In a (New) World of My Own

Rise – commute – work – commute – home -dinner – kids – shower – sleep. I get maybe an hour per day to process and upload images and do take care of those essential little tasks for relaunching. I still have to assemble photobook templates, flyer templates, business card templates, and to push out my advertising on Craigslist, Facebook and MySpace.

And there is a second child on the way. When did my life take on this sheen of the daily adult grind? Two years ago my biggest choice was whether I should go for a photowalk or log into World of Warcraft and do an instance with my guild.

Caira’s birthday photos are still coming. Honest.

Almost everyone I know in Las Vegas is transient – I’m from Galway, Mariah hails from San Diego and my friends Tia and Caron hail from San Francisco and somewhere in rural Indiana respectively. Only my sister-in-law Holli, and my daughter are Caira bonafide, born Las Vegans. You retire here. You come here for in search of work, to join your family or even to come in search of your big break. Some come for the weather Some come to gamble and never leave.

But here’s the thing: You hate it here. You hate the dust, the lack of open green areas, and the heat. You hate all of the other asshole drives from out-of-state who don’t give two shits about the city. You hate your crappy eight dollar an hour job, because not a single resort on the Strip – where all of the good jobs lay – will hire you. Maybe you just Las Vegas because your co-workers and friends all tell you how much they absolutely loathe the city, to the point where you have trouble trying to think up good things.

End result? No one respects Las Vegas. No one (who I know) gives two shits about the city, save as a means to an end. Tia wants to pursue her career until she has enough on her resume to move away from this sandbox. Caron is waiting (im)patiently for her husband to ship out – to anywhere. And I’m waiting for the baby to arrive before we try to leave for anywhere we can make a living because mine wife and I both feel that Las Vegas ultimately doesn’t offer all that much for our family.

And all this shows in how the people I see each day act, how the police act and how the city officials act. It took me two years to realize that many of the people who live here have a huge chip on their shoulder about here. They love America, but by God they do not, and never will, love Las Vegas.

Contrast this with a three hour drive north of the state line. In the fourteen hours I was in Beaver, Utah I met people who were born and raised in the city, who pointed at the farm down the road and told me how their great, great grandparents came to the valley with the first wave of pioneers back in 1856, built that house themselves and how the family is still there a hundred and fifty-three years later. Maybe I’m just jaded, but I was shocked to meet people who loved the city they lived in and were proud of its accomplishments.

I’ll even put aside the scary moment when I caught a bunch of rednecks looking at me like they wanted to walk up and say, ”Well dun you have a real purthy mouth on you, boy.” Total townie/nerd moment of bowel-clenching fear.

I like Beaver. I liked the cool breeze, the silence, the fresh air, the fact that everyone drove slowly. The manners and politeness. The girl at the McDonalds drive-through who spoke perfect English. I loved the scenery, the sunset, and the dirt roads.

God Utah is love?

If you are reading this on MySpace, or followed the tweet from Twitter, thank Wordpress’ Socialite plugin. It sends out Tweets, it gives alerts, and in the case of MySpace lets me completely cross-post my blog entries. This level of laziness only took uh, oh god, two days of dawn to dusk tinkering? Two days, yeah. I had to update my Wordpress, update my backend, make changes to configuration files I barely remembered existed and maybe sacrifice the odd chicken or two. It fucking PETA comes around asking, tell them it was a rubber chicken and flip them off just because. Wordpress tosses out a few weird errors when I publish a post, but It Works. I can iron out the quirks later.

Fucking typical (Linux) geek mindset. Spend days tinkering and tweaking something to perfection for the sake of avoiding five minutes of copying, pasting and checking code.

But all this free time is courtesy of two things: Mariah is out of town (see here),, and I gave up my job purely through my own means. Over the last few months we’ve all gone from one lower notch after another, at least from where I stand (see here). All of those feelings came to a head about four weeks ago when I tried to leave. I had given work notice, had my bags packed, money acquired and was just waiting for the right time to take the flight. Until Mariah noticed that I had a bunch of missed calls from my family in Ireland, checked my voicemail in case someone was dead, made the connection, and confronted me while I was in the shower.

O capricious fate!

This wasn’t my proudest moment, but we sat down, talked through it. Really talked, heart to heart, for what felt like the first time in months. We confronted ugly facts, proverbially held hands and maybe improved our marriage for the next thirty-odd hours.

At that point I lied to my family. I could bear to admit that after all that was said I was backing out of leaving and wanted to stay here, so I lied about why I wasn’t on the plane. I should have foreseen them panicking, making their own phone calls, calling in connections and stirring up a shitstorm out of fear that I was in danger. Ah well. They called here, words were said and everything came to light. I wound up hated, discredited and out of work. Some things improved over the next few weeks and now Mariah and I back to where we started. We bicker, upset each other on a daily basis, and occasionally have moments where we act like a couple in love again.

Where did it all go? Our love and passion and interest for and in each other has turned into (for me) stir-craziness. Wanderlust is a terrible beast. Outside of two trips to San Diego, a few day trips to Boulder City and Pahrump, and one trip out to St. George in Utah to shoot a wedding, all I’ve seen of the ten million-odd square kilometres of the United States of America are the four sides of the Las Vegas Valley. Gass Peak to the north, Frenchman Mountain to the east, La Madre Mountain to the west and Black Mountain away to the south. I have this horrible, burning urge to go anywhere, see anything, just so long as I’m moving. Any direction, any speed, as long as I’m going. It’s unfair to you, Mariah, but this is what has been pushing me. And I also know I’ve put us into a catch 22 bind: You will not move with me because I’m a flight risk, and I’m a flight risk because you will not move.

It runs in the males of my family. Dad always had to be walking somewhere. He was the only person who knew more about Galway city from the perspective of being on foot than I ever did, because I had to always walk too. I got up in the middle of last night and walked five or six miles just because it felt good. Frank is the same, but he finds his outlet in airshows. He’s always on a plane to an airshow or from one. He’ll tell you it’s for the planes.

Going to new places: It’s better than any alcohol, more of a addictive than World of Warcraft and more of a kick than sex. I’m a novelty-junkie.

I came across this powerful piece while following random links on a forum. If you have kids, have had kids, or plan to have kids, I ask you to take a gander.

Reading it raised questions about religion, God and faith that I’ve managed to deftly avoid for almost twenty years. With one child almost of school age and a second well on his way I have to consider how I (we) will present the whole matter to them. Nominally, technically, I’m an Irish Roman Catholic from the parish of St. Patrick’s church in Galway city. I was duly baptised in 1981, had my first holy communion somewhere around 1986 and had my confirmation in 1990. I went to church every Sunday until about 1993 – I was actually an altar boy – when one day I simply realised that no one at home was going to force me to go to Sunday mass. So I stopped attending. Mum gave me heat about the topic a few times, and Jennifer still tells me if I’m full of shit if the topic if it ever comes up, but mostly everyone at home has left me be about my faith, or lack of it. I mean, while I’ve gone through the motions a few more times for the sake of family, at dad’s funeral and at nana’s, I leave religion be and expect the same of them. The few Baptists, Evangelists, Mormons, Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Jews, Bhuddists, Hindus, bog-standard Catholics, Protestants and Calvinists who’ve pressed me on the topic of converting have been soundly told to go fuck off. I love you guys, really, but I’m not interested.

One of my absolutely earliest memories of religion was my first holy communion. To me it was just cards full of money from family members and cousins, some as far flung as England, and a really cracking dinner out at a pub. The spiritual parts were utterly missed on me, maybe considering my age. The next time comes a few years after that. I remember asking mum why we went to church if God was everywhere, all the time. She shushed me and told me that it was expected of us to go.

Alright. Fair enough, even. So we go to mass for the sake of fitting in with the neighbours?
No, Mark. Jesus expects us to go.
Oh.

And I remember very clearly that that moment set off this niggling conflict inside of me. No one, not one person in my family who I ever met called upon God, prayed to Jesus outside of that one hour on Sunday morning when we went through the rote motions as the priest up upon high read the same letter out of John’s once again. I can almost recount word for word what was said every weekend. Lamb God, take away the sins of the world. Lamb of God, pray for us sinners. Yeah.

So we went there, we prayed, we went through the motions, and went back to being a broken family. Dad was almost at his lowest ebb then. He had walked out of his job simply because it cut into his drinking time, and mum had gone back to work in a bakery to make end’s meet, as well as having to be mum when she came back home. I was going through a really rough time at school by being that kid. I was bullied, I got in fights, I was disruptive and I started going out on the mitch all the time. Times were tough, and nowhere in it could I see the hand of God. Dad got drunk because that was just what he did. My own problems at school came from me not caring enough to just go through the motions of fitting in.

How could Jesus or God help us with this? Make us say a few prayers or recite the rosary?

Skip forward about six years. I became an altar boy because it was the done thing, and used it to my advantage. I got out of school, I got tips for weddings and funerals and otherwise, while I was closer to the action, I still had this feeling that we were all just going through the motions. Maybe this is an Irish feeling, this deep undercurrent of cynicism that lies in the heart of every Irish person. I’ve seen the alcoholism, the lies, all of the violence firsthand. And in all of this I had a growing realisation that I simply had no faith. There is no Big Man up on some cloud pervin’ on all of us mortal sinners as we had sex, as we lied, stole, beat our wives and families. And so I reached the point at the start of this piece: I simply stopped going to church.

Three things came of this, two good and one bad. One is an abiding love of the architecture of temples of all kinds. The entire concept of such a temple, a monument to something greater than the sum of all out of human parts speaks of a hope and unity that still humbles me today. The second is a respect for priests on an individual level. I feel lucky as I read about paedophile priests and preachers of hate and intolerance because every priest I encountered as a youth were warm and approachable men. They were teachers and shepherds, and if nothing else, they’ve sworn to give up their whole lives into the service of others. And the third thing is a deep and abiding dislike of religions as a whole. Church will always be, to me, people going through empty motions for the sake of fitting in, or worse, being filled with messages of hate and bias and intolerance.

So where do my kids fit into all of this? Force my own scepticism on them? Let them discover, as they will, God, god or gods? Tell them to ignore it all?

About ten weeks ago I finally moved In a (New) World of My Own to Wordpress 2.7, but a strange problem occured: I could not make a new post or edit an existing one. My real-life upheavals, lack of free time, and simple lack of interest in blogging stopped me from finding a fix, until in five minutes of sheer boredom I solved it (it was a plugin).

Now what? I asked myself. I logged back into World of Warcraft and hit level 80 on Tashrak. Excitement! For about three weeks after that I was so determined to ignore the real world around me out of anger that I just played played played…and found real-life sitting there still when I looked up from Mariah’s laptop. And from where I stand, real-life hasn’t been good. I’ve battled stomach upsets on and off for about a month, which included losing three days of work to diarrhea, a trip to the doctor and lots of misery therein.

Sw33t.

I’ve been outright…distraught beyond that. Mariah is pregnant with my child. I’ve yet to feel anything towards it. Love and compassion would be great, Fetus, but I’d even take hate or loathing right now to let me know that there’s something ticking away inside me. I resent what you represent, though. I looked at you kicking and waving on the sonogram yesterday and I nearly broke down crying because you are the manifestation of Mariah and I’s failure to ever communicate – she felt I wanted a child because of jokes I cracked almost two years ago, to ever agree on anything important – birth control and another child, and everything that we have lost – our home, independence, occasional domestic bliss, and our nascent financial security. We were slowly moving back into the black when Mariah felt that she had to give up work and move us back into your grandmother’s home. I loathe this house, you know. It’s filty, cluttered with trash and overrun with animals pissing on everything within reach. I’m upset that my childen, you and your sister Caira, will be raised in this house by a family who is perfectly happy with this squalor. And if nothing else, it upsets me that everyone around me has found joy in their pregnancies, in the birth of their children, and show the ability to plan their pregnancy. Your conception has brought nothing, nothing, not a single thing but discord and misery.

And yet, I feel absolutely nothing towards you you you. I don’t feel love, but I cannot bring myself to hate you. Why?

Your mum is completely uncaring towards my upset. I’m told to shut up whining, and deal with it, Mark if I complain. I don’t act any better by keeping your mum at arm’s length and only ever talking to her with ice in my voice. Aren’t we just a fantastic set of parents? This is the world you’ll come into, Fetus. Mum and dad always at each other’s throats and afraid to just listen to each other.

And there’s nothing between you and I. I gave the gift that started this off, is all. No hard feelings, right?

I wanted to run away, run fast, run hard until I was out of your mum’s shadow. I spoke to my friend. I spoke to my family too, and they all asked me, ”what about the baby?” I told them I could support you from afar. I told them I could browbeat your mum into registering you as an Irish citizen. I told myself I could love you from afar, free of your mum, free of her (your!) family, and free to live my life.

But that won’t work. Your mum would cut off every bit of access I might have had to you. I do not know the full truth of the story with your sister and her father, but I do know Mariah walled off Billy completely. At best, I think I’d be an idol of casual hate. ”Fetus, meet your father. Mind what I told you about hating him!”

It’s a funny thing, that I can bear the idea of not loving you, but I can’t bear the idea of you hating me.

These combine with Caira’s My Little Pony toys to form the three pillars of my existence. Untold virtures stem from the combination of their disparate molecules.

They make life worth living and I think I need them. She loves those damm ponies, Blue and Red like nothing else. Blue flies and Pink wants to take long naps… Wait, just wait. I’m playing with plastic ponies? Well yeah. It’s a joy to just see Caira using her imagination to turn the toys into whatever she wants them to be. I full expect that at least one of them will be a dinosaur by next week.

Caira (and I) have come down with a tickly throat cough that kept us awake for most of last night. We tried to give her cough medicine, but she got so upset by this that she got sick. :[

Other days, yeah. Mariah has been Big Bear and San Diego over the weekend, so I dusted off my Warlock on Arthas and decided to grind him to level 50 (from 42) so that he could both fill out his Demonolgy tree and get his Felguard. I just didn’t count on weekend warriors.

Immediately after starting a quest on Saturday morning I was obliged to defend myself from speciest Horde who were probably just a husband and wife team IRL trying to grab a few kills, but were ultimately traumatized after their meeting with me. So I moved location and had another team try and kill me. And another. But all this fighting honestly produced some awesome moments because how many level 46 Warlocks can say that they killed a level 58 Death Knight? A level 48 Rogue attacked me at the Steamwheedle Port in Tanaris and as I was finishing her off a Death Knight intervened and attacked me. I immediately spammed Fear, put a DoT on his pet to stop him from mounting and ran for Gadgetzan (the Highlander Boots from Arathi Basin and a Swiftness Potion were my two lifesavers). The Death Knight followed me on foot and was immediately killed by town guards. Easily my most fun kill of the weekend.

Weekend warriors turned what should have been a straight grind into a twelve hour passage through the valley of darkness. I dinged to level 50 at five o’clock in the morning in the backwoods of Felwood and getting an underpowered pet. I can understand the power of the Felguard at levels 70 and beyond, but at the moment you get the pet at level 50, it is severely underpowered. Playing through Demonology I am used to using my pets to control a situation. My Succubus can instantly stun a player for up to fifteen seconds and with the damage mitigation, mana and healing provided by talent tree my Voidwalker becomes the rock on which monsters break themselves. But the Felguard cannot do any of that. The Felguard’s melee damage at this level is middling, it cannot charge/stun players yet and it’s taunt is underpowered. Had I known all of this beforehand I might have stayed with the Affliction talent tree, but what’s done is done.

And maybe getting the Felguard was a premonition of Sunday? If I was the pigeon on Saturday, I was the statue on Sunday and died to every player who gave me so much as a casual glance. I was corpse-camped in Un’Goro and faced ride-by gankings in the Plaguelands. I lagged out so badly in Shattrath City that I ran diagnostics on my laptop and found that my hard disk might be on its last legs.

y da h8?

I get the Look about once a month here in Las Vegas, give or take. This is neither a look or the look, it is the Look. A hypothetical observer of the person Giving this Look to me would note the significant import given to this Look and mentally capitalize it. For me though, the Look means a few awkward moments of this Irishman becoming the Giver’s personal hero, favourite celebrity in the flesh and possibly a lifetime counselor. These are grave powers that should never be used for evil.

The Giving of the Look usually begins with me in a store somewhere, ordering something. I speak my part and mentally roll a D100. Roll a 1-99 and I get a simple I’m sorry, but could you repeat that again? Roll a 100 and I get the Look. A few silent moments pass as mental hard-drives spin up, processors crunch numbers and programs are loaded into RAM. And then I get asked:

I’m sorry, but are you Irish?

Yes. Shit.

I’m a Foreigner, you see. A flesh and blood Irishman straight for the storied days of yore. Mexicans don’t count, to Americans. I mean, their Uncle Mitch went on holidays in Moscow and in the room next to him? A Mexican family from Tijuana. The Mexican people are so ubiquitous here that they blend into the background noise and don’t really get noticed on a conscious level. Hispanics in general, that is visitors from Central American, South American and even from the Iberian Peninsula, suffer this fate too. You are foreign, but not Foreign.

I usually cringe inside while waiting for the Giver’s next statement. It will fall into one of the following categories:

So, you’re Irish… This rest of this statement is an unspoken implication that by being Irish I have regularly conversed and consorted with pixies, fairies, druids, warlocks and also that yes, I know where the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow is. I can get away with a knowing smirk and a wink.

Or

Do you know where….? The village asked about was abandoned during the famine and is now little more than a jumbled pile of stones on a lonely moonlit hill somewhere. Why yes! This village is still a bustling town somewhere peopled by your distant cousins.

Or

When is it a good time to visit? It never really is. This is fucking Ireland, one of the wettest places on Earth outside of the Amazon Basin and Seattle. My home city has the world record for most consecutive days of rain. We light fires and use heaters in July as it can get so damp and miserable. In winter we either hide behind a glass in a warm pub for two months straight or stay home and screw like rabbits. In summer we either hide behind a glass in a warm pub for two months straight or stay home and screw like rabbits. Well this is a fine time of year as the weather is great.

Or

Do you know who…? This is the worst – and thankfully rarest – question of them all. I am hailed as literally one of their flesh and blood ancestors brought through time to the present day and expected to deliver learned ancestral advice on the direction of their life and critique their life to date. I hate you. You did fine, but you should maybe get a girlfriend and maybe look for a better job, okay?

The knights on their silver chargers were well-fortified with alcohol, with a company of archers on the wall to cover their charge they were loud and brash, but their dark-eyed enemy was fierce and grim. All too soon were the knights forced to retreat from the field in disarray with their dead and wounded left behind to be cloven by the cruel weapons of the heathens.

Oh, no doubt tales will be sung in years to come of that cold morning’s deeds. An epic poem brave Sir Decatur’s charge into the enemy’s midst to hew down the fork-tongue captain before he was felled by a stray arrow will be sung to the chorus of a roaring toast from the men-at-arms in the mead-hall.

Or Sir Paradise’s brave sacrifice to give his brother knights a chance to retreat becomes an example of how to comport yourself as a knight. So, they tell squires, all that crap you spout about being chaste, dedicated, poetic and a lady’s man? Managing estates books and leading men from the rear? That’s bullshit. This, this Sir Paradise is how a real knight behaves.

Now Sir Rainbow’s squire, a learned lad, was beaten down and captured in the midst of a fierce melee. He learned the heathen’s tongue from the hours he’d wasted learning from his books. While being ransomed by the heathens he discoursed at length with one of their lords. Eventually his impassioned debates convinced the heathen King Summerlin to withdraw his armies from the besieged castle and sue for peace. He was eventually sainted for his pious work and earned himself a pretty stained-glass window in a church somewhere.

But, you know, those fancily embroidered tales aren’t half of the story. The real story.

Take Sir Decatur. It turns out that he was a right bastard who had a young wife at home with an inheritance of almost a thousand hectares of prime farmland… and a younger brother who’d been vigorously courting her while Decatur Sr. was away. Lonely and unhappy wife; dedicated and charming suitor. A tale as old as Cain and Abel. Decatur Jr. gave a pouch of gold coins to a bowman known to have gambling problems, in order to take care of any niggling technicalities. Nothing was explicitly asked, nothing was explicitly promised. Everyone walked away happy.

Or poor Sir Paradise, a man who has issues with the adage love thy brother. His love for his brother knights went a little farther than some others and when his father found out…oh dear. De-facto disowned by his family, left almost destitute, and with his fathers last words of you’re no knight ringing in his (admittedly pretty) ears, Sir Paradise was determined to go out with a last fuck you, world! that would be sung about for decades to come. What the fuck did that doddering old bastard with his thirteen-year old second wife know? Fuck him. So Sir Paradise was the first to volunteer for the sally and knew that his moment had come when his brothers started to run for the walls. He pulled out his sword and beat those little woodsie fucks down until corpses were piled five deep by his feet before a captain with half a brain just called for someone with a crossbow.

Thunk.

And Sir Rainbow’s squire? He didn’t want to be there, shouldn’t have been there. Rainbow’s lord knight was an old man on his last procession around the kingdom before he hung up his gauntlets for good. Misfortune caught them both at the castle when the siege began. The old cock just had to go out in a blaze of glory and volunteered them both for the sally. A woodsie pikeman caught Rainbow in stomach during the first twenty seconds of the sally and spilled his guts in a gorily spectacular manner. The squire was left standing there facing a mounted knight and three woodsie men-at-arms. After considered the pretty girl waiting for him at home, his future inheritance and his current odds of getting either, the squire literally shit his pants, threw down his sword and begged for mercy. They smirked at him and moved in for the skill. Shit. Think! I’m a merchant’s son, what do I know? Money. Je suis riche et peut être racheté pour l’or. Prenez-moi en vie! he cried in the heathens uncouth language. I am rich and can be ransomed for gold. Take me alive! After a moment of their own consideration the heathens took the squire to the rear of their camp, sluiced off the shit and kept him in a tent with a man who was ordered to slit the squire’s throat if he so much as gave anyone a funny look. This was while they verified through their sources that he really was worth a lot of money. You can consider this a medieval credit check. When word came back that his credit was good, the squire was offered a better tent, more wine and even a pretty wench to warm his bed, in exchange for a promise of good conduct. How fucking awesome!

But while kicked his heels, the thought about, and talked about, money. How everyone involved could make a ridiculous amount of the golden stuff if they just stopped killing each other for a while. Eventually word of these gilt-ledged monologues worked its way up to the ear of King Summerlin and ordered the squire brought to his pavilion. There they talked. The squire spent ten minutes listening (politely) to the king’s listing of grievances against his heathen people and then embarked on a six hour presentation of Why Trade Routes Make More Sense. Those farmers who desecrated your family graves? They’re someone’s tenants. Buy their landlord out and cast the fuckers out on their arses. Make a lasting example of them. Eventually, convinced that he will be bathing in gold before year’s end and have more concubines that any decently decadent man would know what to do with, King Summerlin ends the siege with an apology to the squire for any rough treatment. It’s just business, you know? No hard feelings? Great!

Such was yesterday’s post. I spoke a few (arguably pretty) words that ultimately didn’t convey on the fact that my marriage, while it includes two very imperfect people, can occasionally be very interesting, have strange consequences and features real flesh and blood people who do things like shit themselves when faced with stiff opposition or bribe the enemy commander to call off his soldiers. I also hate using this blog for extended Evil Villain-style internal monologues.

And no, I’m not gay. It was an analogy.