December Wolves: This Is What You Wanted

I came home exhausted from work and I want nothing more than to fall face first onto the bed 3 feet from me. It was mostly because I stayed up way too late last night to get different done. I made a statement, though, that I ought to stand by. Then again, I made it on Twitter, so I have to live up to it.

This is what I want. I want to write. But to get there, I have to do it for free. Often. So here I am. It's more the often. Without a deadline, I can pick endlessly at what I've already written instead of actually writing. So this one is about Christmas. It's a big enterprise (but not too big) in the household I'm in. And every year, it's the same deal. Christmas comes and I know that I have ironclad obligations to my parents.

And after a couple decades, that gets repetitive. I get annoyed, because it's so same-y. Year in, year out. Big dinner at home Christmas Eve, big dinner elsewhere Christmas Day. The Good Clothes. The Tree. The Stockings. Oh, God, The Presents. So, How Are You Doing This Year? The Tradition.

It's grating. But then, I hear that a couple friends of mine have lived without it and they actually find it cool that my family has traditions. And, since my parents are never gonna read this, I can say it: After hearing this, I almost kind of agree with them. Okay, yes, tradition and I have a pretty fractured relationship these days. And yes, it's inconvenient around the Christmas holiday to set a certain amount of daily real estate aside for something that only happens once a year and for a select group of people. But hey: This thing has been happening for more than two decades now so the fact that it goes on by its own inertia is pretty cool. On some level, that's what this website set out to be.

But the tradition in this case isn't cool because it's still around. There are plenty of things that are still around that are terrible. It allows friends to have something ironclad to gather around that's positive and is a safe space. And as I'm getting older (it being relative), I realize I want that more and more. Gifts or toys (books excepted, of course, because they're manna from heaven) are nice, but that's what I want more than anything: A chance to see my friends.

It's taken me a lot of nights of troubled sleep to realize that. And tomorrow, I will go to sleep in the same building as my grandparents and extended family. Yes, New Year's Eve will not be exciting, but it will be with the ones I love and now, I realize how valuable of a gift that is.

December Wolves: Phonogram

More rough edits on a comic book. Recorded on Christmas morning, so merry Christmas, belatedly. I'm wearing a Crime In Stereo shirt. Expect more updates, a deluge of them, before the 31st.

December Wolves: Avarice Wolf

I don't know what happened. I thought I had a weekend to catch up and even get ahead on this promise and I couldn't find anything I wanted to write about. There's something about Jersey Shore in the archive, but it feels kind of toothless and it wasn't really begging to be written. I came back to a couple paragraphs I wrote after playing Borderlands with a very important friend of mine and it ended up going to an interesting place.

I mean, okay, self-flagellation on here isn't really a surprise. But I'd like to think I'm actually learning and this is proof of it. Anyway, have you heard of Courage Wolf? The title is a reverent nod of the head.

I'd like to confirm that Borderlands has reached Diablo 2 levels of addictiveness. A good friend of mine and I started playing at about 9:30 p.m. and didn't stop until 4:30 a.m. a couple weeks ago and that's an invigorating feeling that I haven't had in a very long time.

The alcohol didn't hurt. I've written a lot about my feelings around alcohol, but it felt right here. Here the alcohol was used as celebrating something, my friend being back from another college semester.

Borderlands is very, very addictive. Very, very fun. I don't care what the metacritic score is. It does what it does very well and even miles removed from the ability to play it, I'm still jonesing for the "shoot enemies and guns come out" mechanic, as popularized by Diablo 2. But I don't think I'll play it any time soon.

My computer can't run it and the cheapest console that can run it costs $200. Which means, I'm looking at $250 (at the very least, and that's not including the 10% tax that brings the purchase up to $275 , which means it's closer to $300 than I'd like.) Now all that said, I could ask for a PS3 for Christmas, but what's holding me back is the backlog of PS2 games I still haven't gotten through. Looking back on what I wrote around consumable media last Christmas, I think I'm in danger of losing that important "I've got what I've got and I'll get around to new stuff when I'm done with the old stuff" perspective that I had before.

Let me go down the list of things I haven't finished or gotten to that I wrote about in that post last year:

Videogames:

+Killzone and Odin Sphere (right) have been beaten. Odin Sphere I made sure I beat in the true ending way so there was no bullshit and I could say I was finished and didn't have to replay the game. In Killzone, I don't think there's different endings, so I feel like I got the core message of that game. The core message being shoot things that are hard to kill.

+Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 haven't been beaten. The difference between then and now is that I'm starting to play God of War 2 again and am a couple hours further than I was at the end of the school year.

Books:

+The War Within and But Is It Art have been finished. The War Within was pretty much devoured and imbibed in January, and But Is It Art was gifted to a friend's girlfriend who is currently a

n art major. So they're consumed and thought about and dispensed with, until I come back to them. (Which I don't, but that's another subject for writing. Do I really go through my "library"? I've got shelves of books, but I don't really pick through them, I look for something new.)

+The End of Faith, The Mystery of Capital and The Arab Predicament are all cluttering up a "I SWEAR I WILL GET TO THESE" shelf. The End Of Faith is one of those books that I feel uncomfortable even picking up since apparently atheism is getting pretty douchebaggy and I am nominally Catholic. But I bought it, so I ought to read it. The Mystery of Capital I haven't even seriously started. I'm maybe 10 pages into it. It's very far down on the list, behind oh God everything else. The Arab Predicament, I think I'm half finished with but have put down and now can't find in the web of music, other books and games that I need to finish.

+The Essential Rumi, however, is in my work satchel, so I'm three quarters finished with that and it's a peculiar book with wonderful poems about getting drunk and loving God and loving women and are you going to drink that wine, because if you're not, I will. It's a breath of fresh air. Hella refreshing.

(Yes, I used the phrase hella refreshing. I make squishy noises with the English language.)

Phew.

After all that, I'm still very far behind and that's from this time last year.

I have all these things to get through before I even begin to think about new games and books. My parents don't know what to get me for Christmas, and guess what I want: More books! I have lots of them and I am slowly finding the time to read them. But what I really want for Christmas is the ability to look forward in my life without losing sight of the great things I have in front of me.

Borderlands, then, is representative of all the things that are new and shiny in front of me and (as Visa and Chase are trying to point out) I can totally kind of afford them. I recognize that there is something inside me, whether native or not, I don't know, but certainly cultivated, that I want new things. Because the old things won't do. The graphics on the PS2 aren't as good as the PS3 graphics. I like David Aja's art more than I like Mike Mignola's on Hellboy, even in the library form, or whatever the excuse this week is.

Borderlands is indicative of moving towards the altar of moar (if I can blaspheme to have religious and 4chan imagery working side by side) and I'm ashamed to admit, I thought I wrote pretty definitively about that last year. I will get to Borderlands when I get to Borderlands. I will get to the Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus over Christmas, because that's at least one indulgence I'm allowing myself. But I'm taking everything else slow. No rest for the wicked, remember?

A Chirstmas gift to our readers.

A brief note: If you celebrate another holiday, then consider the title to be a seasonally appropriate salutation, since, well, I and Thomas are Catholic, myself, if only fashionably and it feels a bit too off the mark to say a holiday gift. So, as you probably figured, no offense is meant.

Shopping at Borders shouldn't give me an existential dilemma. It, however, did. As I passed the clearance books (after picking up a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and Common's Universal Mind Control for my brother's Christmas gift), I saw something that was so value packed it defies my best attempts at an explanation as to even begin to chart or map it. On sale for eight dollars was the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Eight bucks for his complete works?

You could spend hours looking at the Raven and still never truly suck all the meaning out of it, and you know what? There's about forty-odd other poems there, not to mention the seventy something stories. It's so massive, I don't know where to begin. I didn't buy it, (Zach might shoot me, but to do that, he'd first have to read this, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen.) because I already bought two other books from Borders just yesterday, The War Within by Bob Woodward and a book of Islamic poetry by a man called Rumi. (As is my want, I've gotten 12 chapters deep in Woodward's book by now, and haven't started Rumi.)

Looking again at the book, which appears now, to be about roughly three quarters the size of a throw pullow and twice as deep, could I ever have gotten to it? Also, my bag was bulging from the two books and CD I had already bought. I have enough books that I've started to finish, which include:

the Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami
the End of Faith by Sam Harris
the Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto
But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland

If I'm lucky, I'll finish three of the four by the middle of January.Thus, an upwards of seven hundred page book, most of it requiring in depth reading, I don't know if I'll ever get through just doesn't seem worth it, even as a complete discography, just to have purchased it once and be done with it once. That said, I'll almost certainly go back to Borders later on this week and pick it up then because it's everything Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote for eight bucks. I'll find something, I'm sure.

That's when I realized: There's far too much media, whether it's music, literature, TV shows, movies or games to sift through everything I want in one life. I've got lists and lines of games and records and books and almost everything else. Hell, I have Killzone in my PlayStation 2 right now, with Odin Sphere, Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 on deck. I have no idea if I'll be able to finish another one of those games within the time I return, and hundreds of CDs on my computer sent to me by PR people that I don't know when I'll get the time to listen to.

I guess now is a good a time as any for a huge pronouncement, it feels to me like there's always going to be something else to read, listen, watch or play before I die. But, beyond all that, now I have another goal, but hopefully this one encompasses many smaler ones: I just want to write something one day that's worth the investment of time.

So. We'll (Who am I kidding, I) will try to keep posting here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the other writing projects I have. May your next week be without hassle and as little stress as possible.

Here's to never having enough time!