Both directions, uphill

On April 3, 2018April 2, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting5 Comments

They say– well, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone say this specifically, but I assume someone has– that you never really understand your parents until you’re a parent yourself. And I feel like there’s a lot of truth to that, right? I feel like I understand my mom and dad a lot more now that I’ve got a son of my own, and there are things I have in common with my parents now that only became things in common once I became a dad. I got raised right, as near as I can tell, or at least as right as my parents were capable, and for the most part I’m trying to raise my son the same way my mom and dad raised me.

Mostly, anyway.

Anyone who is around my age will remember the vaguely patronizing way most if not all of our parents treated video games. When I was growing up I couldn’t name a single parent of one of my friends who was into games. I remember my mom playing Pitfall! and Pac-Man on our Atari and that’s it. My dad, to the absolute best of my recollection, never touched a game controller once. Nobody’s dad played video games. Absolutely nobody’s. And games were treated as something that was For Kids and always would be For Kids; it was assumed we were all going to grow out of gaming eventually and put down the controllers forever sooner or later. The idea that anyone could ever make a career out of video games was openly laughed at.

That idea may be the single most incorrect thing our parents thought about my generation, right? Some of us stopped playing eventually, but the idea that I’m 41 and still playing video games isn’t even a little bit odd, and there are tons of careers connected to games. You can even make good money literally just playing games with the right Twitch stream or YouTube channel.

So I used part of our tax refund to buy a Nintendo Switch. I came home with the new Zelda game (which turned out to be terrible) and the new Mario game, which … didn’t. And for the first time, my son is not only allowed to play a video game system that we have (I haven’t let him touch the PS4, for obvious reasons) but he also wants to. He’s literally playing right now, next to me, while I’m writing this.

And any minute now, he’s going to hit a patch that he has trouble with, and do you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to hand me the controller and ask me to beat it for him.

And I will ask him if he tried, and I won’t do it unless I feel like he tried hard enough before asking me to jump in for him.

I cannot even imagine what my dad might have done if I’d tried to have him help me beat a stage or a boss in a game. The entire idea is completely ludicrous. And for my son, the idea that Daddy is better at video games than he is is perfectly normal, and eventually he’s going to beat me at some fighting game and it’ll be like the first time I beat my dad at basketball.

(I’ve never beaten my dad at basketball. I don’t play basketball. Neither does my dad. We’ve never once played basketball together. This is not a criticism of my upbringing. Substitute “beat him at euchre” if you want something more directly salient to my family if you’d like.)

(My uncle David taught me to play chess. I don’t think I’ve ever beaten him.)

And sooner or later this kid is gonna get mad at me for not wanting to beat something for him, and he’s gonna hear about how when I was a kid, we had these things called lives in video games, and passwords, and nobody to help us because not only could nobody older than us play the games, but there wasn’t any Internet to look up clues, unless you had your parents’ permission to call the Nintendo hint line, which cost money, so sometimes you just had to stop playing something basically forever because you couldn’t figure out what to do next.)

Yeah. Uphill, in the snow, both ways, that’s how I played Nintendo as a kid.

On being dumb and confused, in that order

On April 2, 2018April 2, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Take a look at that there can of Mountain Dew. Just take a second and look at it.

Oh, wait, I’m sorry, I meant “Mtn Dew,” since the company decided that a weird abbreviation instead of a perfectly normal word was how they wanted to be known from now on. I assume trademarks are involved somehow and either way I think it’s stupid.

If you follow me on Twitter or on Instagram (and if you don’t, why not, dammit?) you may already be aware that I discovered a truly epic splat of bird shit on the door of my car when I left for work this morning– fully four or five inches wide, big enough that I have to assume it came from the bald eagle that’s been spotted around here recently, because normal birds don’t shit this big. I mean, hell, it was a big enough splat of bird shit that I took a picture of it and put that picture on the Internet, and I don’t feel bad about it, because you would have done the exact same damn thing.

But anyway. That huge splat of bird shit meant that I needed to hit a gas station on the way home to clean it off. Also for gas. And also, as it turned out, for caffeine, since as soon as I got to the gas station I realized I needed Mountain Dew.

And then I saw that can, and I saw the flavor– for Christ’s sake, crafted green apple kiwi, which is absolutely guaranteed to not be anything I want to drink, and with a word in the name that does not belong there at all to boot– and, for no clear reason, I bought the can, because the can looked so good, and despite knowing that it wasn’t going to taste very good I spent money on it anyway.

This is a gatdamb miracle of marketing over my own good common sense, and I knew it at the time and did it anyway. And then discovered that the beverage itself was a poisonous-looking green in color, not far off from the pull tab at the top, and the color that we used to use for things like antifreezes to signal that they shouldn’t be consumed, and of course it tasted like ass. But Mtn Dew has my money, for something I didn’t want and knew beforehand I wouldn’t like, because yay cool can!

Sigh.

Just over a year ago I wrote this post about a shitty, shitty house full of shitty, shitty people near me that I noticed had been foreclosed on by the bank and sold at auction. The house was purchased and torn down nearly instantly, and is currently open green space. What I left out, because it wasn’t relevant, was that there was a second shitty house not far down the road from the first shitty house. These folks didn’t raise my ire because of the lack of white supremacist symbols on the house, and in fact it appeared to be abandoned anyway– but it must have been a terrible place to live in, because each and every time it rained, no matter how small of a rain, the entire front yard would flood. Heavy rain could leave puddles in the yard for weeks. I can only imagine the mold that must have been inside that house.

I drove past it Saturday night on the way home and the whole house was gone, leaving behind evidence of what sure as hell looked like an explosion. Today, with better light, I stopped and took a couple of pictures. Does this look like the results of a deliberate demolition to anyone?

This would have been where the house was and, I think, a bit of the back yard. You can see what looks like a piece of siding in the middle of this picture, but I promise there used to be a whole ass house there. The picture is taken from a distance because the place is surrounded by a fence. In particular, look at that tree on the right, and look at how it looks like the big branch bisecting that tree seems to have split the entire thing in half. What the shit happened here?

The house behind it, by the way, appears to be fine, and there’s no visible damage to any of the trees or the grass or anything on their lot.

This is a view of what would have been their front yard. None of that looks like construction or demolition debris to me– it all looks like exploded tree. I don’t even see anything that looks like a foundation anywhere– the house doesn’t have a footprint any longer at all.

I can’t find any news articles or any references to anything having happened there recently. I feel like if there had been a big fire or something there would have been an article about it– but nothing looks burned. Anybody have any theories?

I was, by the by, unable to fully clean off the birdshit. It’s gonna take a rainstorm.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On April 1, 2018March 31, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m Luther Siler. I’m a writer and an editor. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I’ve written several books you might be interested in, ranging from short story collections to near-future science fiction to fantasy space opera to nonfiction, all available as ebooks or in print from Amazon. Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.

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