Roads, Mills, Laps

I drove into this deserted, once-vibrant city this afternoon as torrents of water dropped in payloads from the heavens. My truck is now bookended in a tight garage space between a Ford Escort with a bumper sticker that states “Pagan Special Forces” and another rusted minivan with a bag of Dorritos and a roll of paper towels in the back seat with hundreds of bumper stickers. My favorite on the minivan states that “My elf has a higher armor class than yours.”

Apparently, the Hudson Mohawk race HQ is sharing the hotel with a Dungeons and Dragons convention. A woman with a faded black shirt stating “Space 9000,” carrying a two-liter soda bottle and wearing a leather pouch like you’d see in Robin Hood’s hand atop King John’s overturned carriage, emerged from the same elevator as a Quebecois couple with matching Boston Marathon jackets muttering under their breath in pidgin French.

The lobby swims with this eclectic mix of fantasy and fitness characters.

I just got back from the expo which entailed entering a dark bar where a Marine in full dress uniform quaffs a beer alone and presenting my bib # to a lonely man with coke-bottle glasses who handed me the running equivalent of King John’s treasure — my bib in an EMS sack brimming with running advertisements. There are no vendors hawking ’sticks,’ gels, nipple guards or velvet marathoning Elvis.’ A single woman sits behind another table with about five various articles of clothing for sale quietly looking back at you as you shop for size XXXL or XXXXS running shorts.

As an aside, I did lose my nip guards; I grabbed the next best thing in my medicine cabinet– pink Barbie bandages.

The hotel is now filling with the EMS bags and the leather pouches and wizard hats.

It’s 3:09 pm and I’m in a Godforsaken, abandoned city with ornate, early 20th Century buildings and beautiful facades defaced with spraypainted ‘BYATCHS AND HOES;’ I’m in a spitting tempest mixed up in this menagerie of insanity.

So I have taken stock of things and concluded that the hotel has a treadmill for my four-mile run, beer to pass time, and 12-sided Dungeon Master dice to throw. I used to be a Dungeon Master so I might enter a campaign with the elf who has the higher armor class.

Stay tuned. I’m bored and have high-speed internet so I will for sure blog myself to tears.

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4:30 p.m. update.

Just got done with four-miles on a True treadmill. Nice surface. I liked the ride. Ran next to the Quebecois elevator man who appears to be quite in shape. Tried to go to mass at St. Mary’s which was built in 1797. A quick glance in the directory told me that the hotel concierge would be happy to provide me mass times. Upon dialing said concierge he was not happy and did not know the mass times. I hung up after hearing, “Um..yeah, we used to have those, but not anymore.”

I walked to St. Marys and found the 4 p.m. Saturday mass well into the preparation of the Eucharist (before Gospel is usually ok to stumble in late to a mass so it was too late for me). I figured as much. Saturday masses are the Catholic fast food version of transubtantiation. In-and-out wafer.

Oh well.

Went downstairs and ambled into one of the fantasy art auctions. Words cannot describe what I saw in terms of people. People are dressed up like bards and wizards and riding a sugar high of candy bars. The male haute couture of the fantasy convention crowd these days are tight iron-on tee shirts that expose a tidal basin of sweat leaving green lines marking the ebb and flow of various Dungeon and Dragon die rolls. A hit on the green dragon is high tide with low tide being when Balthus, the winged chimera, dies from the poison arrow shot by Barry’s character — Zenda the dwarf. Barry lives in his mother’s basement and sleeps on a cot next to computer with suspicious browser bookmarks.

More about Barry later.

So I wander about the art auction and pick up some free literature. One is an ad for I-Con 25 and tells me in Gothic Script, “Jesus Saves and Takes Half Damage.” Another priceless ad is for a book by Lawrence Schoen entitled Buffalogic — A Star-Roaming Hypnotist Meets His First Buffalo Dog…Watch Out Universe!

Upon further reading, I find that Mr. Schoen is “a research psychologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Klingon language.”

He also has written a Klingon dictionary that is available for $1 and shows a pic of Honest Abe Lincoln with the San Andreas faultline forehead marking him as, yes, a Klingon.

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Update 7:18.

No bar scene for me. It’s pouring out still. Good since I am doing something like running 26.2 miles tomorrow. I opted instead to eat in the restaurant bar. As the elevator opened, the freakshow factor increased as I stared back at a man wearing a 19th Century U.S. Naval uniform with his wife in bonnet and shawl. Apparently, there is a naval ship reunion in the hotel too. He explained his uniform and as the door closed, I told him to say hi to the crew of the Monitor to his upturned eyebrows.

At the bar, I sat next to, what I suspect to be, one of the race directors of the marathon who was four sheets to the wind. He sat next to his friend with an HMRCC hat. Two young college women walked in to pick up their numbers and I proceeded to watch these men make aged asses of themselves in front of the women. HMRCC hat pulled out an air horn (the start gun for tomorrow’s race?) and blew it in the bar to the surprise of us all. To incessant, polite whispers of ‘we really have to get going,’ the women extricated themselves from tweedle drunk and tweedle misogynist drunker. I left as well and now sit in my room and place my bib on my Westchester singlet as I listen to Tom Friedman lecture me from his cushy NY Times Op-Ed chair in a studio in DC waving his hands about how ‘we’ screwed up in Iraq. What a job, writing Monday morning quarterback screeds for a living to the incessant applause of the entire top ten floors of Central Park West.

Back to Barry.

A long time ago, my oldest brother, myself, and my youngest brother as well as some other friends used to go to gaming conventions. These weren’t the Klingon sort with the leather pouches, but they were damn close. We played wargames such as Axis and Allies and other miniature wargames where you line up a million lead soldiers, move them with rules and roll dice while arguing over the finer points of dittoed rules with unkempt, lonely men who have decided to use the roll of dice and the taste of pizza at 1 a.m. as their outlet instead of serial killing under the full moon.

At the age of 14, I once played in an Axis and Allies tournament against a 40 year-old man who nervously bit his nails and built industrial complexes in the far reaches of Madagascar while unleashing hordes of Japanese infantry against the soft underbelly of my British Empire. I was wiped out in three turns, and vowed to attend West Point to immerse myself in the art of military science which I did and then promptly put the taxpayer-funded lessons to good use working for the semiconductor division of IBM to make microchips.

Barry?

‘Barry’ was a ubiquitous gamer who frequented all these conventions that my brothers, friends and I attended. Barry didn’t take showers and worse, Barry would argue rules ad nauseum; he would cross the hygiene line as he belched his protest in your face. Barry used to take off his shoes and socks and traipse around the convention for the weekend without them, leaving them to smell up some corner of some hotel conference room. The classic Barry move was spotted by my little brother who noted that he identified his shoes by holding them to his nose, nodding his head in approval and squishing them back onto his soiled feet.

I looked for Barry today but didn’t see him.