Outside of Iowa Again--Reno Edition

The paint on the button for the 18^th floor in the elevator has worn off. All the elevators, actually. All five of them. The 18^th floor is my floor, and I’m wondering if there’s any significance to that.

I’m staying in the Grand Sierra Hotel and Resort, which should more accurately be called the Grand Sierra Casino and Resort, as there is nothing but gambling as far as the eye can see. Penny slots rule the floor, while towards the center craps tables, roulette tables and blackjack tables rule the day. Off to one side is the poker room, where masseuses are on call. I can’t even begin to think about being that involved in something, and I while I can understand the business dynamics that necessitate a casino providing masseuses to their most intense players, not to mention the intensity of the players themselves, I don’t get why the masseuses think this is anywhere close to a good deal. Their tips must be in the triple digits.

The Grand Sierra is massive. They have tried to give their visitors every reason why they shouldn’t leave the premises, and to that end the place is equipped with an arcade, several restaurants, a full-size event-level theater and a nightclub that only has a token wall to block it from the casino area. Really, it all keeps coming back to the casino area.

Partially, this is because the Grand Sierra employs several casino-like tactics to its entire area of business. Windows are rarer than an Oscar-winning porn film, and thanks to the ubiquitous slot machines, flashing lights and brightly-colored neon. Just the existence of the thing should be considered garish beyond words, except for the fact that it works. For as long as you’re in the Grand Sierra, your attention is constantly drawn to any one of a thousand attractions, and after about a day or so, you start craving open sky. I have a strong suspicion that these massive casino/resorts might inadvertently cause the next senior jogging craze.

On the positive side, the hotel rooms are spectacular. There’s nothing quite like having a king-size bed all to yourself, with a nice couch on one side and a ten-foot by ten-foot mirror on the other. The bathroom looks like something out of a GQ magazine, and it made me feel more affluent simply by standing in there, which is a first for myself and bathroom experiences. Maybe it was the unnecessarily long faucet, or it might have been the marble shower with the glass door. It might have been the flatscreen TV mounted to the side of the bathroom mirror, but since I never did figure out how to work it probably not.

What makes this trip equally odd is that during the weekend I drove to Detroit for a martial arts tournament. One day travelling by car, one day in Detroit, and one day travelling back. One night in Cresco, then up bright and early to get to Reno. It can be a little disorienting at times, especially if you’re travelling alone.

When you travel west, you have to adjust a couple hours due to the time zones. This is fine, and I ordinarily have no trouble dealing with it, except for the small matter that the office in Iowa wanted me to do a project for them. This has led to a series of mental calculations each day that not only helps me to figure out when the Iowa office is relative to me, but also keeps me fully aware that I am NEVER going to adjust to the time difference while I’m here. On one hand, I’m waking up much earlier than usual. On the other hand, ten o’ clock feels like midnight, and every minute after ten makes me feel more and more tired.

I’ll be back in Iowa next week. I’ve already got some good topics, and I look forward to putting them down in print, as it were.

About Lee

Okay, so this blog is about northeast Iowa, but it’s also about my life to some extent. Which is why it’s imperative that I talk about Lee Carroll. Lee died last week, which led to me drinking a pint of Guiness in his honor, the taste of which has ensured that I will never ever ever be an alcoholic. Of course, it’s also led to me thinking about Lee, and everything I owe him.

I met Lee when I was a freshmen at the University of Michigan. I wanted to learn about role-playing games, and the most I had done prior to that was some old Marvel Super Heroes gaming with my brothers Jay and Steve. It was fun, and I even tried it out with one or two people at high school. To this day I’m not sure if it cemented my reputation as an unsalvageable geek or made people think I might be involved with a satanic cult. I went to the University of Michigan’s role-playing convention, and in an act of purest optimism signed myself up for two games—a generic fantasy RPG and a super-hero RPG, which took place within minutes of each other. The fantasy RPG was fun enough, and I learned my first real lesson about RPGs—they never stop when people say they are going to. If you get a bunch of gamers together and say they’re going to game from 6 pm to 10 pm, they will start promptly at seven and go until about midnight, unless the players and GM are in a really good part of the adventure, in which case the game will run until about 2 am. What this means is that the fantasy RPG finished about half-way through the superhero game, and I just couldn’t bring myself to enter in saying, “Hi, I signed up for your game. Can I come in half-way through?” So I stuck around, and after the game I approached this gentleman in his 60s, walking with a shillelagh-looking cane and dressed in the style of an Oxford professor. I introduced myself, and we started talking. Granted, I had to wait. Lee had a crowd of gamers around him, talking to him about the game he’d just run. Several gamers, most approximately the age of college students, were gathered around him, talking with him as though he were a college professor who had just delivered the most interesting lecture ever. However, I worked myself in, started talking, and was promptly blown away by someone who was extremely intelligent. The ideas he talked about in the five minutes or so we talked was enough to make me want to go to one of his games. Not to mention he’d obviously been GMing for awhile, and this was my chance to find out what gaming was really like.

It took me five years to learn that Lee’s style of GMing and my style of playing were almost utterly incompatible with each other. Lee had set up worlds upon worlds upon worlds, all with their own little quirks and intricacies. He wanted us to discover the way the universe worked. I more or less wanted to play a cooler version of myself and beat up supervillains. Let’s just say the result was interesting and leave it at that.

(As an aside, I’ve encounted several people who believe that role-playing games are somehow evil, that they open up your mind to Satan, that they lure you off the path of righteousness. I want to say right here and right now that I’ve been gaming for quite a few years, and that nothing has drawn me closer to Christianity than gaming, and nothing has pushed me quite so far from Christianity as other Christians helpfully telling me that I’m going to Hell, that God is punishing me and whatever other excuse their sociopathic minds can dream up. )

From Lee, I learned to run a game. It wasn’t always smooth, it wasn’t easy, and a few players did try to play “Break the GM,” but eventually I got good at it, which would save my sanity a few years later. I also learned about story, about being able to fold in ideas, and I also got a sense of what I liked and didn’t like. It’s one of the few times where I’ve been presented with something and thought, “Yeah, this is definitely meant for me.” It’s a good feeling to have.

As the game went on and I got to know Lee better, I learned about his life. Things like he graduated from Harvard, his grandmother helped create the constitution of Ireland, he was a member of the Coast Guard, and he was a navigator on a spy plane during the Cold War. There was a lot of other stuff he’d done, too, but those were the big things.

Eventually, I had to leave. I didn’t really want to, but as is so often the case in life, sometimes you do things you don’t want to. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to in order make things better for yourself. I drifted away, and I found other gaming groups. When my life was in the middle of falling apart, I started up a Star Wars campaign with two or three guys, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it helped keep me sane during a time when nothing else was going right. I would get back from my crappy temp job or, worse yet, crappy fast food job and start planning out what my players would get involved in this time. Every week we’d get together. Sometimes I’d have to steal one or two slices of pizza because my money had gone toward paying rent or the electric bill or just trying to keep one of several bill collectors at bay. I also discovered I had a talent for gamemastering, and I drew heavily on Lee’s influence with overarcing plot points and all manner of things to be discovered, although I definitely threw in some influences of my own as well. Even after I’d gotten back on my feet and finally had an apartment that wasn’t a slum, the game kept going and I think even the worst gaming experience I’ve had has still been pretty good.

When I moved out to Iowa and came back to Michigan to visit, I tried to see Lee and his wife Anne. It wasn’t easy—Ann Arbor is, to be charitable, a bit of a detour in a drive that already takes a half day, and I have a laundry list of places to go and people to visit when I get to Michigan anyway. Whenever I got to see them, though, they always remembered me, even though a lot of new people must have joined VOX since I left. Lee would come out from whatever he was doing, and we’d talk. Actually, he’d do most of the talking. I mostly added whatever I could to the conversation and just went along for the ride.

One of the last times I talked with him, I mentioned that I was going to be very disappointed if he didn’t regenerate when he died, a la Doctor Who. Part of me is still kind of wishing for that.

I’m getting to the end of this, and I realize I still haven’t talked nearly enough about Lee. I haven’t talked nearly enough about gaming, for that matter. Perhaps that’s for the best. It’s a life—you shouldn’t be able to condense a life well-lived into a few hundred words. It should span volumes, fill up a few volumes of the ol’ Encyclopedia Brittanica. He should have his own wiki, for the Internet generation.

One thing I want to say, and then I’m done. There’s a lot of focus on making one’s mark in the world, and the generally accepted way to do this is to become famous. Get on a reality TV show and let the world see your antics and hope you get popular. Alternately, you’re supposed to become filthy rotten dirty stinking rich (Warrant reference for the win) and win at life that way. What goes unmentioned, and criminally unappreciated, is that another way to win at life is to live it to the fullest. Get out there and do what you love. Be unafraid to fail. I meet too many people who are stuck in their lives, like it’s a maze they’ve constructed around themselves, intentionally placing dead ends in every path. Why do that to yourself? Why listen to all the naysayers and mean-spirited critics around you when you can just strike out and do exactly what you want to do? It’s what Lee did. It’s what a lot of people who knew him have done. I think everyone should do this, myself included.

So, while I’m still sad, I just want to say get out there and live your life. It’s way too good to miss.

Winter arrives with all the grace of a sledgehammer

Well, when you mess up, the best thing to do is just confess and get it over with. Two weeks ago, my parents visited, and while I could have put together a blog post between visiting with them and seeing two awesome musicals, I also had the mother of all colds, which meant that my schedule went like this: wake up exhausted, go to work, come home, have dinner with parents, sleep for an hour, spend time with parents, go to bed early, lather, rinse, and repeat for five days straight. I managed to sleep pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday, and the next week was all about playing catch-up, which included more trips to Subway than any man should ever make in a week. This is admittedly my fault, but I was also trying to make up for lost time in the gym and at kendo practice. In the craziness, things like this blog got sadly neglected, and I apologize to my legions of listeners who were waiting at their monitors with bated breath.

That being said, in a previous journal entry, I had talked about how mild the winter of 2011-2012 was. I made one or two statements to the effect that winters out here were usually harsh, but not this year. I also may have wondered how long this could last. Two weeks ago I got my answer—more or less the day after I wrote that stupid journal entry.  It wasn’t just any snowstorm, either. No, it had to be a blizzard. An honest-to-goodness blizzard, albeit not one that shut the entire town down. It did give us about five or so inches of snow, and kept the traffic moving at speeds where most cars regularly got passed by snails heading south for the winter.

So I’m sitting in my apartment, a cup of tea beside me, and I figured I’d talk a bit this time about Cresco in winter. The feel of the whole town actually shifts a little, in my opinion.

First, there’s the Cresco Fitness Center. The place is practically overrun with people and activities from December to April, when the weather finally starts to break. This is partially because January is the month where people stop feasting, snacking and partying, get up on a scale, and promptly swear that they will eat right, they will go to the gym every single day and they will lose all the weight they gained and then some, a vow which usually lasts until about sometime in February, where people realize a.) weight doesn’t come off as fast as it goes on and b.) workouts actually require work. Until then, several people go to the fitness center, sign up for a few memberships, and spend a few sessions figuring out that buying the next size up in jeans is less tiring. It’s also mostly because the Cresco Fitness Center is home to a lot of what I suppose could be called “Intramural” sports—basketball teams and volleyball teams mostly, although there are some beginner gymnast classes, too. The divisions are pretty simple, just adults and children, and they’re not really playing for anything more than bragging rights. While I’m sure there are one or two people who take the competition entirely too seriously, as though an NBA scout might be hanging around Cresco waiting to snatch up some undiscovered talent, I am heartened to report I have not encountered anyone remotely like this. The Cresco Fitness Center is also hosting what they call a “Take Your Time” Triathalon, which basically means by April 28 you have to swim 10 miles, run 100 miles and bike/elliptical 200 miles. Rather, *I* need to do this, as I signed up for the event. We’ll see how tough I am, apparently.

Another thing that changes about Cresco in the wintertime is that snowmobiles come out to play. I cannot for the life of me figure out why snowmobiles are so popular in rural areas, and it’s especially confusing when you consider that there doesn’t seem to be much crossover between people who own other vehicles, like motorcycles. If I had to guess, I’d say snowmobiling is seen as safer than motorcycling, since if you fall off a snowmobile you land on snow instead of asphalt. Which is false, by the way, but we won’t get into that right now. The point is that immediately after sunset you can hear the buzz ofsnowmobile engines tearing around the outskirts of town, sounding like lions with particularly bad head colds.

I have to admit, I’m not a huge snowmobiling fan, mostly because the demographics tend to favor the young and foolhardy and the people who like to have a few drinks before they go out on their machines. This is what is known in the scientific world as “a recipe for disaster.” The mitigating factor, though, is that Iowa, being Iowa, has miles of snow-covered farmland which is great for snowmobiling. For those in need of a bit more exploration, the area around Decorah is filled with hills, cliffs and a ton of neat geography that I can see having a lot of fun exploring in an off-road vehicle. I will just say, though, if you do go out in one of those things, be careful. I had mentioned in a previous blog entry about seeing some roadside memorials on the top of about a twenty-foot cliff. Now that the snow has covered the roads and I see the snowmobile tracks layered on top of each other like coats of paint applied by a painter on LSD, I can come up with a couple of plausible, yet disturbing scenarios that involve someone on a snowmobile and a Wile E. Coyote-like drop.

Finally, there are the bars. There are at least five bars that I know of in a two-block radius in Cresco, which is kind of impressive and sad at the same time. I can’t really blame anyone in the winter for spending their Saturday nights indoors, with friends, and having a drink or two. The thing about bars, though, is that the people who hang around them are really not the people that you see in beer commercials. Most of them look kind of used up and sad, actually, like they would like to have something else to do but they don’t know what else is out there. I wonder if they’re aware of all the programs that the Cresco Fitness Center offers.

So that’s winter in northeast Iowa. We’re all hunkered down out here, peering through our windows and listening to the sound of lions with head colds out in the distance. Personally, I can think of much worse fates.