Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Some mortar for the cracks, a pillow for the fall
Baseball Tunes: Yesterday’s drive to and from baseball practice was done to John’s Rap playlist.
Boom Biddy Bye Bye, Cyprus Hill
Godzilla, Eminem
Fight For Your Right, Beastie Boys
The Next Episode, Dr. Drew, featuring Snoop Dogg
So What’Cha Want, Beastie Boys
Tequila Sunrise, Cypress Hill
Dr. Greenthumb, Cypress Hill
Insane in the Brain, Cypress Hill
Slow And Low, Beastie Boys
I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That, Cypress Hill
Peter Piper, RUN-DMC
The New Style, Beastie Boys
High Plains Drifter, Beastie Boys
Sabotage, Beastie Boys
By The Time I Get To Arizona, Public Enemy
I Wanna Get High, Cypress Hill
Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A
Something I’m looking forward to today: My bi-weekly space trip and the start of the weekend.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Playing D&D next Wednesday.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: After so, so, so goddamn long — finding a name for the monster in my closet.
What I’m writing: Friday-eve News Nuggie Alert! How is your “reply all” destroying the planet? Why do doctors have you under constant pressure? Wait … a happy teen girl? A not-surprising link to temper tantrums … and a really weird place to find a groundhog. Don’t delay. Open up that box of News Nuggies and start munching right now.
What I’ve written: A story I wrote when I worked for the electric co-op that somehow made it to the Peoria Journal-Star. Co-Mo celebrates 75 years of bringing light to rural Missouri I had SO much fun researching and writing the book this article was a part of.
‘Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies’
Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption
For more than a half a decade, there has been a monster in my closet. This was the worst kind of monster. As I know from being a veteran of the Dungeons & Dragons world, unnamed monsters are a pain in the ass. If you don’t know what something is, it can be really hard to fight it. Sure, a demogorgon is a dangerous foe, but if you know it’s a demogorgon, at least you know what you’re facing. A vampire can be taken out with a stake to the heart. A werewolf falls to a silver bullet. Dangle a prostitute in front of a politician and you can slay that beast.
But an unnamed, unknown monster can, as the country people say, right-fuck you up before you have a clue how to kill it.
For so, so long now, I have searched for a name for the monster that made its home in the secret closet all of us have but none of us talk about. In this era of knowability, all the things let me down. Google. ChatGPT. Therapists. To all of these things and more I fed the description of my monster — what it looked like, the ways it fought, what it preyed upon, how it attacked, where it hid, what enticed it to come out … everything — and all the powerful knowing-stuff shrugged its goddamn shoulders and said, “Dang. That sucks.”
And so the monster remained unknown and, because of that, very, very powerful.
It wasn’t two days ago now that the monster and I were going toe-to-toe once again, Round 129,918. But that’s not accurate. That would give the impression that I was able to stand up against this monster and actually do something back to it. Ha. That’s beyond laughable. A more accurate statement would be this: It wasn’t two days ago that this monster had me pinned against the ropes once again, my guard up to try to protect me from the killing blow as it silently pummeled the shit out of me for the umpteenth time. And, oh, how this monster enjoys it, enjoys the pummeling. You’d have thought it would get bored by now, but this monster is worse than any school-age bully. School-age bullies sometimes get bored of picking on the same kid, and often, if the picked-on stands up and fights back, the bully moves on to easier prey.
Not this monster. This monster loved when I tried to fight back, and it never got bored with doing what it does. This monster would see me straighten my spine, push off from the ropes and come at it with mean intentions of fighting back and would smile. It then would slip my weak-ass punch and counter me with a knee to the balls. Because, oh, did I mention? This monster doesn’t fight fair. Not even close. There is no honor in this monster.
It’s funny, in a sick way, that, as a reader, I have loved monsters without mercy, the kind created by H.P. Lovecraft, for example. There’s a big difference between Michael Myers and, say, a werewolf. Both are evil, nasty bastards. But you can distract a werewolf, and there are times when a werewolf is just a man. Michael Myers was a relentless killing machine for whom “mercy” was not a concept. He just killed because that’s what he did. He wasn’t even particularly hateful or discriminatory. He just … killed.
My monster was like that. It didn’t really care what I said, what I thought, what I did, what else was going on around it, nor my pleas for mercy. It didn’t care for the prayers of others or the kind words of support that strengthened me to keep fighting. Actually, it loved those prayers and kind words. They meant it would have another chance to beat the crap out of a rejuvenated me. That’s all it had on its calendar. It had one item on its to-do list: “Pummel John.”
And it did. It has. For a long, long time.
Yesterday, I found out my monster’s name.
It happened in a most interesting way, and I don’t think the monster is happy. It started with an eNewsletter I subscribed to more than a year ago that I hardly ever read. It’s an OK newsletter. It’s got a few useful things in it from time to time, but only after subscribing did I realize its main audience is women, so there’s a bunch of stuff in it that rarely applies to me.
But yesterday.
Yesterday, the subject had a line with a word I didn’t know. I don’t know exactly why it caught my attention. I am a knower of words … but not all words … and rarely if I see a word I don’t know do I explore it any further. Yesterday, I explored it further. I read the article referred to in the subject line, and if anyone had been around, they might have seen my jaw hanging on the floor.
“You bastard!” I thought. “That’s you! That’s your motherfucking name! That’s who you are. That’s how you fight. Oh, and would you look at this? Here’s how to fight you. Here’s how to beat you. Here’s where you are vulnerable, you miserable fuck.”
That one article led me back to a helpful technological friend. Armed with a name — a name! — I had something with which to query the Google Gods. And the Google Gods answered. A name! That’s all it took. A motherfucking name! Ask the Google Gods how to fight your monster and feed the Google Gods the actual name of your monster and the Google Gods will respond.
Now, 24 hours later, I am forming a plan. Oh, I’m under no illusion that simply finding the name of my monster has made me ready to kill it. But it has given me insight into how to kill it. If you don’t know how to kill Medusa, you’re gonna end up stone (not stoned). If you don’t know how to kill a vampire, well, you’re gonna join him. If you don’t know how to kill a werewolf, you’re gonna really hate the full moon.
But if you know not to look at her directly, if you know he hates the sunlight and garlic, if you know that a werewolf is incredibly vulnerable in its human state — well, there are the seeds of your plan to slay the monsters.
And so now I’m planting those seeds. They are safe, secure and being tended to regularly. Watered. Fed. Pruned. They will grow into the weapons I need to fight my monster.
And for the first time in a long, long time, I have hope that I will kill it.
Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?
[…] on August 23, I wrote a Puzzle Pieces and entitled it “Hope.” The day before, I had stumbled upon The Thing I had been looking for since, oh, about 2019. Through […]
[…] late August, I wrote about finally finding the name for the monster that I’d been battling for about a half a decade. This self-created monster […]
Leave a Reply