wax banks

how to run a game of D&D 5e!! i won’t talk too much about this in future i promise but if i don’t put this down it will remain in my mindbrain and that will not do.

guy at the next table is explaining to his friend how to run a D&D 5e game. her first time DMing. i recommend a version of the GUMSHOE approach to investigation-planning, where you think in terms of ‘what is the deliverable of this scene?’ (this is as true for combat as for investigation; combat is still advancement through storyspace) and think of multiple ways the players might pursue that payoff, knowing that if you make N plans they’ll choose the (N+1)th. plan the situation in detail so that you can improvise the plot, the dynamics.

it’s ok to describe NPC magic ‘systems’ as something like nonoverlapping magisteria — they don’t map to PC magic. that’s one way to keep magic magical. 5e magic is too mechanical, it quickly becomes boring.

read Apocalypse World for DM advice; 5e DMG is divided against itself and serves too many masters, not solely corporate-committee

prep situations, not plots

have win conditions for combat, and loss conditions — figure out when the baddies would retreat, when they’ll decide they have nothing to lose. use Morale rolls. surprise yourself and the players.

look to 4e for ‘combat puzzles’ — also the 16hp dragon anecdote from a Dungeon World blogger (maybe sage latorra?)

‘trash fights’ don’t feel like trash fights unless they outstay their welcome — planning is almost always interesting, so instead of ‘avoid trash fights,’ the right advice is ‘offer interesting conflicts/incentives’ — so the players are always up against something engaging. give them something compelling to get involved with, then trust them to involve themselves.

a locked door is only a bad obstacle if the players don’t enjoy figuring out how to unlock it!

if you like ‘combat puzzles,’ then actually offer them — don’t be afraid to present a situation that seems impossible. the third act of the adventure movie, when we’re All Out of Options and frankly This Might Sound Crazy but on the other hand What If It Works?! think of the movie Serenity if you like — perfectly structured D&D campaign climax. the only reason the final plan works is that a bunch of impossible things happen, at awful cost. ‘we’ve done the impossible, and that makes us mighty’

remain agnostic as to how players solve problems. this is the underrated GP=XP advantage. interesting problems are their own reward; D&D is a lateral-thinking game, a game of world-puzzles, and the players must be allowed to actually explore.

the ‘oracular power of dice’ doesn’t refer to an ability to predict or even create the future; you consult an oracle in order to characterize the present. the dice just tell you what’s going on, in interesting terms. they connect the situation to the myth. roll the dice to suggest; play to find out!

indeed, remember: ‘play to find out.’ ‘respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards.’ ‘look at the world through crosshairs.’ (i’m paraphrasing that last one.) vincent baker’s how-to-GM aphorisms are excellent.

1. Lately I’m wearing a scally cap, why not but why but (then again on the other hand) why not. In broad terms, a baseball cap that’s not one; more personally more precisely, the last time I owned a hat that fit me proper was my own ball cap senior year of high school, proper fitted and real classy like. Two three weeks ago I took a piece of string and wrapped it around my head to measure to make, hoping for nothing really (I’m well schooled well trained), and since this bloody thing arrived I don’t even want to take it off. Suits me fine, shame about the face, but it suits me just fine. Like an arm around my shoulder or a quiet word of encouragement. Do you know, maybe you do, what it’s like, I think you might, to feel put half-together from spare the universe’s parts, to feel like leftovers, to feel like men pity you and women no not even notice you, too heavy, too perfectly roundy faced and one too many chins at least, and soft at the middle, big stupid skull still somehow too small? But then this hat fits me perfect. I want you to see me seeing. I want to hold your eyes. I might not fall; I might not hate so comprehensively myownself, just a day, don’t worry, only a day of it, but please a day. A day at least.
2. At the bakery this morning, shook hands with Dave and asked How’ve you been It’s been so long What happened to your leg Are you going south for the winter How old are your children Why didn’t you actually file for the divorce Are you safe to walk et cetera, et cetera, proper talk between not-young men. It’d been a while. And here’s where the hands have come to rest on the clock: walking home after, not having read the Berryman book I brought, I dictated to myownself a lengthy note about what I had heard and learned, so that next time I might remember and be, tinily, a better neighbour. Friendly. Almost even a friend.
3. Berryman, Dream Song 155 final stanza, one of a sequence remembering his beloved friend Delmore Schwartz taken too young:

we never learnt why he came, or what he wanted.
His mission was obscure. His mission was real,
but obscure.
I remember his electrical insight as the young man,
his wit & passion, gift, the whole young man
alive with surplus love.

A friend is up in New Hampshire for a weekend event, and needs a ride home. But home is a town an hour away from me, and not collinear with Cambridge and her event. Total driving time would be up above four hours, and my EV’s battery isn’t at 100%; a stop to charge would likely necessary. I hate knowing about such opportunities and not acting.

At age 30, I’m there like Cher. I ‘curate’ a driving playlist en route. I think well of myself, proportionate with the inconvenience of it all.

At age 47, with my sympathies and genuine regret: Enjoy your bus ride, darling.

I’m reading Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld, which represents an attempt at a theory/practice of working with dreams that starts with Jung but embodies Hillman’s ‘stay with the image’ philosophy.

…one key reason psychoanalysis often seems to fail, or ‘fail’ — we’re sitting on the couch discussing daytime events in daytime terms, and at every turn lossily converting arising-ceasing subconscious impulses/images into the terms of interpretive ‘analytical’ schemata. ‘Staying with the image,’ even in less radical Freudian-analytical terms, must mean journeying in the imaginal. We cannot ‘exist imaginally’; existence is physical, material, logistical, logical. But we can experience imaginally, e.g. by daydreaming, meditating, fantasizing (the river of thought is Styx, or the Ripper’s Thames, or the falls at Rauros or Iguazú)…

By giving imaginal experience primacy of place in the psychoanalytic environment — seeking to realize imaginal topology in that place of practice, by the usual and unusual means — maybe we prepare to get down deeper, faster, toward the real.

For me, at least, this means I need to approach psychotherapy as something far darker and stranger than a fucking medical appointment.

And maybe it means I need to go on a vision quest, no I’m not joking, no I’m not exaggerating. I need clearer vision(s); there are techniques (of ecstasy) for that, hint hint. The shaman guides you to the land of the dead; the land of the dead is inside you; you do not enter it like a room, you enter it like a mind-state. You realize the land of the dead. This is an electrochemical process and an imaginative one.

But then I’m not undertaking either aspect of that work, am I.

Maybe it’s time for those 108 prostrations.

Spoilers follow, starting with the third full sentence.

An SCP-wiki web serial turned into an extraordinary effective cosmic-horror novel with a conceit so superbly rich it took the author years to realize just how good it was: Unknown Organization’s antimemetics division fights a long war (or indeed wars) against Lovecraftian horrors which act, in this storyworld, like black holes for memory. The head of the division comes to work, meets with subordinates, goes into airlocked conference rooms, pops mnestic (memory-boosting) drugs, and starts from scratch on the research projects that’ve taken her years and decades. A long history emerges, confined to its disappearing documentation, which gives horribly ironic meaning to the term ‘backstory.’

Indeed, that image of the past lossily reconstructed, and of heroism as a sort of doggedly hopeful and methodical inductive reasoning, is Division‘s novel conceptual contribution. Not for nothing is one of its key characters’ genius clearly communicated by his uncanny ability to trust his own notes. Author qntm is a programmer by trade, and both writes like one and (better, crucially) attends like one.

There is nearly no ‘literary style’ to the book. I noticed this only after finishing, because the story is so fucking good. This is not Vernor Vinge nor William Gibson, nor indeed Adam Roberts. Thankfully, this is not HP Lovecraft either.

The book has ‘two endings,’ which is a brave and excellent and inescapable creative choice. This means it has two key viewpoint characters, which risks fragmenting reader affection — I suspect that’s a major issue for the SCP shared-world fiction project in general — but it pays off beautifully here, doubtless under the firm guidance of qntm’s editors, who have earned their keep.

The middle third or half of the book, both before and after our first heroine’s (long-forgotten and -forgetting) widower unknowingly takes up her work, does excellently nerdy metaphor-work with modern tech and the ‘ideatic world.’ There are passages that read as chilling-warming-warning antifascist exhortations. The sequences when qntm lets loose his curiosity and intelligence, rather than his cleverness, show his real potential as a writer and thinker — the jokes are ultimately forgettable (ha ha ha) but the image of, say, monstrous cyclopean sarcophagi of the living is incredibly resonant and upsetting. The third-act sprint to the finale piles up images worthy of qntm’s much-expanded audience and ambition.

The third act also piles up the intertexts and sf references, higher in the end than I might’ve chosen, and the final transhuman resolution is a bit silly and much too Evangelion-ish for my taste. But the first half of the novel is astonishing, and the next 40% is just as engaging (but in a different register). A wonderful novel, not perfect because nothing is, which makes the most of a priceless conceit. After sleeping and dreaming on it, it’s nagging and needling me today. I’m so glad.

My son’s school was unexpectedly closed Monday and Tuesday, for certain Reasons, so this morning he asked for a lift to get the week started proper. Naturally he forgot his water bottle. Naturally he’s lost his good tennis racket; maybe it’s in a town an hour away. (What’s more natural than ADD, after all?) Naturally, when we reach the car, the album I was playing last night starts playing again—

‘Stay with Me,’ from Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space by Spiritualized, 1997. An album I didn’t appreciate when a hip friend played it for us back then, but which I wouldn’t want to do without, now. Such a heavy heart. I said to my son that once he’d had an awful breakup, a song like ‘Stay with Me’ would reach inside him and [here I reached over to the passenger seat and pretended to tear his heart out out of his ribcage like Mola Ram] but it’d be good. It’s important to love someone so much that you can’t imagine living without her; it’s important to realize you can, and just as importantly, to realize she can too. And a beautiful song can see you partway through the dark.

When the song ended I skipped backward to play ‘All of My Thoughts,’ and I talked a little about my first college girlfriend, and how stupid and lost and aggrieved I felt when we split up.

I queued up Page McConnell’s solo piano cover of The Who’s ‘Sea and Sand’ off Quadrophenia, Page singing his little heart out, lyrics he remembers his own way from his own childhood—

I see her dancing across the ballroom
UV light making star-shine of her smile
I am the Face, she has to know it
I’m dressed up better than anyone within a mile…

There’s a story that the grass is so green
What did I see? Where have I been?

We pulled up to the school and my son hopped out, and promised to look for the tennis racket first thing. I want to say, or to believe, he was in a little bit of a reflective mood. But he’s his own nation I can’t know. I suppose I saw my own mood in him, or instead of him.

My dad couldn’t stand on two feet
As he lectured about morality
And now I guess the family’s complete—

I remember feeling like the kid in the song, once upon my own time. I bet my son does too; and now I guess I’m the hypocrite and the bore instead, lecturing — or worse: reminiscing. Driving back up Storrow to pick up my wife for her morning travels, I queued up ‘Sea and Sand’ again, and sang along heavy and light, my own little heart murmuring in middling age.

Alejandro Iñárritu, in the Guardian a couple months ago:

“It’s when you are liberated from the narratives that we are so addicted to — plot twists and all that — when you liberate the images from that, the images have to say something,” he said. “Not by serving any narrative, but by just being what I found. The way you remember a film is never complete, you always remember flickers, images, moments. That’s the way our memory works. So, this is kind of a representation of how our memory works when we remember a film — it’s fragments of light and memory that are not related, but in a way they mean something, they hopefully make you feel something.” (via m john harrison)

Plot yoinks psychic image out of free play and autonomous existence and yokes it to a telos and an interpretive structure. Things that happen in stories mean things, they have to; that’s what narrative happening is. Meaning (memory-context among other things) is how event becomes experience. The psychic image doesn’t mean. Images are metaphors, analogies, associations: they are illogics of association.

Plot is logic. Image-illogic offers freedom: among other things, freedom from plot.

This and that was, and I had to, but later I’ll, so meanwhile, and.

SSIA.

Common occurrence: middle-aged guy realizes he misses D&D and wants to teach his screen-addicted kids. The old games are long since out of print, and the new versions are these $60 hardcovers full of garbage soft-focus digital art where apparently orcs are gentle souls and Alignment has been replaced by Today’s Vibes. You just want that old game. What’s to do?

And why not try the new one?

I’m here to help!

They’re fun, flavourful, and built for speed and weird mischance. TSR’s version of D&D — in primordial, light-basic, and heavier-advanced versions — was made to be claimed, personalized, and houseruled out of recognizability. It’s a run’n’gun pulp adventure game of lateral thinking and adolescent charisma. The rules fit in a pamphlet, your character fits on an index card, and nothing is out of bounds but what you decide. It respects imaginative autonomy and calls out for stupid creativity. It owes nothing to video games (indeed, the other way around). It is an important part of post-Vietnam pop culture. It’s a great time.

D&D 5e is a middleweight game — a cleaner design than AD&D, oddly proportioned the way the old game was. Spreadsheets were used in its design, but inconsistently. They don’t matter. It’s meant to be played on a chessboard but won’t just come out and say it. Its implied setting has abandoned the original pulp-inspired ‘humans and the occasional demihuman seek their fortune in a capriciously deadly world of monsters’ frame, in favour of a more diffuse ‘demihumans and the occasional human seek to do good in a basically safe world of monsters’ thing. The production values are excellent; the playerbase comes from videogames and deprecates ‘homebrew’ creativity to a startling, depressing degree.

There are some valuable mechanical changes to the old ways, chief among them Advantage/Disadvantage: most situational d20 modifiers are replaced by rolling twice and keeping either the better or the worse result. If you have both Ad and Disad (from however many non-stacking sources), they just cancel out. It’s simple and clear, and a bit deflating. There are some…questions…about which game system this mechanic was taken from, uncredited.

5e was designed in 2014 to be a ‘universal receptor’ for D&D players of all the previous modes: the woolly TSR games, the hideously overengineered 3e/3.5, even the elegant chess++ mistake 4e — a deliberate attempt to be every gamer’s ‘second favourite D&D.’ It’s enormously popular because it’s a popular chassis for voice actors and comedians to play on camera.

I’ve been playing 5e for years and am fine with it. But while it’s not a universal system, it’s not an idiosyncratic or interesting one either. It has no personality at all. I wouldn’t bother running it for my son unless he insisted.

In the 3e and 4e eras, WotC/Hasbro licensed D&D’s rules. The terms of the license, combined with the fun fact that rules themselves are not copyrightable while their written expression is, led to a proliferation of ‘retroclones’ of the old TSR games, by (almost exclusively) guys who played the old games and wanted to go back and (usually) do it weirder. OSRIC is a cleaned-up AD&D 1e, Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a lean and strange black-metal version of the early-80s Moldvay/Cook ‘Basic/Expert’ games, Old-School Essentials is an autistically precise recreation of the B/X rules. The recent game Shadowdark reruns B/X with some post-5e simplifications and a handful of mechanics borrowed from old-school blogs. The old systems are easily adapted to other genres, it turns out: Mutant Future redoes Gamma World with B/X mechanics; Stars Without Number does the same for Traveller.

There are a lot of ‘old-school’ games to be had, none of them bearing the name Dungeons & Dragons.

And then Hasbro published an anniversary edition of the 1st edition hardcovers, which sold like gangbusters and told the suits that money was out there to be made.

And then all the 1980s D&D editions were made available in official PDF releases, which sold quite well and affirmed that money was out there to be made.

And then as softcover and indeed hardcover print-on-demand books!

So you can just buy the old games again online, wait a couple weeks, and have a spiffy new copy of your childhood to hand to your bored and functionally illiterate modern child.

OK so which version should you give her?

To begin with…

Moldvay/Cook + Keep on the Borderlands. The B/X edition was, and still is, the cleanest, clearest, most evocative introductory version of D&D. The Basic Set — bright red with yellow lettering and a characteristic Erol Otus painting on the cover — came with the beloved, slightly incoherent intro adventure Keep on the Borderlands, and sold many many a copy in 1981-83. Even if you grew up on the rewritten ‘BECMI’ edition by Frank Mentzer, with the classic Larry Elmore cover art, get the B/X books instead.

If you run out of monsters six months from now, pick up the 1e Monster Manual or (even better) the 2e Monstrous Manual and do some elementary math to convert whatever stats seem weird. Guides exist online.

Alternatively…

Rules Cyclopedia + AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. The canonical one-volume presentation of old-school D&D is Aaron Allston’s Cyclopedia. It has two flaws: it stretches the game from 14 to 36 levels, rather slowing certain skill progressions, and its visual presentation is fucking disastrous. No book has handled page numbers and headings worse than the RC. But it’s the only one-stop version of the game, handling everything from low-level ‘charismatic ne’er-do-wells rob graves and get killed by housecats’ to ‘strangle a god with your bare hands and take Her place’ stuff at campaign’s end. If you are limited to one old-school D&D book, it should be this one.

Meanwhile, Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide is one of the most important works of American postwar fantasy. It is totally incompetent work, and it is an outpouring of genius; the DMG left a Hobbit-sized crater in nerd-world, for better and worse. And you can read it forever and keep finding Neat Stuff, most of it stupid, much of it startlingly useful (‘…from a certain point of view’).

These two hardcovers, at a total cost of $60 or so, will last you a lifetime. And of course, a library of supporting material awaits.

Moreover…

Old-School Essentials. Gavin Norman’s retroclone combines Moldvay Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert into a single attractive A5 reference text with absolutely perfect information-design, totally devoid of flavour but ready to run in five seconds at the table. For most ordinary passages of play, there’s a two-page spread that has all your situational rules. OSE’s monster writeups are concise, the dice tables are squeaky clean, and D&D has never been more clearly laid out.

If you’re running B/X, you should own this book.

But it is useless as a teaching-text. Norman and company are coming out with a beginner boxset later this year — but instead of buying that for your kid and her friends, get the Moldvay book.

But then again…

There’s a single volume B/X Omnibus PDF floating around there, along with handsome cover PDFs (for hardcover and perfect-bound versions), which you could print at lulu.com fer real cheap. Less usable than OSE, for the usual reasons, but it’s got all the flavour, down to the wonderful cover paintings. If I were running B/X for my own son and his crew, this is the edition I’d give each of them. If you wait for Lulu’s annual 30% discount, it’s even the cheapest way to do it.

In honour of Julian of Norwich’s night of divine deathbed ‘shewings,’ on this date in 1373, let us celebrate a similar visionary experience, this one shared and attested by thousands, in the late 20th century across the wide western sea.

If you’ve heard a single Grateful Dead live set — if a well-meaning stoner friend tried to put you onto their music — there’s every chance that it’s the second half of the concert from Cornell’s Barton Hall, performed on Sunday the 8th of May, 1977. Amongst deadheads this is that rare combination of received convention and thoughtful consensus. The show was widely circulated Back In The Day partly because it was a great gig available in a perfect soundboard recording, and that’s obviously contributed to its canonization — everyone hears it because everyone’s heard it — but it’s also just a perfect encapsulation of the Dead’s post-hiatus ‘psychedelic dance band’ sound, favouring the fluid-ethereal over the astral (or the high-technical) in a flawlessly organized set-long story.

Plenty of wise people with low blood pressure will tell you that the Dead were the best American rock band. But no one album or show proves the point. Live/Dead, their classic early-1969 double live album, presents the results of their first few years of experiment and exploration; while it deserves its reputation for initiatory passage, it predates Garcia/Hunter’s songwriting watershed, and in foregrounding Pigpen McKernan’s personality-plus raps it unfortunately points up his constraining limitations in the keyboard chair. (The Dead were amazing with Pigpen, but their music made a quantum leap when they got a pianist with real chops, at the cost of an important but self-limiting part of their early identity.) Europe ’72 samples an incredible breakthrough period for the band and their new keyboard player Keith Godchaux, but it leaves out the nightly half-hour cosmic improvisations that make the full tour essential listening. Dick’s Picks 4 — February 1970 in their away gym at the Fillmore East, another standard new-listener choice — can be a taxing listen over three discs,1 but its insane 90-minute Dark Star > Other One > Lovelight sequence perfectly complements its disc-one early rusticana and covers all that they then were. DP4 is the actual best one-stop introduction to the band’s improvisatory project, if anything is. Yet in 1970 the Dead were still primarily representatives of a SF scene, still a certain kind of very Sixties Weird, which makes for powerful listening but only hints at how much they’d later be able to do with a single set. The pieces aren’t all in place.

The Cornell show is in several key ways simpler than those turn-of-the-decade performances: Lesh hews closer to rock-bass conventions, Keith adds colour but not much harmonic challenge, and there’s no space-jam to mess with the shifting dance beat. And with Donna around, the vocal harmonies are fuller. But the crucial advance, I think, is that the band (especially Lesh and the drummers) has learned to float. Garcia’s melodic leads and Bobby’s rhythm-guitar concept are fully formed, the extended ‘jazz’2 harmonies of the 1973-74 shows are in balance with the open-road songwriting, and the band’s sound is smooth as silk even as they push into unknown territory. The Dead were a lot of things over their 30 years, and I think they were never better at being so many of them than right at this time, between the psychedelic practice-studio attack of their 75-76 hiatus and the chemical/sonic shift that marked their Reagan/MIDI era. 1977 isn’t my favourite period of their music (that’s the end of the one-drummer interregnum, 73-74), but it’s the most consistently pleasurable, masterful, and welcoming Dead on tape. And it leaves the curious newbie with a choice: work backward through the 70s into the Dead’s ‘primal’ 60s material, or forward through the coke years to their elder-statesmen era.

Either way, what complicated bliss.

If you’re totally new to the Dead and can handle sitting still for 25 minutes, put on the Scarlet > Fire that starts the second set of the Cornell show and be welcomed into the secret. Ideally you should hear the couple minutes preceding the set first, with Bobby and Jerry beseeching the crowd to back up to give the dancers a little room while the band tunes up. It’ll set the mood: sarcastic, welcoming, taking play seriously; this bit of banter is so well known to fans that even the official release of the show includes it.

And then it’s time for one of the better straight-up rock songs of the 70s, a butter-smooth segue into one of the canonical hippie-dance tunes, and a climactic guitar-led jam in ‘Fire’ that’ll singe the hairs off your palms.

If you dig that then you’ll love the shambling/bopping/whirling dance jams that follow, and the show-closing arrangement of ‘Morning Dew’ will carry you down through the valley and over the mountain and on through the last days. The Dew jam is so perfectly realized, its climax such warning thunder and apocalyptic sunstroke, that it doesn’t matter that they bobble the landing a little. Maybe I’m prone to hyperbole at times, whatever fuck you, but when people talk about hearing the voice of God — y’know, that hoary old metaphor for what merely meat and mind make — I think of this song and I know just what we mean. God is a fiction and this is one of the places I go to hear Its voice.

Cornell was my own first Dead tape, of course — I think some Phish fan hooked me up with a blanks+postage deal back in the day, with a beautiful hand-coloured j-card. Along with the classic Branford show? Somebody knew. The old heads who make it through intact are tasked with carrying something forward for us young people.

My first Dead CD, not counting the best-of comp and Terrapin Station discs I got on spec from Columbia House mail-order in high school, was the copy of Dick’s Picks 4 I borrowed from David at MIT, along with Live-Evil, and shittily pathetically never returned.

I’m sorry David. Thank you for helping me along a little ways.

1. There’s a seven-minute drum duet. ↩
2. Derisive scare quotes around ‘jazz’ because the Dead played plenty of things, but not that. Phil Lesh’s 2000-01 quintet could make the claim, and I’m sure Lesh could have learned the music, but ultimately he was a talented dilettante and Garcia’s omnivorous interests lay elsewhere and it wasn’t until Bruce Hornsby came on full-time that calling the Dead ‘jazz’ stopped sounding like special pleading. ↩

One of the essays in Voluptuous Panic! is, or started as, an attempt to clarify and explain what ‘genius’ is to me — the word is freighted and its meaning too shifty, so it must’ve seemed useful at some point to set down a definitional marker. In the event, I ended up writing this sentence—

Mostly men, these, but not all: think too of Mrs Whatsit, Juliet’s Nurse, Granny Weatherwax, Anne Sullivan, Ms Frizzle.

Yesterday I flipped through the whole book writing down its topics in sequence, for the benefit of future historians and biographers as well as for my own amusement. This essay, ‘Freedom to Live’ (the final stage of Campbell’s hero-schema), broke down as follows:

• vision i.e. ‘genius’
• heroic reintegration
• joyce and matrix
• incommensurability is the cost of self-actualization
• conceptual hygiene hypothesis
• Jes Grew
• visionary gurus
• at last, an extended discussion of star wars
• the call to adventure is unfair
• you would have met your own darth vader

‘Joyce and matrix’ is indeed about the Wake and the Wachowskis.

The essay is structurally baggy but the good bits are quite good and I did come up with the fine section-title ‘Campbell’s Super.’ My weaknesses didn’t suddenly disappear overnight, but certain strengths remain.

I can’t write anything real today — too fucking tired. This is what’s available.