so no one gets hurt.

I turn to see my neighbor Tony standing quietly not fifteen feet away. “Oh, I didn’t see you at all,” I tell him.

“Crazy,” he says.

“Any news?” I ask.

“It’s dark,” he laughs, which is strange. He doesn’t laugh often.

“Yeah,” I click my tongue.

“I bet it’ll be a few days until power’s back,” he bites his lip. He plays guitar, and I doubt he wants to be without power to his stacks for long.

There is devastation all around us. A gazebo and garage across the street are completely shattered. A massive oak lies fallen, crossing three lots and more in the yards behind. A house around the corner is an utter loss. Hot power lines dangle threateningly over streets and sidewalks.

We see none of it. It’s all darkness.

The National Weather service has since confirmed an F1 tornado hit our neighborhood with 90MPH winds.

By some peculiar accident of fate and nature, our house is untouched. We have no more than a few limbs down in our backyard. Homes all around us lie beneath trees, temporarily uninhabitable and without power. Around the corner, an old oak vines its way through a front bedroom, under the bed, around dining chairs, through cupboards, and out the back door.

Meanwhile, we have electricity and watched the television news last night with a small twinge of guilt for our good fortune.

As tornadoes go, this one wasn’t terribly strong. Still, the destructive force of nature is apparent right outside our front door, and our back door too for that matter.

And here I am, puzzling at the randomness by which we escaped harm.

Last year our family was very disappointed that we’d misplaced Olive the Other Reindeer.

We looked again this year as we pulled out our Holiday books and the kids began reading them aloud and joking about whether Shani or Barb was Auntie Claus.

We’ve been pretty glum without our favorite Christmas book.

By some weird luck, Olive is on the television tonight, and she’s voiced by, ‘Woof!’ Drew Barrymore.

It’s goofy, irreverent, and faithful to both the art and the mood of the book.

Olive is right up there with the old Rankin/Bass shows I remember from when I was a kid. And it’s a new favorite of mine along with the televised version of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather that Ion has been running.

I was ready to throw out my television (it’s 18-years-old after all) after seeing Shrek the Halls, which I consider the ultimate suckfest in holiday entertainment.

I will try to stop being such a TV-hater from now on. I promise. Just bring me more Olive and absolutely no Shrek.