Ten Years After September 11, 2001

So, a decade ago some murderous shits perpetrated an atrocity.


A little over two thousand people died in the course of this atrocity.

And thanks to yearly goddamned reminders, I am all but numb to the actual gravity of the horror.


Every year we get plastered with "never forget." Unless we know someone who died that day, we've ALREADY forgotten. What we're keeping alive is a mere shadow of what we felt.


The highjackers have achieved immortality. Most of us know their names, or at least a couple.

The planners are likewise memorialized every time this sad damned mess is brought up.

A few of the passengers (especially those on Flight 93) and crew murdered by the aforementioned scumbags are known to us.


But who are we really remembering?

When I write the names of Mohamed Atta, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or Osama bin Laden, most, if not all of us, can call up not only a photograph we've seen, but a brief biography.

Now, quick. Name one person who died as a victim of the attacks. Go on. Look up the guy (Todd Beamer) who said "Let's roll." Or maybe John P. O'Neill. Perhaps Sirius the bomb-sniffing dog is recalled by some of you?



With over two thousand dead, it's easy to wrap them all up in "those who were lost" on September 11, 2001.



But that's reductionist bullshit. No one was "lost." People were murdered. And we continue to fixate upon the murderers.



I didn't know anyone who died that day.

I now know the bastards responsible better than I have any reason to.



And I'm about done venerating their gigantic goddamned crime.

On Libya. (And Iraq. And Afghanistan. And so on.)

"There is a Great Beast loose in the world of men.

It awoke in dark times, to fight a terrible enemy. It stormed through Europe, across the far Pacific, and crushed the evil that it found there underfoot.

But when it was victorious, when the crooked cross and the rising sun were done with, the Great Beast’s keepers found that it would not go back to sleep.

The Beast has many heads, and on its heads are written names: Lockheed. Bell. Monsanto. Dow. Grumman. Colt. And many more.

And they are very, very hungry.

So the Great Beast must be fed: and every generation, our country goes to war to do just that. A war for war’s sake, usually. And one that could have been avoided. But there must be blood in extraordinary quantities, and whether it is foreign or American is of no consequence at all."

- Garth Ennis, Punisher: Born, Issue #4- The Last Day

Rifles and the Single Survivalist

So, despite having a job that pays infinitely more than I was earning this time last year, I've found the urge to upgrade my primary rifle pretty much snuffed.

For one thing, in my current location, I honestly do not need a better weapon- With its ten-round capacity, my old Yugo SKS is capable of wiping out ten percent of the entire local population, assuming I hit everything I aim at- and the range of engagement out here is either incredibly far or dangerously close. Factor in my .45, and there's... really little reason to spend the money on trading up.

Which isn't to say that, over the summer, as I bop from populated zone to populated zone, I won't shop around- but the goal there will be to get my Yugo into the hands of someone else in the organization who hasn't got a 7.62 x 39 mm weapon. For where I'm likely to be for the forseeable future, the clunky but reliable (and forgiving) SKS is plenty of gun, at least from a survival point of view.

Which reassures me on one point- I may be a collector of melee weapons, but I'm definitely no gun collector.

Just give me something that works, and I'm content.

On the Death of Prep

So, as may or may not be known by the 0.5 people who read this, I am a survivalist. I firmly believe that sooner or later, something's going to give, and by "something," I mean "everything."

While down in Indiana, I had a group of like-minded hombres, and we spent our non-gaming, non-debauched time working on prep.

Yeah, we have our share of mall ninja-ry, but we know it for what it is, and for the most part, our plans are actually better than many.

Or in my case, were.

Because a strange thing happened when I took my current job-

I got pre-bugged out.

I live in a community so tiny and so far from major population centers that even a full-scale riot could be suppressed by one man with a ten-round magazine.

We are very much the end of the line- there is nowhere to bug out TOO.

Which is not to say that the community is fully self-sufficient and sustainable- far from it, we rely on fuel oil from outside, if the power goes out, we all bitch about it, and none of the kids have paid enough attention to their grandparents to know what to do in a survival situation.

BUT.

When the power goes out here- sometimes for days- the biggest hitch is in bathing.
There is no panic, just mild annoyance. Some houses didn't have electrical power until about three years ago.

Everyone out here has a water filter- not because the water will kill you, but because it has a very real chance of being.... unpleasant (read: Mexican-style burning liquid shits).

Everyone stockpiles dietary staples, not because we can't buy them, but because shipping them out here is an utter bitch. I haven't restocked basic dry goods since August, and I still have forty pounds of rice, fifty pounds of flour, and about five large packs of spaghetti.

I also have a freezer full of caribou meat, and that brings up another advantage this place has-

Hunting and fishing are a way of life. And I don't mean, "you and your dad go duck hunting on the weekends.."

I have several gallons of blueberry preserves at my disposal. There is dried fish all over.

In short, I am, while here in the village, better prepared than my own skill level should really justify.

Which brings me to a sad side-note- I am semi-prepared out here.

But in the summer months, I am now completely unprepared. My bug-out bag (what remains of it) is in a basement in Utah. My hometown is, while better set up than some, incapable of feeding its population from the surrounding countryside. And my water filtration system is out here, not there.

Which means for the next few years, until I can establish myself, I will swing from unconcern to worry I can do nothing about as I migrate.

It's.... vexing, to say the least.

Why Gamers Suck

All right, so I'm a dedicated gamer, given the chance. After a shitty workweek, unleashing "Burning" Takarov, priest of the thoroughly evil god of Fire and Poison on an unsuspecting village in the company of the equally vile Lovefist brothers had a cathartic joy to it. And of course, our interminable avatar campaigns in the World of Darkness allow an even more direct opportunity to blow off steam.

But let's face it, all gamers suck. Here's why-


1- We will tell you about our characters, knowing full well that you do not give a fuck. We will also tell you about how much we hate it when people tell us about their characters, because that's how we roll.

2- We find our in-jokes funny. Then we ruin them by explaining them to you. Honestly, if you weren't there, "that time Mike said we'd kill him if he fucked up" just isn't that funny.

3- We will argue endlessly about truly pointless shit in imaginary worlds. You have not experienced Hell until you've seen a Forgotten Realms fan throw down with a Greyhawk fan about the respective merits of their settings. And while just about everyone on Earth is capable of this, only gamers and other geeks will get in a frothing rage about why Elminster could totally kick Mordenkainen's ass. If they start citing page numbers, you're probably on the internet, and should just navigate to a porn site to unwind.

4- We, aware as we are of stereotypical social awkwardness, will still pick on gamers who "do it wrong." In the game store I worked at in Bloomington, we had a guy we called C.K.W. (Coolest Kid in the World) who we endlessly put down and abused in-game. A simpler, mature solution would have been to not let him play since his style pissed us off. But lord knows, we can't turn a fellow gamer away. Especially not when he's more pathetic than we are and makes us look better by comparison.

5- We have to be cool. And we have to prove it. Drunken rednecks have nothing on pencil-wristed gamers when it comes to dick-measuring contests. About shit that is usually either trivial, fictitious, or just useless.

6- Our system is better than yours. We have a tendency to cling to a gaming system we like as if it contained the only water left in the universe. And revised versions of systems we like are greeted with hostility. For example, I started playing D&D when it was AD&D 2nd Edition. A system, which, by the way, sucked the meat missile. GOD it was awful and arbitrary. But it took me a while to warm up to 3rd Edition, because, well, it was change. And would Eldred Shadowmere, Dual-Wielding Ranger Who Could Totally Kick Drizzt's Ass And I had The Stats To Prove It survive the transition unchanged?! WHO KNEW?!

7- If you don't like a system, you clearly just played it wrong. Of course. It has nothing to do with the fact that you hated how it worked. Or that character creation required ninety-seven charts... or had NO charts! GASP! Our terminal inability to accept style differences stems from another problem...

8- We are frequently one or two players short of a good group, and will therefore take in strays who then have an awful time while we mock them. Lord knows, if we just loosened up and had fun, we might get farther, but THIS game is S E R I O U S. We promise. With all of these differences, each group inevitably feels it is doing things "right," and pities others who can't get the hang of it, which feeds back into 4, 6 and 7.

9- We spend money on crap we could easily make up. Don't believe me? World of Darkness: Hong Kong. Rather than, say, looking into an area's history and making up your own imaginary shit to put in it, you instead buy White Wolf's. Doubly shaming if you're playing a game in a TOTALLY fictitious world. News flash- Almost none of their fluff is that great or original. If you make up some derivative crap, don;t worry- you're just like 97% of published fantasy or science fiction novels.

10- We are aware of every single one of these flaws, and we do nothing about it. Seriously.

Now, in conclusion, let me say that I still love this damned hobby, and I miss my old group to death. Why? Because we try as hard as we can to mitigate some of this list. Say, I'm sure my old seat's open, why don't you drop by and try a game? Don't worry if you don't get it at first, but they're totally doing it right.

The Kobuk Catechism

The following are phrases, words and notions that I've adopted in the ten weeks I've lived up here... Explanations are best kept to a minimum- nothing ever gets explained terribly well up here, and I kinda like it.

OMGWTFFTS- "Oh My God, What The Fuck, Fuck This Shit."- Sort of the mantra for our first week of school. I still keep it handy.

"Probably not today."- Says it all.

"Nothing works here."- Ditto.

"A Plan is just a series of events that don't happen."

"Adii"- Inupiaq for "I don't waaaaaannnna." Best said in a grating whine.

"Sometimes always never."- Once in a blue fucking moon.

"Alaapaa."- Inupiaq for "It's cold." With perhaps a "god damn it" on the end, depending on the tone.

"Make your peace with ugly"- A repeated catchphrase from Yours Truly to the two experienced teachers who are new to Village life.

"Never ever do this."

There's something about the northern latitudes that brings out the macho insanity in nearly everybody.

And I don't mean the "Hey, y'all, watch this!" brand you find down south, either.

No, I'm talking about the kind of macho insanity that makes heading out on an icy river after sundown in a small john-boat to set nets sound reasonable.

Or the kind that makes you leap at the chance to work on top of a rickety fish-rack, passing a chainsaw back and forth.

Or hop on a 4-wheeler without checking fuel status to roar into the mountains on a joyride into totally uninhabited wilderness.

In other words, you start doing the kind of thing that makes responsible people cringe.

But don't worry- you're hardly alone.