Brooke Gets Her Way

Two weeks ago, Brooke asked me why she hasn’t been on the weblog yet. I told her, “Brooke, all you have to do is get drunk and do something stupid, and I’ll have your story on there the next day.”

It's funny that, on the one hand, several people are mad at me about this blog, while others are bugging me to find out why I haven't mentioned them yet. I do have several friends here who check up on it regularly; they think the posts are fun and want to be part of the whole thing.

Of course, I haven't been writing as much the last two weeks. Been a lot going on, what with looking for work and some illnesses in the family. I've been doing pretty well at catching up on my reading, though. I’ve been re-reading Poe the last few days. Last night I read, among other things, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Decent story. Arthur Conan Doyle certainly cribbed from it, though he went out of his way to have Sherlock Holmes put Dupin down in a couple of stories.

There was something I’d forgotten in the years since I’d last read it. At the beginning, Poe (through his Watson-like narrator) attempts to discredit chess as an intellectual exercise, finding it inferior to card games. He says:

...the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood...the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat.

He says further (and I paraphrase, for Poe, as always, goes on at tremendous length) that whist, which nobody ever plays anymore, is favored by men of the highest intellect while "eschewing chess as frivolous." A great card player has to understand everything, while a great chess player apparently does not; and one who is proficient in cards should be good at everything that requires intellectual rigor, while a great chess player is frequently only that. A chess player doesn't need to understand the person he's playing against; he doesn't have to think, doesn't have to have any particular skills; he only has to pay attention.

I've got to disagree with this. Poe's is an extremely narrow view of the skills involved in playing chess well. I’ve heard a similar argument from Erik, Hank’s resident professional card player. I have no real idea what’s involved in being a good card player (though Erik thinks I would be a good one if I tried), but I know intimately what’s involved in playing good chess. I’m not a professional-quality player, of course, but I’m a damn good bar player; I’m not likely to meet anyone in my everyday life who can beat me consistently.

Chess certainly requires an awareness of what’s happening on the board, just as whist (I had to look up the rules online) requires one to remember what cards have already been played, and therefore to know which are still waiting in the opponents’ hands. I submit that an activity that increases awareness is, by definition, an intellectual exercise.

Saying that something is intellectual means that it relates to, or appeals to and engages, the intellect, which is pretty straightforward. What is the intellect? According to Dictionary.com, it is the ability to learn and reason; the capacity for knowledge and understanding; the ability to think abstractly or profoundly. What is chess if it doesn't fit this definition?

Learning and reasoning are the very heart of chess. Recognizing a situation that you've been in before, knowing that you came badly out of it last time, and searching for a new response; isn't that learning? Reasoning is very much sharpened by chess specifically because the consequences of faulty reasoning are immediately and inarguably displayed (which, let's face it, doesn't happen often enough in real life, or someone else would be President), and rewards for proper reasoning are correspondingly great.

But most important, the capacity for abstract thought is the single ability that sets good players apart from bad ones. Someone once proved that, after each player has had his first ten moves, there are something like TEN MILLION different postions that could have been reached on a chess board. Whatever Poe might think, no one can be aware of all those positions. A player must be able to look at the board and see what is likely to happen over the next few moves, certainly; he must see which attacks are likely to succeed or fail before the positions that make them possible arise; but mere awareness of the board won't help him. There are simply too many possibilities. He has to be able to adapt himself to conditions that can change with breathtaking speed. He has to be aware of the potential of each piece, singly and in conjunction with its brothers, and he must be prepared to move fluidly from attack to defense, from one wing to the other, or to the center. He has to see the whole board and be ready for anything. If that isn't abstract thinking, I don't know what the hell is.

Also, it's ridiculous to say that a chess player doesn't have to know anything about human nature to succeed. I know, for example, when I play Ace, that he fears knights; so I goad him into exchanging them in ways that improve my overall position. Some people are tactically strong but strategically weak; you distract them with bells and whistles while the telling attack is brewing somewhere else. I know that some people are uncomfortable playing without queens; some can't navigate a crowded position; some lose control in an open position. I learn these things about people, and it makes them easier to beat.

My strategy is determined by what I know about my opponent; will this person be so enamored of his attack that his king will be open to a subtle thrust? Will he ignore the danger of a queen-side pawn majority too long? Will he get so caught up by activity in front of the castled position that, with a quick shift of queen and/or bishop, a weakside attack can be mounted that he can't meet? I'll know these things, or similar weaknesses, fairly early in the first game; I'll know them all after a full game. Don't tell me a good chess player can't read his opponent.

As to whether any of this is profound or not, well, I'll leave that to you to decide. Whatever profundity it has, however, was apparently lost on Poe. He was aware of the profound in beauty and in horror; perhaps he should have stuck to writing about what he knew.

* * * * * * *

Last Saturday, Brooke told me, “Look, I want to be on the blog, but I don’t want to be on there for doing something stupid. Katy’s on there, and you don’t talk about her being stupid.”
“Well, Brooke, Katy works here. If you worked here, you’d already be on the blog, too.”

You don't actually have be drunk and stupid to get on the blog, but it helps. There are other ways; being around when I myself do something stupid that I'll write about is useful, of course, but there's no way to count on that.

The principal thing is to be in my head when I write these things. Right now my head is mostly full of my Gramma, who isn't supposed to last the night. I didn't realize she was that sick (though I knew she was in bad shape) until a couple of days ago. I don't drive, so I couldn't get down there. I called and spoke to her. She can't reply, but they held the phone to her ear, and my uncle said her face lit up when she heard my voice. That might just be him talking, of course, but I've decided to believe it.

My cousin Jacob went down to see her. He lives in Columbus, which puts me on his way down; I wish he'd called and asked if I wanted to go. It would have been nice to see her once more. But there's nothing to be done about it now. Gramma is 75, I believe, which seems like a ripe old age, but her mother and grandmother both lived to be 100 or thereabouts. I actually have memories of my great-great-grandmother, who didn't die 'til I was around five. How many people can say that?

Anyway, yeah, I figured Gramma had another twenty years or so. Frankly, I thought she'd outlive me...men in my family die young, but the women go on forever. I never expected this, really. But, she's buried her husband, one of her sons (my dad), and one of her grandsons (my cousin Eddie), and maybe she's just tired of burying people. I can relate to that.

Another person who’s been on my mind recently is my friend Bill, for kind of an odd reason. I rented Shaun of the Dead from the video store last week. Loved it. I’ve watched it like fifteen times now. And Shaun kinda reminds me of Bill. Doesn’t look much like him, really, but some of his mannerisms were dead-on. The best was in Liz’s apartment, where Shaun is trying to give Liz some flowers he bought for his mother (with what I thought was a wonderful cover story referring back to their conversation of the night before; at least she knows he listens to her). The look he gets when Liz says, “They’re for your mum, aren’t they?” and he says, “Yeah,” that’s Bill all over. There were a few more instances, too, but that’s the one that sticks in my memory.

The movie, as I say, I loved. I’m a huge zombie movie fan (as you’ll notice from my masthead). The film was funny, though how funny it would be to someone who doesn’t get into zombie movies, I can’t say. Part of the fun was watching for references to the old Romero films. There were several, some very obvious (the “We’re coming to get you, Barbara” line, for example) and some a bit more subtle. They used a lot of the music from both Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, which was a nice touch. Seven people trying to get to the pub kind of mirrored the seven people trapped in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, too, though one of them dying en route shoots that a bit to hell. And I like to think that the whole idea of their attempt to cover the last hundred yards to the pub by pretending to be zombies was an homage to Redneck Zombies, a trash classic of the genre (serious props to ANYONE who has ANY idea what I'm talking about here). There were other references, too, but not as many as I thought there would be. I was expecting a kind of zombie movie trivia game, but it was mostly just a good, fun film.

My favorite reference was the name of the store Shaun worked in: FOREE ELECTRONICS (you can see it best when he takes off his name tag and throws it on the sink). Ken Foree, of course, was the actor who played Peter, the hero of Dawn of the Dead. I was very pleased when I spotted that.

But as I say, it was more than a collection of references. It had some great moments all its own, like when Barbara and Di are watching Shaun, Liz, and Ed try to destroy the corpse of John, the pub owner, and are bopping along with the Queen song playing on the jukebox in the background; that'll be parodied in future films itself. It's awesome, too, in a John Waters kinda way, when Philip’s zombie turns off the stereo in the Jaguar. Good stuff.

When I lived in Dayton, my place was directly across the street from a huge cemetery. My friend Justin came over one night and we got really drunk and I made him watch all three of the original Romero movies, and then he had to walk home past the cemetery at four in the morning. He told me that he got stopped on the way home walking down the middle of the road; he couldn’t bring himself to walk on the cemetery side, which was clear, and he was afraid to walk down the sidewalk on my side ‘cause all the trees gave the zombies too many places to hide.

Incidentally, nowhere in any of the original three movies does any character refer to the zombies as “zombies.” I wonder if that was what these filmmakers were thinking when they had Shaun upbraid Ed for calling them zombies: “It just sounds so…ridiculous!”

* * * * * * *

Last Wednesday, Brooke asked me, “What time did you leave the other night?”
“Not too late, I don’t think,” I answered. “Why?”
“Oh, I just wanted to see if you were still here when I got drunk and stupid.”
“No, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I missed that.”
Later that night, though, she had a few drinks and made a confession. I always enjoy confessional drunks. “Ah hah,” I teased her, “you’ve finally made the blog with that one.”
She was horrified. “You won’t really put that on there, will you?”
“I don’t know, Brooke,” I said. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

I won't, though; that would be pretty mean of me. Not that I'm not mean, but tonight isn't a mean night. Maybe some other time. If I was feeling mean, this would be a good time for it; there's some college student behind me trying to sort out some sort of financial trouble over her cell phone. I've already heard her Marshall username and password, her credit card number, her password into an internet course she's taking, and her full name. Someday a less honest person will find this young one to be a virtual gold mine. But for tonight, at least, she's safe.

I had wanted to write something beautiful tonight. I’ve been walking around, digging the night and thinking, and I know there’s something beautiful in there, but it won’t come out. It’s possible that I’ve drowned it; an awful lot of whiskey made that trip with me, and not much of it made it back.

I’d hoped to write something like John Steinbeck’s description of the Salinas Valley that starts East of Eden, but I’m not feeling it. I might be able to manage something beautiful and terribly sad, like the last two paragraphs of The Big Sleep, but no one wants to read that tonight, least of all me.

I wanted something that would cause my spirit to rise on the wind and float away, something that would make you, dear reader, feel like your heart had gotten too big for your chest. I think that, for tonight at least, I am destined to be disappointed in that. I can’t seem to get a grip on whatever beauty I’ve got in me (which is, after all, ephemeral at the best of times).

Frankly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of beauty in the world to work with, just right at the moment. I expect that's just my mood. Tomorrow, maybe, I'll write more about Gramma; and that might be beautiful, and I promise it won't be sad.

Might write some more about zombie movies, too...been watching 'em an awful lot lately. Might even check out Redneck Zombies, if they've got it, to refresh my memory. I'm spreading the gospel of bad horror movies; everybody jump on the train!

Basically, I have no idea what I'll write about. I'll discuss it with everyone at Trivia Night, and we'll make an informed decision sometime around three o'clock, when everyone's ass-wasted (Trivia Night is the one night I know I'm gonna get wasted in a bar). My next post might not even be in anything that could justifiably be called English, so prepare yourself.

* * * * * * *

This past Saturday, Brooke said, “You didn’t really put that thing on your blog, did you? I’ve been afraid to check.”
“No, Brooke, I wouldn’t do that. You are gonna be on the next post, though.”
“For what?”
“Oh, I’m using you to divide the sections. You’re gonna be a literary device!”
“Cool. I like that.”
“Yes, sweetheart; I thought that would make you happy.”
And I hope it has.