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.

The Winter That (So Far) Wasn’t

I’ve been saving a particular topic for a while now. It’s something that is definitely cool in northeast Iowa. Downright frozen, in fact. I’m referring to the Iowa winters, which hold the record as the coldest winters I’ve ever gone through, and I’ve gone through northern Michigan winters. For those of you not accustomed to northern Michigan winters, you learn to get used to having three to four inches of snow dumped on you during the average snowfall, and temperatures below zero degrees Fahrenheit are pretty much a way of life until about April. I thought I knew all about cold and blowing and feeling as though you were lost in the Antarctic.

Then came Iowa, and Minnesota for that matter. Both places manage to get just as cold as northern Michigan, but northern Michigan has trees. You don’t know just how important trees are until you’re in a place where trees aren’t vast forests that spring up around you, but little clumps that occasionally appear on the horizon. Trees are the best windbreakers ever, and it’s only when you’re in an area with no trees do you realize how nice that is. Out here, windchill is a thing to be feared. I used to laugh when I would get email notices at my job telling us that schools were closed due to windchill, and then I tried walking from my apartment to the Cresco Fitness Center in the winter. I won’t say the decision almost killed me, but by the time I arrived at the gym I was praying that the weather would warm up at least a degree or two, or that the wind would stop blowing for five minutes. Admittedly, during the walk back the wind did stop blowing for a second or two, before starting right back up again. You may not believe me when I say the wind was consciously taunting me, and if you don’t you have never lived in Iowa.

Windchill takes a day which is only normally damned cold and turns it into weather you more commonly found in the Antarctic. It’s actually hazardous to go out when the windchill drops the temperature below -30, and after you’ve spent, say, five minutes having below freezing air cut through your lined pants as though they didn’t exist, you’ll develop an appreciation for the Great Indoors.

By itself the windchill would be bad enough, but then there are the blizzards. Northeastern Iowa attracts blizzards like cigarettes attract welfare queens, and once a blizzard comes through, all you can do is stay indoors. Granted, I say this as someone who has gone out during blizzards twice, and both times I’ve been confronted by snowdrifts that close off all but the middle of the road, miles of sheer ice and whiteout conditions that limit visibility to maybe ten feet in front of you if you are lucky. An Iowa blizzard can force pretty much all businesses to close for the day, and that includes fast food restaurants and gas stations.

So this winter, I was ready. I was going to document all the Iowa winter in its snow-filled, ice-coated business-closing glory. I was going to talk about the awful majesty nature can sometimes call forth, and how it makes me feel just a little less safe than I usually do, as though I’m at the mercy of what may be a capricious, random climate. I’m telling you all this information so that when I say that for the past month the weather has been absolutely beautiful you can get the full force of the irony. Most of the time, the weather has been in the 40s, which is positively balmy compared to your average winter. There has been some snow on the ground, which left the day after it came, and most people are out and about enjoying this weather.

If you were to ask most people how they feel about this weather, they’ll tell you they are relieved. Most people in Cresco look upon winter the same way Cinderella looked upon her evil stepmother—you have to live with her, but it’s always such a joy when she doesn’t show. On the other hand, people don’t seem to have altered their winter habits any, either. People are still cooped up inside, watching TV, and most people take care not to be outside for longer than they can help it. It’s like they’re on autopilot somehow. They know they don’t have to stay inside this winter, but they still do anyway. I have two theories about this.

The first theory is that everyone knows the weather is supposed to be colder and nastier, but no one really wants to come out and say so. We all know the weather’s doing all it can do to be winter around here, so why not just dress warmly and trundle to and from our cars everyday anyway? It’ll make the weather feel like it’s done its job.

The second theory is that, for all its inconvenience and pain, there are a lot of great things to do when you’re cooped up indoors. You can catch up on DVD and TV watching, for instance, or you can read that book that you’ve just never had the time to pick up. Winter is perhaps the best season for forcing people to relax, and while we could all just go about doing things outdoors and trying to get all the projects on our ever-present to do list done, it’s nice to have a season that forces us to relax for a bit. No one really wants to give that up. So we’ll gladly go to our homes, dressed warmer than we need to, and then kick off our shoes, pull up a chair and just relax. Some people will turn on the TV and watch the game. Others will fire up that new video game. Still others will finally watch that movie they’ve been wanting to for years. Others may also surf the web for a few hours, grateful that for a few weeks they have an excuse for spending so much time on it.

The Caucus Comes to Town

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say Iowa is known for two things. One of them is corn. The other, of course, is the state’s position as first among the presidential caucuses. There has been a lot of discussion about whether or not Iowa deserves this position, but currently if a man or woman wants to get elected president, they have to go through Iowa first.

Personally, I’m okay with this. I know many people to consider Iowa a “kingmaker” state, as it were, even though NPR spent almost the entire day explaining why having the first presidential caucus means absolutely nothing and no one should be attaching any sort of significance to this other than to say this is how people feel now. That was either the most ironic or most Zen thing I believe I will ever hear in 2012.

What the political experts don’t seem to realize is that they’re the only ones smart enough not to care  that the Iowa caucuses don’t mean anything. They also don’t realize that this is where it all starts. It’s like the beginning of a race. The debates and the pressing of the political flesh on cable television networks were practice laps, that’s all. It was a chance to get the kinks out of the presidential candidates’ positions and let everyone see whose views were right for them. Now the race begins, and everyone wants to see who pulls ahead of the pack early.

This was why I found myself heading for the northeast Iowa Community College outreach center in Cresco on Tuesday night. I’d driven twelve hours more or less straight the day before, going through hell and blizzard-like conditions to get from Michigan to Iowa, and I kind of wanted to just kick back and relax a bit. Massaging my aching accelerator foot sounded like a good idea, too.

To be fair, the Democratic Caucus was also going on, albeit in a small town about ten miles to the north, but that was kind of boring. We all know who they’re going to elect. I mean, it’s not like Al Sharpton is going to get the surprise nomination. But the Iowa Republican caucus? This was going to be fun, especially given how extreme some of the candidates’ views are. Who would lionize Rick Santorum, for instance? Who was going to get up and speak on behalf of Michele Bachmann? Would anyone speak up on behalf of Mitt Romney?

Before we go on, I want to give a brief overview of how the Iowa Republican Caucus works. First, everyone gathers in a room where they are given the names of the presidential candidates. Each presidential nominee then has someone speak on his or her behalf. Sometimes, these people are specially sent by the nominees. Other times, someone who fervently believes in the nominee stands and delivers a quick speech. I was told by my contact who informed me about these caucuses that some of these speeches could be very moving.

The first thing that struck me about the Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus crowd was that some of them either don’t know how to park, or are simply jerks when it comes to parking. Listen, if you are going to an event that will be popular and there is limited parking, PARK BETWEEN THE LINES. Don’t nudge your car or truck just over the yellow line a bit, and if someone does that, then the person on the other side of the parking space shouldn’t nudge their car just over the yellow line to create a parking space between them that is only suitable for someone whose vehicle is an anorexic snake.

The second thing that struck me is the caucus was a very polite crowd. In the small lecture hall, people were talking and laughing, and while I did see one or two presidential stickers, for the most part it was low key. There weren’t any signs or banners, and at no time did a chant break out for one of the candidates. I hate to make this comparison, but the banality of it all reminded me of the Shirley Jackson story, “The Lottery.” Small town folks were cheerily talking amongst themselves, and in minutes they would make a decision that could potentially affect the direction of the United States. Yet here they were, treating it as though it were an ice cream social. This comforted me. These people may hold different beliefs than I do, but underneath it all they were still people, and at the end of the night it was pretty likely everyone was going to cast their vote and go home friends with everyone else.

The chairman of the Howard County Republican Party started things off. He got in a few digs at Barack Obama, which was to be expected and a lot less harsh than they could have been. He also welcomed everyone to the caucus, saying he was pleased to see such a large turnout. He also told the entirely Caucasian crowd that the Republican Party was a “Big Tent party,” with plenty of room for different beliefs and ideals. I think the irony escaped almost everyone in the room.

After that, he invited any designated representatives of the nominees to come up and speak. No one stood, and I have to admit I wasn’t that surprised. I have no idea how many votes Howard County is worth, but I suspect it’s not a lot. Besides, that meant that whoever got up to speak on behalf of the nominees would actually genuinely want them to be president!

I have to admit, I’ve followed the Republican debates and seen the rise and fall of pretty much every GOP nominee, followed by the same thoroughly predictable news story. From my point of view, I haven’t been impressed with the GOP candidates, and I’m worried that one or two of them might be certifiably insane. Then again, I don’t talk a lot about politics with people whose views are vastly different than mine. So this was not only a chance to see how presidential election politics worked, it was a chance to hear what the other side thought, so to speak.

So how were the speakers? All right. None of them were accomplished public speakers, except for the reverend who stumped for Rick Santorum. They all got to talk for about five minutes as to why they liked the candidate they liked, and all the candidates had someone willing to stand up for them except Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman. I was kind of expecting that Jon Huntsman wouldn’t be supported all that much, but Newt Gingrich not having anyone to support him? I almost wanted to raise my hand and volunteer, which was when it hit me—I could volunteer to speak for Newt Gingrich! I could volunteer to speak for Jon Huntsman! Not that I actually did. As much fun as it would have been to do five minutes of insulting Newt Gingrich, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten lynched. I’m also known to hold liberal views, so even doing a serious five-minute support speech would have drawn suspicion. Still, I could have done it if I had wanted to. That’s what really made me hold my tongue.  Imagine being able to get up and speak to a listening audience about why you feel someone should be elected President of the United States! That kind of power, accessible by anyone, deserves some respect.

During the speeches, I learned one or two interesting things, the most interesting of which was that Rick Santorum had visited the Cresco restaurant Su-Z-Q’s during his tour of the state. Personally, I think that’s a political gaffe that puts the whole Herman Cain adultery scandal to shame. If a man is so lost and lacking in judgment that he visits Su-Z-Q’s when he’s feeling hungry, then I don’t think he can possibly make a good president.

Finally, the speechifying was done, and it was time to vote. As I walked out of the caucus, I thought about what I’d seen. This is what the millions of dollars poured into presidential campaigns come to—a bunch of people sitting down and trying to make up their own minds. Some of them are smart, some of them are stupid, some are rich, some are poor, but all of them get a say and all of them get a vote. A flash of pride surged though me. As I drove home I passed Su-Z-Q’s. I thought I saw Rick Santorum in there, but I couldn’t be sure.