ultimate

SELF-HELP RESOLUTIONS

I have two resolutions that I’m excited to share:

The first is canceling my first resolution. Did you know you could do this? I had an elaborate and specific resolution that I scheduled for the start of the New Year and IMMEDIATELY blew it. It was a bit more involved than working out three times a week or writing in a gratitude journal before bedtime.

What I wanted to do was go 365 days without reading any self-help books.

My life, I’ve realized, has become a sponge for any advice I can find. Call it the benefit of living in the Age of Everything (the internet, comparison, research, social media, whatever). For as long as I can remember I’ve sought out anything and everything that could shed light on what I was going through. Originally, self-help was designed as a tool – helping oneself, go figure – but has now turned into the goal. If anything went wrong in life, I’d look up the remedy, which was a temporary emotional band-aid, but never indented the larger scope of the problem. Eventually, taking the drug of self-help was all that mattered.

In other words: I had forgone living and was, instead, reading about how one ought to live.

And so I was determined to live a life independent about reading about an ideal one.

Triumphant as that resolution was, I immediately caved no less than fifteen hours into the New Year when I was feeling low and needed a pick-me-up.

As I flipped through the pages of a book from my shelf, I thought, “Is there a self-help book for being addicted to self-help books?”

Wherein I extracted a valuable lesson: When the remedy becomes a contradiction, get rid of the remedy.

So, I’ve eliminated that resolution. Instead, I’m sticking to my goal of living life while not actively seeking how others live for reference. For a few months, maybe.

I’m much more excited about the second resolution:

To post another Weekly Post-Ed.

It’s specific, achievable, and something I’ve been wanting to do for so long. Without further babbling, here’s a new one (finally!).

See? Goals are achievable—so long as they are bite-sized and easily consumable as actual bite-sized things. I assume I could eat this Weekly Post-Ed if I printed it out…

Am I getting off track? Gotcha, we’ll move on.

***

BALLS DROPPING

This New Year’s marked the first ever ball dropping in my hometown. Around 6000 attended, which was more than any local officials imagined since only two police officers were posted for duty for the entirety of the crowd. Cramming along a single avenue that acts as both the single exciting street in a smalltown (complete with restaurants, a performing arts theater, hockey arena, and a peppering of breweries offering a local culinary favorite: pizza), thousands hereded around a single crane that lifted a luminescent ball wrapped in Christmas lights high above the crowd. The adjoining buildings, no taller than three stories, acted as balcony party sights for those who could afford the new-age apartments that rival apartment prices in NYC (not to be outdone, the landlords are just as negligent when attending to faulty AC units and weird leaks from a guy playing AC/DC most of the night).

Driving to the downtown area would act as a perfect preview for the preferred scent of the evening. Every corner has sprouted a cannabis dispensary and patrons of the downtown area were well stocked. As one attendee of the event said, “I tried to smell anything else, even my armpits, but couldn’t.”

If the smell of cheap and expensive reactional marijuana (a mix that made for a “meh” combination despite the price point) wasn’t pervading the atmosphere of the ball drop, the mood surely shifted. Lines for alcohol ranged from an hour to the following fortnight, and the New Year’s reminiscing gave way to hallunicating optimism.

“Once the ball drops,” said one man, “we’re going to beat the shit out of it and get all the weed!”

During the course of several hits of weed, a New Year’s ball drop evolved from a celebratory event to reel in the new year to a birthday pinata bash. The two officers on duty were quick to ascertain the plot and apprehend the three or four brooms from those closest to the ball drop location.

As midnight came and went, drinks spilled and kisses given to loved ones and complete strangers, it was a night of jubilee in a small town. One city official was ecstatic about the event, stating the town “was back!”

Others, meanwhile, offered up constructive criticism. One hair salonist said, “Why was the ball so small? I mean, it was like my son’s little kickball size. Couldn’t they find something bigger? I like bigger balls.”

Well, don’t we all?

No official word has been given about budget constraints in terms of the small ball size, but many of the cannibus community had a fix that is catching a lot of attention.

“Just buy a second one and add it to the first one!”

One artist went so far as to draw a mockup for this proposal. Another offered a slogan to go along with it. With enough support, next year’s ball(s) drop will be another huge community hit.

[Balls on crane with slogan: 2025: Get Ready for Our Balls to Drop!]

***

2023 PLAYLISTS

I’ve posted four new playlists! They were my quarterly playlists from 2023 that have (finally) been posted. If the New Year was in desperate need of anything, it was an infusion of new jams to start fresh with. Why not click on one of the banners below and sample some of the best tracks from last year.

Pairs nicely with new gym memberships, I hear.

***

A SMASHING NEW YEAR

Lastly, the site has a new look.

It’s hard to believe that on April 26 of this year, Super Smash Bros. will celebrate its 25^TH anniversary. It’s even harder to believe I’ve played the same video game franchise over a 25-year period. When I think of what else I’ve done over such a long period of my life, nothing healthy comes to mind. Coffee drinker? Sure, since I was 14. Light sugar addiction? Even longer: maybe when I was just a baby. Other than having a sibling and parents for the entirety of my life, very little makes the cut of “Celebrating Our 25^TH Anniversary!”

I would mention my previous marriage at the age of 4 to now super model Kate Ferrera, but unfortunately we divorced just before our 25^TH anniversary. Unlike Super Smash Bros., Kate changed— she wasn’t a super model when we married, but everything changed when she moved away from diapers. It was a long descent into hell after that. Think of the movie “Walk the Line” starring Joaquin Phoenix, except picture the film starring a pair of toddlers with swaths of diapers and ants-on-a-log snacks in the place of drugs, and tantrums (not so different from the movie).

With the 25^TH anniversary fast approaching, there was no better time to redesign the website in the style of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It is the magnum opus of the series that includes every fighter from the entire series (the likes of Cloud Strife, Sonic the Hedgehog, Solid Snake, Ryu and Ken, Sora, Banjo-Kazooie, and on and on and on). This dizzying array of characters epitomized the clashing video game universe we all wished was real growing up. If anything, Super Smash Bros. became a banner title that showed that dreams really can come true.

Anyway, I gush…

It’s a fitting look for the New Year, I think.

***

I sincerely wish that all of you had had a safe start to the New Year. Maybe things will be easier (or maybe they won’t), but just know you’re not alone. I’ll be here, making playlists and tinkering with what to write next. Feel free to write in.

Wishing you as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,

Some Wonderful Lines from The Wild Wild West

Having watched a few episodes with my parents lately, there are some absolute gem-like lines in this 1960’s television show. Here’s a sampling:

Evil Prison Warden: “Show them what happens when they cross you, Iron-Leg.”

[Iron Leg crosses to a nearby wooden bench and proceeds to kick it into two perfectly cut halves].

Evil Prison Warden: [A snicker] “Be careful, Mr. West, or the same fate will come to you.”

And:

Random grizzly bearded prospector chopping a cigar-store Indian with an axe in an abandoned western town: “There’s a pandemic of neck breaking going around. And it’s contagious! I’d watch out if I were you.”

*******

Robert Caro’s Working

I read this book over a weekend. Robert Caro is the biographer of books on Robert Moses and President Lyndon Johnson, men of power and ability to shape the worlds they lived in. Caro’s book, Working, however, is about the author’s experiences with interviewing the people connected with those great men and finding the story. I felt I was reading about a writer from another time, when answers didn’t come from a convenient Google search. Caro is the journeyman journalist, out on the road and tracking down answers to something much bigger than what is on the surface.

He and his wife, Ina, devoted three years of their lives to living in the Hill Country in Texas to understand the place President Lyndon Johnson grew up. Hill Country in Texas, according to Caro, is little more glamorous than a town without electricity. Houses can be miles apart, there isn’t a sense of community other than convenient geography, and the desolate countryside is so utterly abandoned that without the moonlight or brilliance of a starry night, it’s a world drowned in darkness.

I admire Caro’s drive, his grit to find what he was looking for.

Most of my writing (short stories, certainly) is improvisation. I sit down at a computer, type the first title that comes to mind, set a timer, and start writing something. Usually what ends up on the page is the final story in one form or another. So, it struck me when I read Robert Caro’s writing advice from a former Princeton professor of his. Caro wrote short stories in very similar way to my own (last second, off the cuff, procrastinating until finally getting to it). The professor said to him, “…you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

What Mr. Caro’s professor meant was to put more care into his writing, that he wasn’t fooling anyone by writing in this well-received, speedy way.

I’m sure to write more about this, but I have a complicated relationship with writing short stories. To me, they feel “easy” because I can write them without overthinking. This doesn’t mean that what I write is good, but that I can sit down and crank something out feels more like a party trick than something to take seriously.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy them (I love my short stories), but it doesn’t feel as satisfying to write them as, say, a novel or something I’ve developed a more meaningful relationship with.

I think with Robert Caro, and with the words of his professor, I felt exposed in a very constructive way; that I wasn’t getting brownie points for how I wrote my own stories. It was worth reading.

More to come on that topic in the future, I’m sure.

***

Pyra/Mythra in Smash Ultimate

Pyra/Mythra from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It’s a good addition. My favorite thing about Smash DLC announcements is that they are seldom what leakers suggest. In this way, I’m more satisfied that Nintendo fans can’t predict what will happen with a favorite franchise. When the audience knows what will happen next, you’re sunk. In that spirit, Smash Ultimate remains afloat.

Besides, what the game’s director, Masahiro Sakurai, decides to do with new characters is FAR more interesting than who the character is revealed to be, in my opinion.

***

The Rest of Nintendo’s February 2021 Direct

“Meh.”

“Oh, hey! A new Mario Golf!”

“Really, no Breath of the Wild 2 news? Not even some concept art? Yikes.”

“Meh, and it’s over.”

***

On the Brightside, Guilty Gear Strive

It has been fantastic watching the Beta for this game. Such a frantic, fast-paced, beautiful fighting game with great rollback netcode. It brings me joy to see a game bringing joy to others.

***

New Short Story Coming Next Week

I’m finishing up a draft of an upcoming short story that will be posted this week. I’ll include a teaser to hold you all over. It’s a silly little story.

Weekly Post-Ed #61