The Brennan Family Groupblog

Okay, I’ll admit, this was an easy one. But fun!

Beck, me, and my buddy Paper all headed out after work and bounced across lines a few times at random until we wound up somewhere southward, looking for a pub. Not the trickiest puzzle in the Boston level of the game, you know?

I hadn’t gotten much chance to talk with the guys since getting back. So there were questions about the funeral, and pretty soon they were on me about my new project.

Becker: “I mean, what is this, really?”

Me: “Exactly what it looks like, man. I mean, what the fuck, right? Why not? Let’s say I do only last two weeks. At least for two weeks I was trying something new, you know? Considering I got a girl’s phone number the first night out…”

Paper: “She’ll be pleased to know you view her as an experiment.”

Me: “Aw, fuck you, Paper. I’m calling her tomorrow, we’ll do something old fashioned and charming, I’ll either get lucky or I won’t, and then whatever. Hell, nothing says she can’t actually be cool, besides, right?”

Becker: “Ad exec.”

Me: “Okay, point. But still.”

Usually, we go to this little Bar and Grille on the North side, called Garside’s. The food is decent, the music’s above average, and the drinks are cheap - if only because they know us now. But you live in a city, this city, for as long as I have, having a “regular Saturday night thing” amounts to a rut - there’s approximately 6.4 billion bars in Boston. Some of which aren’t even Irish! So a change of venue. I mean, this was my first day back at work, and I was exhausted, burnt out; doing anything flashy just wasn’t going to happen today.

It was one of those corner joints that goes more by location than name. The sign was a beer brand logo - I’m sure it has a name, but I couldn’t tell you. Okay, now I sound like Mags, but… we roll in, laughing at a bad joke Paper told, and we get one of those “everyone in the bar turns and looks”… but it was for a second, not really hostile. I don’t know if it’s because they didn’t give a shit at all, or if they just needed to confirm our accents, make sure we weren’t just tourists wandering way off from the Freedom Trail. I ask the girl at the bar if they’re running specials, she’s noncommittal, I wind up getting mid-shelf and the boys order a pitcher for a table by the wall.
I work in retail middle management. I don’t really want to get any further into it, to be honest. My family reading this know what I do, but it’s not really my greatest source of pride or anything. I make enough to get by. I won’t be doing it forever. What I AM gonna do… fuck, I dunno. Maybe go back to school. I’m just trying to enjoy my days right now. Some weeks, I can even afford the trips out like tonight. Not that it’d make a whole lot of difference.

There were no women at this bar! Or, at least, no women any of us were going to hit on. There were chubby-cheeked bar girls (not my type) and there were a couple of pretty girls in pantsuits with heavy rocks (slumming?). I suppose that makes this part of the story less exciting, but it gave us guys a chance to catch up. Turns out Paper has taken a turn setting up for bands at some little-ass club close to the Square and doing write-ups of fresh museum exhibits for one of the local indies. I’m a little surprised. Part of the reason we call him Paper is ’cause he tends to the two-dimensional, if you follow me. Though surprisingly sharp.
For the most part, my friends aren’t doing a whole lot away from the water cooler and the watering hole.

At one point in the evening, this wrung-out dishtowel of a guy comes over to our table and sits himself, asks us if we serve - which I guess means he did. Winds up toasting Henry Miller, of all people. Paper gets a kick out of it, toasts William James. Not sure what to do, I raise a glass to Samuel Pepys. I can’t decide if this is sort-of clever, or funny, or if it’s just weird and random; and I’m thinking about it when I see that Beck has gotten all pissy about something. When the guy has wandered off to yell at the jukebox or whatever, I ask him what his problem is.

“You guys. Can’t go two fucking minutes without showing off how clever you are.”

Paper rightly points out that the vet started it by being random - we were just following suit. But Beck is having none of it. Says we’re always acting like he’s the dumb one in the group when he works some ridiculous technical web 2.0 whatever it is that he does. No idea where this is coming from. Paper is real quiet while I’m arguing with him, and then just raises his glass.”To Tanya.”

Beck’s face clouds all up. “Man, fuck you, Paper.” Gets up, grabs his coat and walks out. Paper casts me this glance like I should’ve seen it all coming.The vet turns from the bar and says “You ladies just break up?” And the whole crowd starts cracking up. I finish my drink and think about how I’ve gotta live with Becker, and if Paper needed to make a point, maybe he shouldn’t have done it when I was fucking with them.

***

Oh, right. Before all that, when they were asking me about this site, we tossed around some ideas for what stuff I might do in the future. It’s tough, because I’m limited by my funds. Or maybe that’s part of the challenge, I dunno. But I’ll try to get into my list at some point later.

Before I start: YES, I heard the news today. From everyone. And their cousins. Please stop e-mailing me. I have a shuddering headache.

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The closer it gets to the wedding, the more often I take the dress out and see how well I’m fitting into it - I know, guys, I’m so lame! I could stand to lose about ten more, but I’m doing so well! Hey Russell, maybe you and I could work out together!

Growing up in this family, I couldn’t help but get a little of that bitter irony and cynicism that you boys are so proud of rubbed off on me - I call it “the spoilsport gene,” and it’s a Brennan family trait, I think. So, I’m standing in front of the mirror in my wedding gown, and aside from being proud and excited and terrified and even a little sad - and wishing I could tuck back a few areas of fat around my hips and thighs - I’ll admit, I got a few jolts from that spoilsport gene and thought about why I was going through with a fair-sized, traditional wedding, when I don’t need it to love my man, or to stay with him.

Most girls, especially those of us who grew up in the days when toys were really big business (I don’t need to get into a whole essay on the subject, far better feminists than I am have done the legwork), the “princess” image was marketed pretty heavy, I guess. For me, it was Disney. I was a tooootal Disney girl. I still am, really, though the newer stuff hasn’t been too good I thought. Most of it, anyway.Here’s my question, though: Is it weird to anyone else that there’s an “official” list of Disney princesses? That some of them don’t make the cut? Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty (the big three!), Belle, Jasmine, and Ariel - who is always human, so I always forget who she is at first. That’s it, right? Pocahontas is the daughter of a chief, doesn’t that count? At first I thought it was maybe because she was “too ethnic,” but Jasmine is… well, she’s probably way whiter than she should be, but none of the other Disney women get to join the club?I was talking to my fiancée (hee) about it, and he didn’t think the others qualified - gypsy girl, too young, not human - Nala actually outranks all of them, doesn’t she? She’s a queen! I think. I guess you can’t sell dress-up dolls of a lioness.
Isn’t “The Nightmare Before Christmas” totally Disney now? They sell stuff at the Disney store. And Sally is (married?) to the Pumpkin King. Too spooky?
The “too young” part, though, gets all screwed up when you consider Disney endorses “Kingdom Hearts” (Yes, Frank, shut up, I’m addicted, it’s okay - and no, he won’t help me at all on the tough parts) which, in the first game, was all about rescuing The Disney Princesses - Princesses of Heart, I think they’re called - and the roster includes Alice. She’s not even a little bit of a Princess! Why her, but not Wendy?

I think Disney should canonize Kairi as one of the Princesses. I guess they don’t 100% own her, but she gets to swing a keyblade and fight back for herself and her friends at the end of the second game, and that’s better for girls than most of the other Princesses. And this is from someone who still loves Aladdin.

*Yawn*So I rolled out of bed pre-dawn this morning. By the time I had my sneakers strapped on, my roommate Becker was paddling about in his robe, trying to get our coffeemaker going. He works on Route 128, early days are more his thing.

“Didn’t even know you were home,” he says. Which means Tanya is still in his room.

Me: “Got in late.”

“How the fuck are you up, then?”

“Going jogging.”

He stared at me for a few, shook his head, and retreated to his room, where a slender blonde sex goddess would no doubt be just rolling over.

He didn’t give me a chance to explain the plan! So I’ll explain it to you: For the next year, every day this year, I’ll be doing things I’ve never done.

It was kinda Mags’ idea, I guess. Partly, anyway. Or she gave me the idea. I was sitting by her at the bar that night, and we didn’t really know each other that well, but I asked her about the old club scene, and that transitioned into how she met Patch, and how he died… Like, his third fucking time on rollerblades and… pow. And she told me how he was trying to do all these things he’d never done before, like he knew what was coming. I mean, I remember seeing him play baseball once when we were younger, and he was okay, but in general he was just this uncoordinated fuck, and here he was rolling down the street - people don’t even skate anymore, for Christ’s sake. Mags said she thought he was doing that stuff to impress her, and I can see that. I remember doing some real bullshit when I was with Dakota.

So, I was thinking to myself while stuck in LAX - all the stuff I’ve never done. And I don’t mean, “I’ve never walked on the moon” or anything, but, like, I’ve never gone skydiving or ridden a motorcycle or baked a cake or gone fishing or played paintball or busked on a street corner or finished a New York Times Sunday Crossword! And I was trying to figure out what I was going to write about on this website Molly set up for the family, and the two thoughts bounced off each other for a while. And I remembered all those people who have blogs about, like, “50 books I’ll read this year” or “I’m gonna trade a paperclip up to a house” or “A year of women rejecting me” or whatever. So: I’m going to do a new thing every day, for 365, that I’ve never done before.

And I figured some of them, you wouldn’t see the effects right away. So for day two - I begin working out.

Since I’m writing this for the general internet public, let me paint a “before” picture (no digital camera). I’m average height, and I’ve only got at most ten, fifteen pounds over, but I’ve no tone to speak of. A female acquaintance - okay, it was Tanya - once called me Gumby for my thick legs, thin arms, and plywood chest. Which is, uh, cool, y’know, but let’s take this chance to see what happens if I have the general public watching over my shoulder while I “self-improve.”

The first thing I realized when I got outside was even Boston (well, Cambridge) is fucking quiet at that hour. The flurries had died down by the morning, and the sun was off the snow brighter than the Citgo sign. I know further downtown everything would be brown to black from the passing cars, but I’m a little further in from the schools and it’s not far to a nice stretch of the Charles (if there is such a thing - I know they say they’ve been cleaning it up but I always think of the riverbed as a crusted floor of Big Dig hardhats and High Life bottles) for my run.

I even remembered to stretch! Not so long since I was a sporty kinda guy, after all.

Things were warming up after the weather, but it’s still Boston in the season; that said, I was the most heavily-dressed guy on a run that morning. Fifteen years old, or eighty-five, they’re all in goddamn wifebeaters and t-shirts that they’ve owned since the days of Hypercolor. I felt guilty for not generating enough of my own heat and picked up the pace for a bit, and then I remembered how out of shape I really was. Felt like Rocky in the last movie all of a sudden. I wish I could get a dog, but our building is a big N-O on that, and no way I’m trading pooch for parking.

There’s something oddly beautiful about a city as it’s waking up. The first few people leaving their houses, blinking crust out of their eyes as they make a beeline for Dunk’s, or sometimes Starbucks because we’re still too close to Harvard Square for comfort. I saw two people say good morning to each other. In an hour, when the cars are totally deadlocked, it’ll be all “fahk you” this and that, but everyone’s still a little human at this hour, too groggy to put their shields up.

It makes it almost understandable, how some people can be morning people. I don’t think I can ever do it for real, but for the sake of this project, I need to stick to some regimens. So we’ll see how the jogging goes. I want to get some actual exercising in, too, but if I try to jump in I know I won’t bother.

Telling you the name of the club would be pointless. You’ve never heard of it. Truth be told, I’m not even sure it has a name. This little underground in Palo Alto. There were only about a hundred people in the crowd, packed tight and shiny with sweat and hour before the music started. People were calling out greetings to old friends that hadn’t been seen since the days of glowsticks.
The Fever Dream Five had come home.

It started on a late night in a cubicle farm less than three miles from here, as Bartholomew Fegredo, a perhaps-surprisingly built graphic designer with a sense of time’s slow crawl into the muck, turned to his neighbor, a striking woman who was in the middle of updating her résumé on the company dime.

“We should start a band.”

I held my cocktail aloft to keep it from spilling (an attempt which failed) and tucked my way through the throng. I rolled with the FD5 before they struck, the Boston years. It’s like saying I was backstage with the Pixies when the Back Bay clubs were their kingdom. A pencil-thin half-Jap in enormous raver pants and still experimenting. Sometimes I’d watch the sound tests, sitting on that sawhorse bar in the Kink Factory with guys like Earv and Eoin the faux-Brit dealer. And compared to the others in this West Coast club, I was a newbie, a late hanger-on.
Bart Fever and Rachel Bannon had already added Ellie Robinson (a last name she dropped from the band’s liner notes) and aging Jazz saxman Jackson Creed to the mix by the time they headed to the East Coast, and had gained some ground in the local scene. But it was in a shitty pub in Quincy where they hooked up with the best bassist in Rock and Roll.
The FD5 are musical chameleons. They can emulate virtually any style, hold their own with any band’s oeuvre. But it was Sponge Generic’s bassline that helped them find their own voice. The only traditional-looking, and oft-acting, rocker - by all accounts, the bizarre moniker is his legal name - Sponge and Bart found improbable like-minded souls in one another, and co-wrote many of the band’s songs. Though of course Sponge alone wrote their first hit single, the Tool-inspired “Rift,” based on an event he’d witnessed in a local strip club.
“Their own voice,” of course, is substantially their razor-sharp sense of humor. Their songs have a surprising satirical wit, for their energy. “Rift,” for one is aware of its resemblance to a now-classic Tool single, and its earnestness on the subject of communication, sex, and magic is all the funnier when Sponge introduces the song at every live performance with the story of watching two amateur girls strip as though the event were apocalyptic.
But it isn’t “Rift” that opens the band’s set this night; nor is it “Buy-Curious,” “Punch Drunk,” or any of their singles. It’s an oft-forgotten track towards the back end of that first self-titled album. “Spike’s Song,” a Bart Fever solo, a deliberately-awkward and desperate grab at a life rolling away. When the lights came up on all sides of Fever and the Bannon clacked her sticks together to lead the band into some of their louder fare, I had actually drifted a bit, thinking about the boyfriend I had so recently lost, and how our paths had unknowingly crossed at an FD5 set so long before. How much more time we could have had if we’d just looked in a different direction that night, seen each other. Knowing how quickly he’d be gone.

But of course, there were too many good memories in that music, in that band, and soon I was pounding my head, I was back-flipping from the stage and letting the hands carry me above the things that had happened. I splayed my hands out in a lazy crucifix and then pulled them back in to cross across my heart even as they lowered me back into the pit. I think Jack Creed had recognized me when my purple Converse sneakers mounted the stage, I think he’d smiled, and that means my life before the man who’d forced me to love him still existed, that I could be whole if I willed it Goddamned hard enough, that maybe I’d live to see the morning, when the dancing was done and the floor was a carpet of stale cigarettes and the drink I’d let fall.

The hotel was… dark. Like the cave, or a church. Or something. I bought Ben (his name) another round and that was all we needed to start talking. I had shots of Jameson’s, and the local piss chaser. That was this guy, a piss chaser. Ha! I just thought of that!
Benjamin Mulligan owns a small chain of sandwich joints around outside LA and further South. I guess he tries to lure in touristy traffic by putting all kinds of crap on the walls for each place, and he was going to open a new one not far from the mine. Little strip mall by the freeway. So he was casin’ the historical joint. I told him all about our friend aaron, when he went to Roswell and all that stuff, which he sorta pursed his lips at.
So! My name is “TV’s” Franklin Brennan, and I… am on vacation! No, no, that’s only half-true. I am on a noble quest, as you may have surmised - I am going to track down the origins of the games collectively known as “The Dragon’s Egg Cycle.”
They each came in the night, signalling death trumpets! For each game utterly obliterated what came before. They were miniature revolutions, in form and content. They were each the mystery and the rage of their form and their age!
Shit, I’m rhyming now. I sound like Danny. Fucking…

* * *

Can’t hold it like I used to. Going to lay down.

“And You Shall Be My Secretary… of Nomenclature!”
A look back at the Kilgore DeGaulle Saga
by Gerhard Brennan

The Kilgore DeGaulle series of novels by now-reclusive author Leslie X are a loaded weapon for the critical reviewer, and no attempt is made here to encapsulate everything that she was able to accomplish - or everything that she wasn’t - with the award-winning and high-selling saga. Combining a pastiche of super spy pulp, postmodern self-awareness, and a decided vicious streak of parody (even the final number of titles - and their relative size to one another - evokes J.K. Rowling), the books were an instant success, though perhaps not in the way that she originally intended. Initially planned as a trilogy, DeGaulle’s leap into the literary canon of influential characters alongside such disparate figures as Sherlock Holmes and Kilgore Trout caused, by some, a jarring turn in the intended narrative; and persistent rumors surrounding her personal life prompted her withdrawal from the public light which she at first seemed to feed off of, and thus no answers on the author’s true intent will ever be forthcoming.

As new mass-market reprintings of the series are released this season with cover illustrations by popular commercial artist “Rusty” Rick Walker, it seems appropriate to look back at the series as a whole, and consider the directions traveled.

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Chronologically, you see, the story begins in a mine. The errant knight and his squire enter with trepidation, hands on their hilts. The abandoned mining technology appears more advanced than the world from which they clearly hail. “Stay close to me,” mutters the knight. “She won’t be alone.”

The feeling of entering another world was palpable to me as I donned my own little helmet and followed the tour group. The first few “levels” were rather what you’d expect: the air alternated between clammy and stale, based I suppose on relative distance to water deposits, little underground rivers. Thick beams buttressed the walls, trying to force square geometry on round caverns. Sputtering lanterns and strung fluorescents fought a losing battle with natural shadow (not so passive, cuz). We all kept tripping over the cart rails.

We know now - one of the few things, in fact, that we know for sure - is that Raynefall was not the first game in the Cycle to be released, even online. It was, however, the game that forced the whole mess into the greater public eye; its meme status was more or less instantaneous, and since then the Cycle has gone from well-kept hacker secret to full-blown fandom. Small wonder, as it seems that was the idea. Released simultaneously to sites like Newgrounds and hyped to ones like Slashdot, it’s easily the most “mainstream” of the games that we can definitively link to the story. The weather-themed protagonist with the prodigious blade is a clear parody of any number of Final Fantasy characters, and the RPG-style gameplay is a close correlation as well. Except, of course, the game is at maximum a single hour in length, and the upgrade system seems designed to show how much can be done with the barest minimum in memory and processing speed.

There’s a man a few feet away from me in the tour group, who keeps making terrible jokes about gas and canaries. I start wondering what he’s even doing there, obviously alone, if he has no interest in the mine. Our guide has lost himself down a tangent on some kind of ancient squabble where the nearby town didn’t want to store the blasting TNT so close to the schoolhouse. I notice for the first time that we’re totally surrounded by bats.

Bats are perhaps the quintessential video game monsters. It’s harder, perhaps, to list games that don’t eventually resort to them.

(…Patch-Related Tangent… One thing I liked, when Danny was telling Clu’s story, he had that line in the college campus chapter about “Bat County.” Clu being essentially a living video game hero, it was a cute tip o’ the pin to the omnipresent bats as well as the obvious Gonzo riff.)

In an informal poll I conducted amongst a few online communities, I found that nearly all gamers hate bats in games. And it’s easy to see why - they’re small, their odd movement makes them hard to target, and there’s always one too many of them. Of course, they “hate” bats the way they “hate” ice-themed levels. The frustration and difficulty are missed when they’re actually gone. Gamers are like everyone else: they hate what they know they want.

Except for escort missions. Everyone actually hates those.

In the mine, the bats numbered in the hundreds; thick as a cloud just above our heads, they just… watched us. Or, sonar-ed us. The cavern had widened here, where it was naturally formed, and everyone spoke in hushed tones, so as not to alarm the little fuckers. The guide muttered that they called this part of the cave “The Cathedral.” I could picture a sacrifice in the center of that space, which put me back in mind of Raynefall. Between that and being spooked as Hell by the bats, I completely lost all threads of the actual tour - which is why I’m being less than informative on the subject of turn-of-the-last-century mining techniques and related ephemera, which I’d honestly rather hoped to fascinate you with.

The game is slow at first in parceling out exposition (relative to its brief timeframe, anyway), but it comes out as you delve further into the mine - which comes to more and more resemble an archaeological dig site - that Rayne and his squire Ted are searching for two women (and what guy isn’t?). Both were members of their… it’s not entirely clear. Pirate gang? Resistance group? Some kind of Adventurer’s Guild? A moot point, apparently, as one member, Desdemona, has (snapped? betrayed?) and subsequently absconded with an artifact that the group had acquired, to say nothing of the fourth member of the band: Ms. Lilyheart, Rayne’s lover.

Naturally, the first monsters they face as you play the game are bats.

We weren’t allowed to descend as far as the mine went, waivers or no. I don’t know if the furthest depths are unstable, or if they were just worried about how a paramedic would reach a cardiac arrest in time, or some other such. In the end, the mine was a sort of tease, anticlimactic. I’m not sure what any of us expected to find at the bottom. Some gold the miners had missed? A raging cave troll? Hoffa? But all that remained was further darkness, leading deeper into the earth. The game, of course, was different. The ending was climactic indeed for an introductory level (indeed, it was set up as a pre-credit tease) and as the newcomers and newgrounders were to learn, there were further worlds to explore.

When I got back to my hotel, a little shady set-up on the desert’s edge, I was amused to discover the pesky patron of the tour group was in the bar. I go now to join him. With luck, I’ll return later to explain the roots of all this, and why a video game hero addicted to heroin was a surprisingly sharp idea.

Okay, here we go.

I’m on the Red Line heading back home from South Station, with my bags and all, and this girl gets on at Park and she doesn’t sit down, just plants herself near the doors and pretends to study the Phoenix ads they’ve got papered up top like she’s actually interested. I’ve never seen her before, and I’m sure I’d remember. She’s got about two inches on me, ruler-straight black hair down past her shoulders, and she’s wearing those not-quite-knee-high boots that all the girls downtown pull on the second the temp goes below seventy-five… boots which, I will admit, I have yet to get sick of.

And normally I’d look a second longer than is appropriate, and I’d go back to Bruins scoresheet (my fantasy league, for those keeping track, is getting its ass handed to it, I don’t care how the real team’s doing this year). But instead I fold up my Globe, tap it against my knee, and clear my throat.

“Excuse me.”

Immediately I assume I’m gonna get maced, but she just raises her eyebrows at me. So I figure what the fuck, right? You only live once.

“This is really forward for the subway and everything, but I can’t help but notice you’re, well, Hell, you’re a knockout actually, and I was wondering if you wanted to get coffee sometime.” Only, of course, I said it at about triple the speed, so it was more like one long word…

…And then there’s this long pause, which is all the worse because I’ve got the scratchy conductor guy mumbling something about the doors, and I don’t know if she’s waiting until he’s done to laugh at me, or if she’s searching her pocket for her cell phone to call her linebacker boyfriend, right? And yes, Gerhard, I did check and see if she had a ring first. But against all powers of logic and reason, she gives this little chuckle and shakes her head and says, “Sure, okay.” And she gives me her card - which apparently she has at the ready at any moment - and says “Karen.”

“Russell.”

“Welcome back to Boston, Russell.” And I sorta flounder for a second until I realize that I have my bags, and she gets off at the next stop. So  check the card, and wouldn’t you know it? She works for a fucking ad company!

I’ll give it a few days and ring her up, if I don’t sweat through the card, first!

Believe it or not, I haven’t yet left California… I’m sitting on the hood of my car typing this into my Fujitsu, parked outside Cliffport Mines. The name is laughable: there has never been, nor will there ever be, a port of any kind here. For boats or for drinking. The mines, however, are fascinating. They go about fifteen hundred feet down, and you can go most of that way as well, after signing a few waivers and getting some gold rush history. It’s one of two definite underground excursions that I’ve had planned for this trip, and after putting a cousin under the ground so recently, It only felt right to follow him down.

Patch wrote about the gold rush only once, for an aborted Manga project called “Yankee Steel.” He was convinced it was going to be the one that made him rich, and in the abstract I can see why. Ninjas in the Civil War, an absurd high concept that he was using to tell a story about the dangers of trusting too much in tradition, and a bunch of other things besides. He said he was going to intercut the main action story with short interludes during the Napoleonic Wars, on the Manila Galleon… it was ambitious for something designed to be read primarily as deliberately silly entertainment. And if there’s one thing my cousin was not strong in, it was research. Indeed, most of the projects that DID succeed involved creative ways for him to dodge around doing any real work.

I’m posting, after the cut, the only finished text he ever sent me for the thing, the script for the six-page prologue. If you guys are serious about wanting to assemble a full collection of his work and keep it online here on the family site, I don’t know how many other people have this bit. It’s a gold rush prospector finding something more than he bargained for with his pan.

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