Big George

First of all, Happy Fathers' Day to all of you geeky dads!  I have a few words to share about my own dad, who's not geeky at all, but he did raise me, so he deserves a medal or something.  But first, if you read the piece of flash fiction I posted the other day entitled "That Golden Day" please go vote for it over at Terrible Minds.  There are a lot of excellent pieces of extremely short fiction over there, so I encourage you to read them all and vote for the most deserving entry, even if it isn't mine.  Of course I'd love for you to vote for my entry (which is Fathers' Day appropriate in a dark sort of way), but like I said, there are some great pieces on the list, written by some incredibly talented writers.

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Fathers' Day is one of those holidays that brings out some seriously mixed emotions in people.  Actually, most holidays have that capacity, depending on the circumstances of your life.  For me, July 4th is a pretty depressing day, being the anniversary of my brother's death.  Fathers' Day just tends to dredge up old memories and stir some pretty strong emotions about your paterfamilias.  Many of the bloggers I read are writing about their fathers today.  As expected, they run the emotional gamut.  From Chuck Wendig's heartwarming story of forgiveness to Maggie Carroll's heartbreaking example of parental denial.

What about my Dad?

"In telling the story of my father's life, it's impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me."
     - Will Bloom, Big Fish

My wife and I took my dad to breakfast this morning at a local diner.  Breakfast has always been my father's meal.  Most people take their fathers out for dinner for special occasions, but cholesterol and quintuple bypass surgery be damned, breakfast is his special meal.  He has ordered the same thing for breakfast any time he goes out for that meal for as long as I can remember.  Two eggs over light, home fries, Taylor ham (if the place has it - since we moved south, he can't always get that, so he'll order bacon or sausage if necessary) and buttered rye toast.  With coffee.  He's actually the only person I've ever heard order their eggs "over light" and I think it's just a fancy way of saying "over easy" but he swears there's a difference.

When I was growing up in New Jersey, I didn't really understand my dad.  I know, what kid does?  But still.  He was never home unless he was sleeping.  When he was home sleeping, my brother and I were under strict orders not to make any noise or do anything that would wake our father.  He caught his sleep whenever he could and usually only a few hours at a time, so waking him was punishable by a beating.  Just making enough noise that waking him was a possibility earned a swift, but quiet, reprimand from our mother.  Sometimes accompanied by a smack or a spanking.  We were reminded frequently that he worked his ass off so that we could have nice things and a good roof over our heads.

When I was young, we lived in an apartment on the second floor of the town annex.  The town held important meetings and other functions in a large meeting hall just below our kid feet.  "Be quiet!  There's people downstairs!" was as much a mantra in our house as "Be quiet, your father's trying to sleep!"  Our backyard was bounded on the opposite side by the town fire department, which was right next to the police station and town hall.  It was actually the "Borough Hall" because technically that's what our town was legally considered.  We didn't have a front yard.  In its place we had a grocery store parking lot.  Across that parking lot was a grocery store, a fascinating place to my young imagination called Kilroy's Wonder Market.  There was also a warehouse for the grocery store and, beyond that, a gas station.  We lived across the street from a large town park, which was a paradise for my brother and I, even if our mom had to walk us across the busy street.  During summers, we had a travel trailer at a campground up in the mountains in Sussex County.  My mom and I, and my brother until he turned 16, stayed there all summer.  My father, and later my brother, joined us when he wasn't working back home in Glen Rock, about an hour away.

I was too young then to understand or appreciate the life that my dad led.  All that mattered to me was that I never got to spend any time with him.  I think it affected my brother, who was 9 years older than me and suffered from bi-polar disorder, more than it affected me because he went through his teen years and his descent into the hell of mental illness while our dad was keeping these crazy hours.  My dad felt guilty about it later and tried his best to make it up to Scott after he retired, but that led to some crazy situations where my dad was more of an enabler for my brother's mental illness than anything else.

When my father was working as a department manager at a local grocery store, one of the town cops used to come in when it rained and wait for his wife to bring him his rain gear.  My father, never one to let such a ripe opportunity for sarcasm to pass him by, teased that officer mercilessly every time.  "Awww.  So nice of your mommy to bring your rubbers."

Eventually, weary of my father's sarcastic comments, the officer gave him a browbeating.  He lectured my dad on the demands and hazards of police work and did something you should never do to a Dutchman as stubborn as my father.  The cop dared him.  With my dad, it doesn't even need to be a triple-dog dare.  The poor guy told my dad that he could never make it as a cop and he dared him to try.

My dad, "Big" George Miller, spent the next 25 years of his life serving the borough of Glen Rock as a police officer.  On top of that, he kept his job as a grocery store department manager.  And those weren't the only two jobs he held.

My dad was a master storyteller.  When he launched into a tale, everyone around gave him their undivided attention.  His stories, and stories about him, were a staple of my formative years.  There was one story about my dad that I didn't hear until after I was grown and married.  The details change depending on who's telling the tale, but I've heard it from multiple sources and the details have remained fairly consistent:

There was, in the town, an elderly woman who had recently lost her husband.  Before his death, she didn't get around town much, as her husband did the shopping and ran most of the errands while she kept house and took care of their children.  After his death, she received flowers from loved ones and, on at least one occasion, my father drove up in the florist's van and delivered them to her.  When she was going through his things, she found a pair of his shoes and his old trumpet.  She wanted to have both of them repaired to give to one of their children.  One day, while she was downtown, she took the shoes to the local shoe store, where my dad took them from her, wrote up the ticket and placed them behind the counter.  A few days later, when she came upon her late husband's trumpet, she took it to the local music store, where my father repaired it for her.  At this point, she was becoming suspicious.


Another day, the old widow called the appliance repair shop and asked for someone to come and pick their old console television for repair.  You guessed it.  My father was driving the truck.  By this point, the poor woman was getting paranoid, convinced that my dad was stalking her.  A few days later, a neighbor drove her to the grocery store to get milk, which was handed to her by the nice gentleman who was stocking the dairy case.  My father.  When he turned to hand her the milk, she nearly ran from the store.  The neighbor drove her home, but she was becoming unhinged by this point, so after a few hours of stewing about what to do, she asked her neighbor to drive her to the police station so that she could file a complaint against this man who must be after her.  My dad was manning the desk.

I can't vouch for the truth in that story, but does it matter?  With my father, the tale has always been about more than the truth.  It is about the story.  And the story today is about fathers.  My story is about my father.  One of the hardest working men I've ever met.  He may not have always been the best father in the world, but he always did his best to provide for us.  And he's always been larger than life.  Thanks, dad.  For everything.

"A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him. And in that way he becomes immortal."
     - Will Bloom, Big Fish

Note: All photos in the links are copyright David Tanner, 2003.
The photo at the top is my dad and I at the Catskill Game Farm, taken some time in the late 70's.

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Game Hacking in the Cold War Era

If you read my first post on Geekcentricity, you know the bare bones on how I was first introduced to role-playing games.  That was almost 30 years ago.  I know, I'm ancient.  I'm that old guy saying, "back in my day, we walked ten miles to school in four feet of snow."  But there were some great things, as far as gaming goes, happening then.  The first was, in the days before the internet (yes, Virginia, there really was a time when we didn't have that) - accessibility.

Back in the early 1980's, there were "mom & pop" toy stores around town.  There was even one in the local mall.  That toy store, which was later bought out by a national chain and then closed, was where I bought most of my first Dungeons & Dragons books, dice and miniatures.

There was another large toy store a few miles down the road from the mall that also carried Dungeons & Dragons materials until the whole anti-D&D craze took off in the area.  The one benefit of that is that when they discontinued everything in the gaming section, I was there with my friends to buy it all at greatly reduced prices.  I even found an original printing of Deities & Demigods, with the two extra chapters, that had fallen behind the rack long ago.  They sold it to me for $5.  Most of the adventures were marked down to $2.  We cleared that place out in a hedonistic frenzy of consumerism.

There were even a few dedicated gaming stores around town then.  If it was published, you could go to one of them and purchase it.  Every now and then, my friends and I would find a way to make the nearly two hour pilgrimage to the Green Dragon in Charleston.  I think it's still there, though I haven't been in years.

Now, we have the internet for accessibility.  There are still some exciting things going on in the hobby.  To me, the most exciting is the number of "indie" game publishers quietly turning out excellent products in the shadows of the juggernauts (Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, etc.).  There are dozens of small companies and individuals creating some great games with either fresh ideas or revisitations of classic ideas in new ways.  I've heard many people say that the tabletop rpg hobby is dying, being eaten alive by console gaming and mmorpgs.  Personally, I think there is a renaissance on the horizon.  The electronic publishing formats, coupled with technology like the iPad, have a universe of untapped potential to change the gaming hobby as we know it.

Personally, I just hope to get something out there that somebody wants to play.  I want to write something that I want to play and then make it accessible to others.  I'm not talking about a revolution.  I'm just talking about finding a hole, a niche, and filling it.

Back in the early 1980's, D&D was the only game in town and Ronald Reagan was playing cold war chess with Leonid Brezhnev.  I wanted to play a game that reflected all of the cold war angst that was in the air.  The problem was, it didn't exist.  Sure, there was something close.   A little game called Top Secret.  Which was close, but not quite what I wanted.  To use modern video games as an analogy, Top Secret was Splinter Cell when I wanted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  It was also brand new and not very fleshed out.

So I did a little game hacking.  I worked from my beloved Mack Bolan: The Executioner series of books (along with all the other tie-in series') by Don Pendleton (and others).  I borrowed a few things from Top Secret, but mostly just hacked Dungeons & Dragons into a game that I called Terrorist Wars.  It was about as immature an effort as you would expect from a twelve year old kid.  It was about as comprehensive and complete as anything an obsessed twelve year old could create.  I filled a pretty thick loose-leaf notebook (on college-ruled paper - I always use college-ruled paper) full of rules.  I had stats for just about every gun you could think of (I got them from a Mack Bolan weapons locker book I had and created stats for them).  I had character classes from Soldier to Spy to Assassin, complete with character advancement charts and everything else that standard D&D classes had in the Players' Handbook.

The game was actually pretty popular among my friends for a few years and several groups I played with seemed to always want to play Terrorist Wars instead of Dungeons & Dragons.  I was always happy to oblige and constantly revised it.  Somewhere around 1985-1986, the game got put away and never taken out again.  Maybe it was Glasnost.  Or maybe we had finally outgrown the game.  Either way, I look back fondly on my first game hack.

Okay gamers.  Here's my question of the day: Have you ever hacked a role-playing game and made a new game out of the rules?  Tell me about it.  What was it called?  What was it about?  Did you ever play it?  How did it go?

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The Encumbrance of Ethereal Lycanthropy

One day, many years ago, actually it must have been almost 20 years ago (yes, I'm old as hell, now get off my lawn!), my wife and I were in the middle of an extremely long drive home (and we may have only been dating at the time) from visiting her family when we decided to play a little game.  It was just one of those silly little games parents often used to play with kids to stave off boredom on long drives.  Except we didn't have kids.  We were just trying to keep each other awake and alert on the long drive, and maybe keep our own boredom at bay.

DISCLAIMER: Because I'm old as hell, this was in the days before mp3 players and handheld gaming systems. Our first car didn't even have a CD player, so we were at the mercy of whatever radio stations we could pick up along the way.  Or the passenger could read to the driver.  Or we could play games.

I don't know the name of the game we played that day, but I remember the rules.  It might have been called "Picnic."  The first player started by saying, "I'm going on a picnic and I'm bringing along a(n):" and then named an object that started with the letter "A."  The next player repeated the phrase, along with the first player's "A" object and then added one starting with "B" and so on.  So, the fifth turn might sound something like, "I'm going on a picnic and I'm bringing along an abacus, a banana, a cucumber, a dalmation, and an.... ummmm.... elephant."  The game was won when the other player forgot one of your items or couldn't come up with an item that started with the appropriate letter.  If you've never tried it, trust me.  "Q" is a bitch.

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Stand By Me

When I was growing up in New Jersey, my family used to spend summers at a campground in the mountains in the northwest corner of the state.  We had a travel trailer permanently set-up on a site there with all of the comforts of home. This was not roughing it. Our last few summers there, we had the biggest and best site in the entire campground.  We were the closest site to the entrance, at the top of a large hill, right across the street from all the campground's public areas.

It was paradise for a kid growing up.  The public areas across the street included a huge park, a pavilion that hosted lots of activities, a general store, and my two favorite attractions: a swimming pool and an arcade. During my years there, the arcade consisted of pinball machines, a jukebox, an air hockey table and a pool table.  There were no video games... for the simple reason that video games were just not a common thing then. Sure, Pong consoles were in arcades in some places, but they were not regular fixtures in most arcades. In our little corner of New Jersey, there just weren't any video games to be found.  Back at our house, my brother and I had a Magnavox Odyssey, but we weren't allowed to bring it to the campground.  I have to admit, we rarely ever played it.  It was a novelty with about 8 Pong-like variations built in, with terrible controls.  At the campground, we did all the stuff kids did at campgrounds. We went swimming in the pool, rode bicycles and skateboards, played the pinball machines in the arcade, played with toys, and went exploring.  We had miles and miles of campground and beyond to explore.  Sure, our parents set boundaries for us and gave us specific times to be home or at least check-in at home.

"It happens sometimes.  Friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant."
                                                                                                      - Stand By Me

 I had some great friends at the campground during those summers.  During the school year, when we were all back in our own towns, at our own schools, we never contacted each other. We were summer friends, the kind of friends you make at places like that campground.  When we were in that place, we were inseparable.  We did everything together. We traded baseball cards, played at each others' trailers, went swimming, played in the arcade, and roamed the hills and fields together.  We were brothers.

The summer that I was nine years old, we were having one of our typical summers, playing baseball in the park, swimming every day, mastering our favorite pinball games, biking, skateboarding, and exploring, until one of my friends, Mike, came to us with some news.  He told us that one of the other campgrounds "a few miles away" had gotten a new addition to their arcade... something none of us had ever seen before.  It was a video game console with a revolutionary new game called Space Invaders.  Those words contained such mystery for us.  What was it like?  What were these "Invaders" and what did they do?  We all believed in strange aliens and spaceships that visited our planet and watched us. We knew that they were really out there, these "Invaders" and we needed to know what to expect.  We needed to be informed.  Most of all, we needed to see a "video game console" and play it and find out what it was like.  This console became our holy grail that summer.  It grew to mythic proportions.  We talked about it for days.  We wondered what it would be like.  Finally, we planned and schemed. We had to find it.  We had to experience it.  It wasn't looking at a dead body, it was a video game, and it was a journey we had to take.

Our plans were meticulous.  Mike found out where the campground was.  Billy found a map in his dad's truck.  We pored over the map; debating the best routes, planning what day and what time to leave, deciding what we would to bring and how to get it.  Our target was miles away, far beyond our range of exploration, far beyond where we were allowed to go.  Once we got far enough away from our campground, there would be no checking-in at home.  We would miss all of our check-in times.  We carefully gauged how long we could miss them without our parents worrying enough to start looking for us.  Rodney got a backpack from one of his older brothers and we all started hoarding change and snack food.  Finally, we set a date.  We needed to be up early. We figured that we had to be on our way by 7:00 a.m.  We packed our supplies the night before and found a good hiding place for the backpack, which was loaded with food and jugs of water.  We brought our pocketknives and Billy even brought a set of wire cutters.  We coordinated the stories we were telling our parents about where we were going to be during the day.  Mike was the only one of us who regularly wore a watch, so we made him the time keeper.  We assigned times for each leg of our journey.  We determined how much time we had to spend at the arcade.  We knew what time we had to leave. We even decided when we had to abort our journey for each stage if something went wrong.  We had everything covered.

"We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going.  It was grand."
                                                                                                    - Stand By Me

We met at the appointed time just down the hill from my site and started up the long road that sloped up  toward the back of our campground.  When we got to the top of the hill we reached the back of the campground, used our wire cutters to cut through the bottom wire of the barbed wire fence that ran along the back of the campground and entered the great world beyond.  When we slid through the fence, we were on the grounds of what we just called "the reservoir."  We knew that the reservoir property was the fastest route to where we needed to go; the quickest way to our grail.  We also knew that the guy who lived in the shack out by the reservoir was crazy.  All of the older kids had stories about him.  We had heard the harrowing tales of kids far bigger and braver than us who had dared trespass on reservoir land.  They told of being chased, screamed at, shot at, and even captured and held for the police if he caught them.  We crouched low to the ground and moved as slowly and quietly as we could. We made it past the building and moved as quietly as any kids can move along the edge of the water.  We made it almost to the far end of the reservoir when we heard it. There was a man's voice shouting at us.  That was it.  We were finished.  Our journey would come to an end before we were a mile outside of the campground.  The consensus decision was to make a run for it.  A crazy old man couldn't outrun a fast group of kids and surely nobody shoot us... we were just innocent kids out for a long walk.

We made it to the edge of the trees on the far side of the reservoir before we heard the buzzing sound and the shredding of leaves above our heads.  I can hear that combination of sounds in my head even now.  That sound came before the loud crack of gunfire, or at least it seemed that way.  We ran as we had never run before. We ran under the trees and up the hill towards the road; up the hill towards our escape; away from the crazy old man with the gun.  When I think about it know, I feel sure he was shooting to miss.  As crazy as it sounds, he was firing shots all around our heads, but just over our heads, to scare us off of the property.  At the time, I was sure that the next shot would plant itself between my shoulder blades and I would die on my face and my parents wouldn't know where to find my body.

Miraculously, we made it to the road.  As we cleared the trees, we saw that the only thing between us and freedom was one more barbed wire fence.  We had no time to cut it, since there was a madman with a gun on our heels, yelling and shooting.  He was surely a killer of children, possibly escaped from some institution.  We had to go underneath.  It was a tight squeeze, even as small as we were, but the fear of the barbs was less than the fear of being shot, so we did it as fast as we could, one after the other, sliding head first under the wire and running across the empty road.  Finally, we walked far enough that we could no longer hear him. We had escaped.  We didn't even give a thought to our having to come back the same way.  We had survived and our adrenaline-fueled thoughts turned to killing alien "Invaders" from space.  We made up stories as we walked. We laughed and joked and enjoyed the journey.  We stopped in a field of some kind of grass that was much taller than our heads, where we ate most of our meager food supply and lounged in the shade.  Billy practiced saying the entire "Peter Piper" tongue twister rhyme in a single belch.  All the while, Mike kept time for us; silently tracking our journey.  He was conscientious... and he had a good watch.

We didn't have to dodge any trains or swim through any leach infested waters that day.  Almost getting shot was enough for us.  We finally reached the campground that played host to our goal.  When we went into the arcade, we just stood there and stared for a moment at the glorious object in front of us.  Soon, we were all taking turns pumping quarters into the hungry slots on the front of the cabinet; taking turns, learning to kill those little aliens, those invaders from space.  When it wasn't our turn to play, we watched or played the nearby pinball machines.  We were lost in our moment.  We were also going through quarters faster than imaginable.  At some point, one of us went to the snack bar and presented the clerk with a precious dollar bill to purchase some food item when she asked that dreaded question.  "What site are you from?"  He made something up that probably wasn't even close to an actual site number.  When she asked to see our visitor's passes, we knew it was "game over" and left the arcade, glancing back at the quarter gobbling machine as we made a hasty exit.  As we started to retrace our route, it seemed that our exit was timely, because the sky seemed to be darkening more quickly than we thought it should.  Mike assured us that we had plenty of time. He had the timing covered.  Still, as we walked, we repeatedly asked him the time.  It was getting dark fast.  There was no way it should be getting dark that early.

"Mike, are you sure you're watch is right?"

That was when reliable Mike made a universal gesture.  He raised his right hand, index finger outstretched, and tapped the glass of his watch face with three quick pecks.  At that moment, we knew we were screwed.  Before he even said the words, we knew his watch had stopped.  We gathered around him, berating him for being so stupid, cursing his watch, and trying to will it to work.  We were huddled there on the road out of that campground with its Space Invaders console when we became conscious of a car stopped a few feet in front of us.  We heard car doors.  My mom and Mike's mom were running towards us, yelling, crying, making angry mother sounds.  We were truly screwed.  We all knew it was Mike's fault.  He was the pariah for several weeks as we all served out our various sentences as consequences of our unauthorized journey.  We didn't know how they had found us until Rodney admitted that he had to tell one of his older brothers where we were going.  He was pressured into it, in return for borrowing his knife and canteen.  By then, we were over being angry about being caught and subsequently punished.  We were already reliving our grand adventure and telling everyone about it.  Mike was grounded for a week.  Rodney and Billy were grounded for two weeks.  As for me, I had never been grounded before.  My parents told me I couldn't leave our campsite without their permission.  They said I would be lucky if I was allowed to leave it before summer was over.

Bright and early on the first day of my incarceration, I pulled a chair up to the edge of the road that ran past our site and planted myself in it.  I stared off into space.  I was looking at freedom from my side of the invisible bars of my parentally imposed prison.  I stayed in the chair.  I refused to leave it.  I refused to eat.  Being grounded was terrible.  When my parents finally decided that I had suffered long enough, I immediately left and jumped on my bike.  I had been grounded for an intolerable four hours and now I was free at last.

That was the last summer we stayed at Kymer's Campground.  The following year, my dad retired and we sold our trailer and moved to South Carolina.  I only ever saw Billy again after that summer.  His family moved to Myrtle Beach about a year or so after we did, but we never hung out again after that.

Seven years after our geekdom rite of passage, a movie named Stand By Me was released.  It is still one of my favorite movies.  Every time I watch it, I think about our quest, not to find a body, but just to play a video game... something I can sit in my living room and do now.

How far have you gone to experience the hottest new thing?

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Gone to the Doggs

I don't plan on making a habit of promoting businesses here on Geekcentricity, but earlier this week, I discovered a new place to eat.  Now, I know it's only a hot dog place, but it has that intangible ingredient that makes a place stick out from the pack.  When the girl behind the counter told me that the owner was from Hackensack, NJ it was settled.  I called my Dad on the spot and invited him to lunch later in the week.  You see, my Dad loves eating establishments with character as much as I do, and he loves places with ties to "back home" even more.  The menu is very "Jersey" from the hard rolls to the Taylor ham.

Today, my Dad and I went to Joey Doggs in Surfside Beach.  My Dad loved it.  We got to sit down and eat some good hot dogs and enjoy the character of the place.  Joey, the owner, sat down with us for a while and chatted with my Dad about New Jersey.  My Dad shared some stories with him that I've never heard before, including tales of his escapades going to the shooting range with the late comedian Buddy Hack
 ett.  Any place that can provide a backdrop for moments like that can't be too bad.

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