Archive for the ‘Jeremiah Tolbert’ Category
Frag Satan!
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
“Satan, I summon you for a pwning!” I shouted, completing the incantation from within my circle of USB cables and hubs. There was a flash of green light, and then a sound like all the air was being sucked out of the LAN party.
“You dare challenge me?” Satan roared. He had a voice like, what if James Earl Jones and Tom Waits made a baby, but he looked about 15 years old, covered in acne with a purple Mohawk so sharp it was cutting my eyes from across the room. He strolled angrily to our table and sat down, taking a computer out of a messenger bag slung over his shoulder.
No cloven feet, no horns, no tail, but his sweet-ass laptop had a red sticker on it that said PITCHFORK in a devilish font. It emitted a blue glow and throbbed gently like a living thing. Ahh–my prize. I had to have it.
G.R., my best friend and clanmate, fell out of his ergonomic chair and onto his ass when Satan appeared. I continued with my challenge terms as the ritual required.
“One round of Counter-Strike. My soul against your computer,” I said.
Satan drew a cat-5e cable out a pocket to Hell in thin air. It made a sound like a thousand souls screaming for all eternity, but they shut up when he plugged into our hub. “Gamers are always so fucking cocky,” he said. “You’re on.”
Five sweaty minutes later, I put a bullet through Satan’s avatar’s head. He vanished in a cloud of acrid smoke, wailing and gnashing his teeth, but leaving the laptop behind.
“Dude,’ said G.R. “I can’t believe you just used wall haxx against Satan.”
I sniffed. “Not my fault he’s a total noob. I’m going to Hell in the end anyway, so I might as well have a totally sweet laptop until then.”
Dude,” G.R. said, clearly impressed. “What’s that summoning spell again?”
First Time
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
So I met this girl at a “meatspace” party the summer between high school and college. I was hanging out with a lot of BBS people back then, before the Internet. And I asked everyone at the party, but no one knew what her screen name was, and they got a little nervous when I brought it up, which only made me more interested. I spent the night watching her across the room. Some time after midnight, she walked out onto a balcony just off the main room where my fellow nerds were arguing about the X-Files. I followed her.
“What’s the weirdest thing you have ever seen?” she turned and asked me before I could figure out what I wanted to say. She lit a Marlboro with a cheap Bic lighter, and the end glowed like the moon on fire.
I paused for a moment before answering. “I saw a ghost of a jogger on the Fourth of July, running in the road. I could see through him and everything. You?”
“Flying saucers practicing their landing on a hillside in Arkansas. They darted up into the clouds sometimes, and then floated back down like a feather. I was bored after an hour.”
I laughed. “I know what you mean. It like, when you see things that lie outside of the realm of the normal, you aren’t aware, in the moment, just how unusual they are. And then you spend a lot of time trying to come up with explanations that put the event squarely inside normal.”
“Lovecraft thought those kinds of things would drive people mad, but I think that human brains are too elastic for that,” she said. When she took a drag from the cigarette, her face lit up. Her eyes were green.
“Is that why I am not gibbering right now?” I asked.
“You mean, because of my tentacles?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t meant to draw attention to them directly, but they were kind of hard not to notice.
“Beats me,” she said. She paused, and took a long drag off of her cigarette. “You want to make out?”
“Sure.”
So that’s how I lost my virginity. I have a suspicion that if I had answered her opening question with “you,” something much worse would have happened to me.