Category Archives: Travel

that kinda lux just ain’t for us

Anne and I went to Las Vegas on Sunday for our friends Matt and Doree’s wedding. We got dressed up like fancy adults, spent an evening with people we love, and got the hell out of there before Vegas could take any of our money away from us.

I had a stupidly good time playing a silly Star Trek penny slot machine for a quarter a pull, and somehow managed to turn my twenty dollars into one hundred while I was at it. My friend Matt and I found a stupid penny poker machine that let you play one hundred hands at a time, and spent about three dollars to have hundreds of dollars worth of fun for close to an hour.

We almost didn’t go, because I just don’t enjoy being in Las Vegas, but we had a great time, and I’m really glad that we went.

On the plane home, I was reflecting on how much fun we had, and I remembered this story, from a very different time.

For a lot of us who grew up in Los Angeles, a big part of being in your early twenties involves something like this:

  • The phone rings.
  • It’s one of your friends.
  • Your friend says, “Vegas?”
  • Before you can pull another breath of life out of the air around you, you reply, “VEGAS!”
  • One drive across the desert a few hours later, you’re in some casino on the strip, losing whatever money you budgeted for the trip, while trying and occasionally succeeding to find the energy that began your journey there, three or four hours ago.
  • The drive back home lasts for three or four hours, but feels much longer.
  • You swear you’ll never do this again.
  • Months go by.
  • You pick up the phone and dial your friend.
  • When the call connects, you say, “Vegas?”

When Anne and I were dating, we did one of these trips. We stayed at the Imperial Palace, which is just an appallingly outdated and rundown pile of regret in the middle of the Strip. Over the course of a few hours, we walked around it and its adjacent casinos, wagering twenty or so dollars at a time in various places, and never winning a single thing. At the time, we didn’t have a lot of money and had to stay on a tight budget, so the $200 I lost really hurt, to say nothing of the unshakable feeling of just being A Total Loser that clung to me like that cloud of dust around Pig Pen.

I remember, as our night was winding down, we walked into the Flamingo Hilton. We found a $5 blackjack table, and I bought in for my last $40. As the first hand came out, a pit boss came over to us, and asked to see my ID. I showed it to him, and he said, “I thought that was you. I love your work.”

At this time in my life, I hadn’t done any acting work that was worth a goddamn in what felt like an eternity, but was probably close to five years on the calendar(which is an eternity in the entertainment industry). “Thanks,” I said, trying to put on my best happy face, and hoping that the stinky cloud of Loser wasn’t as clear to him as it was to me.

“How’s your night going?” He asked.

“Not good,” I said. “I have literally lost every dollar I’ve bet.”

Because the universe has a good sense of humor, and because the person who is writing my life is lazy, I lost the hand in front of me. I don’t recall what it was, specifically, but if I were writing this, it would have been something like standing on a 13 with the dealer showing a 6, only to draw to 18. It had been that kind of night.

“Well,” he said, “I’m rating you right now, so we can get you some drinks or some breakfast.”  He paused, then added, meaningfully, “at the very least.”

I looked at the last $35 dollars I had in front of me, and hoped against hope that somehow my luck would turn around. I knew we wouldn’t get a comped room, or show tickets, or anything like that, but there was something in his voice that told me that if I could just sit there and play for a little while, we’d get something that would make me feel like less of a total loser than I did. Hey, people got lucky in Vegas all the time, right? People sat down with two bucks, and became millionaires with one pull of the handle. Guys turned five bucks into a thousand in mere minutes, getting lucky at a craps table or hitting a longshot in roulette. Hell, people even won on Keno from time to time. Maybe it was time for my luck to turn around.

So I got ready to defy the odds and become a winner.

Five bucks at a time, I proceeded to lose seven hands in a row, and was broke. I stood up from the table, gathered what I could of my pride, told the dealer to have a good night. The pit boss came over to us (Anne had been standing supportively next to me the whole time, as I could not win a single thing, which was a perfect metaphor for our lives back then). “You sure you have to go?” He said.

“Yeah,” I said, unable to mask the totality of the defeat I was feeling, “I’m all out of money. My luck is just …” I didn’t need to finish that thought. At this time in my life, when I was probably around 24 or 25, My luck is just … was how I felt about pretty much everything.

“Well, here,” he said, not unkindly, “let me at least get you some food and a couple of drinks.” He gave me some vouchers, and Anne and I each had a martini, plus steak and eggs, on the house. We made our way back to our hotel room, fell asleep on a really uncomfortable bed, and slept for a few hours until someone woke us up, screaming in our hallway because she’d hit a jackpot on a slot machine.

it pays my way and it corrodes my soul

IMG_20150914_103540

I’m home from a vacation that I desperately needed, and in twenty minutes, I’m going straight to work on something that I love.

It feels weird to not post stuff here regularly (like, daily, I mean), but it also feels good to take some time to myself and reassess what I want to do with my time, how I feel about what I’ve been doing with my time, and also, like, what is time … really, man?

I don’t think I’m going to be writing in my blog as much as I’d like to for the near future, because putting pressure on myself to write here makes me not want to write here. That probably means I’ll go on some kind of blogsplosion soon.

But! If you just can’t get enough of me, you probably want to follow my Tumblr, because I post stuff there several times a day, even when I’m letting tumbleweeds and dust pile up on my blog. I’ve also been making Radio Free Burrito pretty regularly, and of course there’s my stupid Twitter thing.

Okay bye.

 

 

tears in rain

I walked out of the loading dock, through a cloud of rotting garbage, and into the alleyway behind the theater. A curtain of rain fell between me and my destination, a little over a block away.

“Do you want to wait here, while I get you an umbrella?” Liz, the producer from Wizards of the Coast, asked me.

“No,” I said, stepping into the rain, extending my arms outward and turning my palms and face to the sky, “it’s been so long since I felt rain fall on my body, I’m not going to let this opportunity pass me by.”

I walked down the sidewalk, surrounded by other PAX attendees. Some were not bothered by the rain, while others held up programs and newspapers and other things to keep it away. A man walked his dog next to me. The dog was unperturbed by the weather. We got to the corner and waited for the light to change. The rain intensified and it was glorious.

“Are you sure this is okay?” She said.

“Oh yes, this is so much more than okay,” I answered, “this is perfect.”

Earlier

Les Baxter’s soothing sounds were not soothing at 6am. Quiet Village played on my phone, which was, by comparison, better to wake up to as an alarm than an actual alarm’s jarring screech. Still, at 6am, the only thing I want to hear is whatever is in my dreams.

I dragged myself out of bed, silenced my alarm, and started my day.

Coffee.

Muffin.

Shower.

Hairstyle.

Retry hairstyle.

Beard oil.

Retry hairstyle.

Brush teeth.

Give up and accept hairstyle.

Elevator.

Lobby.

“Good morning,” April, from Wizards of the Coast, said.

“LIES!” I said with a smile.

“Can I get you a coffee?”

“Yes. You can get me all the coffee.”

“How would you like your coffee?” A new guy asked me, joining us. “I’m Brad from Wizards,” he told me.

“Angry. I want a big cup of angry coffee.”

We all laughed as Ashly Burch joined us.

“Good morning, Ashly,” April said.

“More lies,” I said, “there is no such thing as a good morning at bullshit o’clock.”

We went on like this for a few more minutes, my anti-morning sass offset by Ashly’s relentless happiness and positivity. Coffees in hand, we walked out of our hotel and a few blocks away to the theater where we were hosting the Battle for Zendikar preview show for Wizards of the Coast, thirteen hours in the future.

Rehearsal went as well as a rehearsal can at 7am (bullshit o’clock plus one hour, if you’re scoring on the Wheaton Clock), and a second run through was legitimately good. The point of the thing was to introduce a bunch of new cards that are about to come out in the Battle for Zendikar set, and to do it in a way that was hopefully amusing to the people on the room, and the Magic fans watching on the Internet. In a little over thirteen hours, we’d know if we succeeded.

I thanked everyone for a good couple of run throughs, went back to my hotel, and took a nap. I woke up, ate a sandwich, and took another nap. Then I woke up for real, went downstairs, and headed back into PAX to play Magic against as many people as I could in two hours.

If the presentation was the work, this was going to be the fun. I haven’t played Magic competitively in well over ten years, and I’ve only played casually in the last five or six years. Until I started preparing for this weekend, I didn’t know what was happening in the story of Magic, and there were a lot of current mechanics that I wasn’t familiar with. But I did a ton of homework, and with the help of some friends (especially my friend, Graham Stark, who really held my hand through the whole process), I entered the battlefield, as ready as I could be against players who dueled on a regular basis.

In the story of Magic, the world of Zendikar is currently being attacked by a species of terrifying creatures called the Eldrazi. These creatures are massive and ancient and hungry. They are so hungry, they devour everything in whatever plane they happen to invade. From their point of view, this isn’t a bad thing (they just want to scoop up everything available at the buffet), but from the point of view of literally every other living thing in the multiverse, the Eldrazi need to be stopped and contained. So these powerful Planeswalkers used the magic inherent to Zendikar along with these things called Hedrons to trap the Eldrazi there. Everything was great for a few thousand years, but now things are not so great. The Eldrazi are awake, hungry, and anxious to get back to feeding, starting with Zendikar itself.

That’s where I and a bunch of really cool and interesting people come in. We all played the role of the Eldrazi, in duels against players who were the representing the Zendikari. I had one deck that was built around summoning these massive Eldrazi creatures, and the players had their choice of three different decks that used different strategies, according to their skill level.

The players were, literally, battling for Zendikar. When a certain number of player victories were achieved, the image of an Eldrazi creature on a huge screen would be replaced with the image of a preview card from the next set, Battle for Zendikar. It was a clever and fun way for Magic fans to both duel against some cool and interesting people (or me), while they also worked as a group to get a first look at what’s coming up next in the game they love to play.

It was incredibly fun. I’m not good at Magic by any objective measure, and I’m certainly not going to offer any kind of meaningful challenge to a player who is experienced in tournament play … but I am pretty good at playing a role, and in these duels I was playing the role of the bad guys, which is something I’m fairly comfortable — some may even say good at — doing.

I learned how my deck was constructed with the help of Rich Hagon, a Pro Tour announcer. “You want to stay alive long enough to get enough mana to cast these big creatures,” he told me. “It won’t be easy, but when you can hit them, you’ll hit them hard.”

“Back when I played regularly, I liked to play with small, fast, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ decks, so this is the opposite of my preferred playing style,” I told him. “I think it’s going to be fun to get out of my comfort zone and do something different.”

Rich wished me luck, we discussed the possibility of him joining me for Tabletop next season, and I got ready to go to work. Well, I mean, to play. Even though I was technically working, I was actually actually playing in the way people play for enjoyment. Playing was also my job for the next few hours, so I guess I was going to work to play. Which was for work. But mostly for play.

Still with me? Good.

I got wrecked in my first game, which gave me tons of mana but not a lot of creatures. I won my second game, using a bunch of smaller creatures to absorb damage from the other player while I got more and more lands into play, finally casting a couple of Eldrazi who were very big and very nasty, including Ulamog the Infinite Gyre.

Win or lose, though, a couple of things happened in every duel:

  • I had a really good time, and so did the other player.
  • None of the people I played with traded the joy of playing for the pursuit of winning.
  • Every player told me how excited they were to play with me, and that they’d been hoping I’d be the Eldrazi (from the more than twenty possible players) they’d face.

This last thing was really awesome, because I could feel how happy it made these people to play with me. I’ve been feeling pretty much the opposite of awesome for several weeks, now, and actually getting to sit down, face to face, in a semi-quiet few moments with real people who wanted to be there with me was … restorative, I guess is the best word. One player told me, “Thank you for everything you do. From Tabletop to Titansgrave — which is the best thing I’ve ever seen — to talking so openly about anxiety and depression.” He then destroyed me, with the final life counts being -8 for me, and 43 for him. It was awesome.

Part of my Depression is this voice that never stops telling me that I suck. Part of my Depression is this constant fear that everyone will know how afraid of failure I am. Part of my Depression is this relentless worrying, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that I’m never going to do anything that matters.

I know that all of those thoughts — occasionally sincerely held beliefs, even — aren’t rational. I know that they are intrusive and part of depression lying, but when the depression and anxiety are very strong and very loud and I’m feeling very sad about some things, the guard who sits between my rational mind and my irrational emotions is easy to sneak past, and when Depression sees that happen, it makes the most of the opportunity.

I was really worried that I was going to suck when I did the presentation with Ashly on Saturday night. I was really worried that Magic players — who aren’t exactly renowned for being the most welcoming and inclusive people on the planet — wouldn’t give me a chance, because I don’t play as frequently or intensely as they do. I was worried that I would be tired and that I would make stupid mistakes that made me look unprepared. Depression saw all of that, and it pounced. I was, basically, a big ball of anxiety up until the moment the presentation was finished, and for a fair amount of time after, too.

I did make some stupid mistakes, but I thought I pulled out of them in an entertaining way (the folks who hired me told me they liked what I did, and the writers of the script were pleased with what I did, so I’ll let them judge). Ashly was perfect, and she made us both look better than I deserved. But I really did have fun talking with Mark Rosewater, who is the head designer for Magic, when we revealed to the world the preview cards we showed during the duels, and some others (like full frame dual lands) that made Magic fans go bananas.

(If you can spell bananas without Gwen Stefani doing it for you in your head, you’re missing out on something great.)

So putting it all together, it was a good and successful event. Yeah, the people who hate something that I do because I did it are always there, and yeah the type of Magic player who needs to be a gatekeeper didn’t like it, and there were some people who just didn’t like it because it wasn’t what they were looking for. All of that is totally fine, of course, but they were outnumbered by at least 20:1, and maybe even more.

But all of that isn’t even the best part of the day, or even the trip, for me.
The best part of the day came at the end of my last duel. The guy I was playing with was kicking my ass. I was down to, I think, 5 or 7 life, and he was still close to 20. I got super lucky and was able to play a card that wipes everything off the table that isn’t colorless, which cleared off all his creatures and gave me a couple of rounds to get out Ulamog, who went to work destroying all of his lands and creatures, and then devouring him. With the win, I finished 4 and 3 on the afternoon.

I extended my hand and thanked him for playing, because it was a genuinely fun and challenging match. He took my hand and he said, “I was really hoping that I’d get to play with you, because you saved my life.” Before I could respond, he continued, “everything you’ve written and shared about anxiety and depression helped me get treatment for my own mental health.”

It’s not the first time someone has said something like this to me, but this guy and I had spent about twenty minutes playing a game together, and we’d sort of bonded a little bit, the way people do when they’re playing a game. I felt an unexpected swell of emotion, and I said, “I’m really happy to know that I could help you the way Jenny Lawson helped me. I have to tell you that I haven’t been feeling very awesome lately, and the last few weeks have really been a struggle. In fact, I’ve had to take [medication] every day this week just to get through the day.”

He laughed. “Me too!”

“The thing I think we have to remember is that there is no finish line with depression, anxiety, or any other sort of mental illness. We’re on this path, and the path is constantly changing. Sometimes it’s flat and well-marked, and we can see all the way to the horizon.” I realized that I had gone from shaking his hand to holding it. “Other times, it’s so heavily shrouded in fog and mist, we can’t even see past our fingertips and we need someone to show us where the path is. And sometimes, we come to a wall that we don’t think we’ll ever get over. I’ve been staring at the base of that wall for weeks, and just now you helped me remember that there are always handholds to get up and over it.”

“You were one of my handholds,” he said, with a squeeze of my hand.

And that’s when we both began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping tears off my cheeks, “it’s been a really shitty few weeks, and you just really, really made me feel better about myself.”

We began to laugh through the tears, and when we composed ourselves, we took a picture together.

“Thanks for playing with me,” I said, “and thanks for … everything else, too.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“Play more games!” I said.

“I will!”

The announcer told the crowd that we were about to reveal another new card, and there was much rejoicing.

Later

I had a little less than an hour between finishing the games and starting the presentation.

Again, I walked back to the hotel to change my clothes. I reflected on my final duel, and another, similar conversation I had with a different player right after it that is so deeply personal I’m not going to recount it.

It was raining, again. I looked up into it, again, and let the rain fall on my face.

We are home from GenCon

I have many things to write about, and many experiences to share.

But right now I am emotionally and physically exhausted, so here’s a picture of a Beholder:

BEHOLD(er)

Did you go to GenCon? What did you play/buy/playtest/demo that you loved? Any huge hits or misses you want to share with the rest of us?