The Classical Perfection of Dead Space

Making Horror Coherent

Dead Space! It's an excellent game, no doubt about it, and it achieves this excellence by adhering to old-fashioned principles of purity and unity.

Dead Space is pure because every aspect of it contributes to the core experience: survival horror on a ghost ship (in space!). It's unified because its style, gameplay, and even its cheats cohere in regard both to each other and their constituent parts. Everything from spaceship to spacesuit, from monster design to monster fighting, from plot to cheat focuses on producing a singular thrill. Wandering the chambers of a leviathan spacecraft, a derelict infested with recklessly-hostile, hellishly tormented and malformed former crewmen, a single engineer, slung with wickedly dangerous futuristic power tools, seeks to save the ship—and his ex-girlfriend. The whole game concentrates on intensifying this one brutaltastic narrative.

The Argument from Schwag

Pre-orders of Dead Space included a piece of schwag: The Art of Dead Space: Designing a Nightmare—an apparently unauthoured book that describes the making of much of the game's sets, characters, and creatures. Now, I've discussed some of the economic irrationality involved in providing schwag to people who would've bought a product anyway—at least in regard to video games—in an article at The Escapist. Though this book also makes no fiscal sense, it does, like so many other gaming promotionalia, contribute to the understanding of the game.

Even better, The Art of Dead Space illuminates the greatness of the game, largely by mistake. Whoever wrote the book spotlights a wrong decision and glosses over a right one. Over and over, we read that the design team aimed at “making things relatable,” says art director Ian Milham.

The adjective 'relatable' is rare. Milham and the authour of the Dead Space book use it to mean “having the quality that one can relate to something, that one can find a connection between oneself and the modified noun”. This means more than just “believable”. Dead Space wants to establish a primarily human environment, on the theory that this will facilitate players' immersion in the game.

The strongest example occurs with Dead Space's creature design. “Exotic aliens were out and enemies constructed from tortured victims were in,” says the authour. The argument goes, then, that monsters made of torn-up and reassembled bits of people constitute a more 'relatable' inhabitant of a ghost ship than do giant bugs or lizard men or cat people or demons—or even ghosts. Yet, exotic aliens, like the one in the Alien series (a heavy influence on Dead Space) or the Monolith of 2001 or the Blob, have all starred in films to great effect. It's not the job of the creature to be relatable in itself; 'relatability' comes from how the various components of the work hang together. And it is in this regard that Dead Space succeeds magnificently.

Unity!

Dead Space exemplifies classical unity—a characteristic of art praised since Aristotle. The concept is simple: a work of art should be a whole. No part of it should divide it from itself. Nothing should be out of place or discordant. To give an example: Jar-Jar destroys what little unity Episode I could have hoped to attain. Dead Space is harmonious, and terrifyingly so.

I relate to the foes of Dead Space; I connect with them enough to have soaked my sides with sweat as I played through the game; but Dead Space elicits this reaction from me by weaving together a coherent, unified environment, of which the monsters form the most dynamic part. The game's unique achievement is to establish this unity by turning everything inside out.

Exposing the Ribs

The key ingenuity of Dead Space was to take its cue for ship design from Gothic architecture. Designing the mining ship Ishimura, the central location, the ghost ship, for the game, “the team settled on a look inspired by the ribbing and buttresses of Gothic cathedrals,” says the authour. This is a decision of pure design: stone on earth needs this kind of support; metal in space does not. But the exoskeletal profile of Gothic structures exudes menace, as it plays its necessary role. It suggests, in its osseous bulk, the strange innards that hold us up in our smooth skins, things we usually see only as a result of violence.

The Ishimura reflects our own bodies, and it has an air of historical familiarity, but these reflections themselves don't establish unity. The patterning begins with the way that the main character's outfits mirror the style of the ship. Isaac Clarke, an engineer aboard a rescue ship sent out to aid the silent Ishimura, remains a cypher until the very last scene of the game, when he removes his helmet and we see his face for the first time. We never hear him speak. We know him through his uniform, his work clothes.

It looks like a heavy affair, Isaac's get-up: thick-booted, canvas-like fabric; vacuum-ready, self-sufficient, and exoskeletal in appearance. Crusting all of his several suits are rows of rib-like metal bands. They serve no apparent purpose, but resemble the ribs of the ship. Isaac's main designer, Chi-Wai Lao, justifies this approach as a move away from a military theme and toward an industrial one. Though neither mode necessitates external ribbing, the look quickly becomes symbolic of heavy grunt work.

You can deduce the rest of the elements of the game from this simple formula: Dead Space is about construction and deconstruction, building up and tearing down.

Tools for the Job

The Ishimura 'cracks' planets, destroying them to mine their minerals. The game's villain, a bacterium synthesized by human scientists from alien instructions, dissects dead humans and recombines them in bizarre and deadly forms. Isaac fixes the damaged ship and takes apart his oddly assembled enemies. This last bit is literal: Dead Space provides powerful gameplay incentives for the player to dismember foes. You use far less ammunition and waste less time killing them by cutting off their appendages than by shooting them center mass or even in the head. This tactic is in keeping with the tools at Isaac's disposal, which flow logically from his profession: he attacks with industrial equipment: power saws and plasma cutters, blow torches and force guns designed for moving cargo.

The gothic-industrial motif unifies style and gameplay. Every aspect interlocks with and reflects all of the others. The Ishimura and Isaac's suit suggest structures turned inside out. The creatures embody, rather than suggest, this extroversion—and, because they've been assembled to attack Isaac, it makes sense for Isaac to disassemble their bodies to pacify them.

Even the cheat codes follow a logical course. Dead Space's environments bristle with graffiti, mostly in English, but some in an alien script resembling Thai or Khmer. Shine your gun light on certain of these alien passages, and you'll fluoresce secret writing: an arrow pointing either left or right, which codes to either the y or x button on the controller. Collect twelve of these steganographioc signs hidden across the twelve chapters of the game, each of which corresponds to a particular section of the ship, pause the game, punch them in, and you'll receive a fat, juicy power up.

This echoes the plot, which ultimately concerns a text of this alien script inscribed on an alien artifact. The decoded script reveals how to make the shitty bacterium that got everybody into this mess in the first place. That's unity for you.

Kristof Wins!

The annual win a trip with Nick Kristof Contest


In Cairo, sometime in the late 1830s, after a drought or a monsoon, Gerard de Nerval bought a Javanese girl. He made the choice with great difficulty, as, for one thing, the slaves his Mohammedan broker proffered all looked the same, “as happens with primitive races”, and, for another, Nerval meant his slave to be at liberty—even to leave him, if she wished. Hard choice, then: find a girl who stands out, but not so much that he would feel compelled to possess her. Casting his eye over the women on display, all with skin like Florentine bronzes, Nerval finally focused on the “metallic spark” in the “almond eye” of the Javanese Zeynab, who had been captured by pirates as a young girl. He barely haggled over her price!

I recount this scene because Nicholas Kristof is my Javanese slave girl. That’s why I would like to win a trip with him. Kristof stands out just enough. Sure; he types up workmanlike prose, with clunky metaphors and corrupt punctuation, and, yes, his column serves mainly as a stage on which to pose Boy Scoutish acts of charity. But, embarrassing as he is, both as a writer and an adult, he offers something that your average posturing, exploitative tourist of suffering doesn’t: an all-expenses-paid trip!

I’m in it for the free stuff! I admit it, but make no mistake: I want to laugh and cry at the wretched of the earth, too. Why, it almost doesn’t matter to me what torment in particular I’ll observe. I’ll sip a warm Coke while I watch a pregnant woman die because of malpractice, and I’ll nibble meat-on-a-stick while witnessing a boy dissolve under the advances of malaria. Hell; I’d even find satisfaction in the death of an old man, so long as rebels shoot him or hyenas eat him or something.

Even more than feeding on individual pain, like some sort of psychic vampire, I want to absorb the horrifying conditions that make life intolerable for teeming billions, like a vast blob from outer space. Open sewers call to me, as do polluted water systems (I imagine purifying them with the introduction of local-beer-produced pee; every drop helps, and I’ve probably got more antibiotics in an average piss than Kinshasa sees in a year), toxic building materials, spoiled food, and a total lack of medicine. Why not throw in corrupt and brutally oppressive governments, too? I’m just visiting!

Now, this is beginning to sound like nostalgie de la boue, but I assure you that, if I have a hankering, it’s for nostalgie de la pu. I mean: I don’t think I romanticise dysentery, but it seems to have worked for Cortez and Rambo and Bruce Willis’s dad in Pulp Fiction. And for Nick Kristof himself! (That’s right: I don’t mind adding Kristof’s bright star to that worthy constellation) In other words, I’m a man: I’ll take on a disease easily curable for a first-worlder, if only to tip my hat to the poor bastards who have to live in the effluent I’ll leave behind. It’d be unseemly not to.

Of course, all of that, the looking and the doing, amounts only to experience. What about the work? The Trade? The Craft? You have to spin that shit into gold, so to speak. You can’t just watch someone die without making a living out of it. There are many ways to do this. Tom Friedman and the ranks of ordinary newsmen chill in penthouses, conducting interviews over the hum of air conditioners, making only slightly more cabbage than Kristof does. But they get it wrong in the end. Dead wrong. Take Friedman: what a dork! The world isn’t flat; it’s a globe. A round, luscious globe, if you take my meaning. While bringing home the bacon counts for a lot, scoring the pig matters more. And with the trip on Kristof’s dime, I know what I’ll be spending my money on! What? Sometimes it takes more than straight-up cash to convince? I’m not worried. I’ll tell her I’ll set up her parents in a Delaware suburb and I’ll learn Chinese or whatever. Swish! Nothin’ but net!

In sum, the problem is human nature.

How to do it?

This past Wednesday, the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship at New York University hosted Ami Dar for a speaking engagement open to the public. Ami Dar founded Action without Borders/Idealist.org, a project that serves as a virtual meeting ground for non-profits. In operational terms, it's a giant database of do-gooders.

Ami spoke and then answered questions for an hour and a half. Much of what he had to say--and most of the questions put to him--concerned the functioning of non-profits. He offered advice of the following sort: if you want to do non-profit work, get comfortable with money. Non-profits are obsessed with money, precisely because they aren't out to make a bunch of it. Learn how to read a balance sheet; know your financials; get used to to thinking about bottom lines.

Later, at the post-event dinner at Negril Village (Caribbean! Not bad!), the talk centered mainly on the promulgation of ideas--not only on their dissemination, but on retaining credit for them. People have had their do-gooder ideas stolen and then been forced to deal with the disconcerting fact that the theft has led to some good being done in the world, just not in their name. All agreed that this amounted to an acceptable, if not a fine thing. Further, the discutants pointed out that the more widely and formally one presents ideas--opens them to theft--the more securely the public record identifies the idea's owner. It's almost Buddhist: the more you give away your ideas, the more you own them.

But all of this talk missed out on the one information issue that, I think, remains unexplored. It does all amount to information, really: contact information; guiding principles; ideas. Who's out there doing what? How do they achieve success? What's the next trend in non-profit work? Almost comprehensive, but there remains a whole field of information that, while not proprietary, everyone guards as closely as possible. This information, nobody puts on a website.

It's savoir-faire. Tricks of the trade. Professional experience. Inside knowledge. It's the true nuts-and-bolts stuff. Example: the Funded Transportation Program at the Department of Defense. The DOD has two programs that provide containerized shipping for humanitarian aid: the Denton Program and the Funded Program. Denton arranges shipping through the military. A humanitarian aid agency has, say, a 20' container of medical equipment to send to Darfur, but no money to shipt it. The agency applies to Denton. When a C-130 with some extra space heads to an airport near the agency's destination--Cairo, maybe--the DOD arranges for the placing of the container on the flight. The process plays out in myriad ways, but you get the basic idea of near total inefficiency.

That's where the Funded Transporatation program comes in. Here the aid agency applies through the appropriate DOD office, and a DOD agent books and pays for a container in the same way that normal human beings do it. Straight-up free shipping. Now, there's a list of restricted countries, of course, and inspections, and the DOD occasionally shuts down the program and the DOD employees who run it tend to be morons, but, when it works, it is free shipping.

And when you look at the list of agencies that have accounts with this program, you see what kind of insider information this really is.

That's the kind of thing we need a website for.

Smolka Don't Cruise.

Police Chief Smolka, a genuine jerk, retired after thirty-three years of service in the NYPD last week. Smolka led the way in oppressing participants in Manhattan Critical Mass rides after the huge success of the 2004 RNC Mass.

Last night, Critical Mass presented him with a going away gift: a bicycle. A pretty good joke, it took some doing to pull off. The police tactic for dealing with the mild chaos of Critical Mass is to hand out bullshit tickets immediately the ride begins. To pre-empt this pre-emptive measure, the whole ride of some 175 or so people walked from Union Square (the regular starting point)to the 9th precinct, in order to offer the bike without losing the integrity of the Mass.

Note the double meaning of 'integrity'!

The Rude Mechanical Orchestra accompanied the Mass. RMO, baby!--a marching band replete with dancers. This made for a much more exciting trip than mere boisterous walking would have done.

At the precinct, The Mass stood on one side of the sidewalk, while the cops stood, scowling, on the other. Everyone knew, however, that the scowls overcompensated for smiles: the cops thought the whole thing hilarious, not least because Smolka is quite fat.

The cops didn't play along, then, but merely continued with the usual routine of feigning a compelling need to control a not-at-all unruly situation. The whole force would do well to take more prunes in their diet.

At any rate, some guy made a few jokes and then a couple of people walked the bike over to the cops, who refused the 'peace offering' with that strained cop etiquette which so pathetically colours all of their intercourse. "Thank you, please"--who the hell says, "Thank you, please"? What does that even mean?

The performance over, the real ride began, and the cops ticketed two people--for improper front lights.

Oh Smolka! They're just not your streets!

Francis Fukuyama Trips Flux Capacitor

Nothing frustrates more than seeing someone, not only come to a realization that he ought to have arrived at years ago, but seeing the realization accompanied by wonderment, pride, and even accolades.

Francis Fukuyama has given us just such an event: in the Wall Street Journal, in article reproduced in slighty different form on the American Interest website (http://the-american-interest.com/contd/?p=605), Fukuyama announces to the world that the U.S. loses the hearts and minds of the world's poor to extremist organizations because a) the extremists provide social services and the U.S. doesn't and b) because, when the U.S. does try to provide such services, it screws up, having lost its know-how since the Reagan administartion gutted domestic service programs.

Over on bloggingheadsTV, Robert Wright hails Fukuyama's insight with his mightiest hyperbole: "Frank's potentially world-saving op-ed" (http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=199&cid=996).

Wright should have praised Fukuyama instead for his discovery of time travel. Look at the startling revelation Fukuyama affords us: "Organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas do not merely lobby the government to provide social services; they run schools and clinics directly." That's why they--and Chavez in Venezuela and the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.--win elections, Francis reveals.

If only we had known! Perhaps something could have been done! But it takes years to figure out something as complex as the idea that giving people medicine, education, blankets, clean water, and the like tends to endear them to you. Fukuyama himself no doubt had to focus much study on, for example, the following passage from an Agence France Press article hidden from public view in the year 1996: "In the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, home to Hezbollah's political, medical and social services, the movement is still active after a series of helicopter attacks on its buildings and the homes of Hezbollah leaders."

"Social services"--what could it mean? Well; a body could wait a year for another clue from Indigo Publications' Intelligence Newsletter: the paper reported that Iran would be increasing Hezbollah's funding from 80 to 100 million dollars, which "will enable Hezbollah to lay on additional welfare and social services, improving its posture vis a vis its "brother-enemies," Nabih Berri's Amal movement."

Again, these maddeningly mysterious words: welfare? social? services?

It would take four years for the Toronto Star to break the story:

In this shabby, Shiite Muslim suburb of Beirut, and in many similar neighbourhoods, the organization best known in the West for indiscriminately raining rockets on settlements in northern Israel [Hezbollah] is the primary source of drinking water, high-quality television programming and a broad range of social services.

Drinking water, eh? Maybe there's something to that...

Fortunately, now, six years after that groundbreaking report, Fukuyama's Rand Corporation-enhanced noodle has found the key: hospitals, schools, food--this crap works. People seem to like it--and, even better, we can produce this stuff, too. Or, at least, we used to be able to.

What takes Fukuyama's insight even further over the top is that it doesn't merely ignore the fact that even the mainstream media has known about this for years; no; his piece seems to suggest that the extremists themselves hardly recognize the reason for their own efficacy. The U.S. has only to offer its own programs in a sort of competitive market of social services, and liberal democracy will win the day.

It's as if he's gone back in time to 1985, to get in on the market that Hezbollah was then establishing. As if it weren't already far, far too late to merely compete for the poor's affections. As if just a little more pressure on the accelerator of that Delorean would save, as Robert Wright suggests, not just democracy in the West, but the whole world, Marty.

China

A couple of years ago, a Canadian video game developer, Bioware, released Jade Empire, a role-playing video game set in a world based loosely on the history and myth of China. Sold for the Xbox console, the game proved a hit, not only in North America and Europe, but in Asia as well. Naturally, Asian players sounded off numerous reactions to the game, the most interesting of which is the following condemnation of the cast of playable characters: they all look like villains. The game offers the player the opportunity to progress through the story as one of several characters, all of them East Asian in looks, each quite distinct from all of the others. The Canadians, no doubt, did their best to model their characters sensitively, but, apparently, to many Asian eyes, Bioware produced the equivalent of a gang of heroes consisting of, say, Alan Rickman, Michael Ironside, Vincent Price, Joan Crawford, Jackie Collins, Glenn Close, and the guy who killed Mozart.
Yet, the Bioware team, so painfully earnest in interviews, had done its homework: they watched hundreds of hours of kung fu movies, perused reams and reams of art, read volume upon volume of Chinese legend—all to no avail: they never picked up on the facial characteristics—in film, in painted depiction, in written description—that pigeonhole actors in one category or another, stock villain or stock hero, a distinction common to both East and West.
Even further, they hadn’t aimed very high: they meant only to develop charismatic characters for their game, not to form, as we all must do, an intelligent opinion on China, our China, not the one of myth and legend, but of trade, labour, politics, and solidarity. I try to keep their story in mind as China comes up in the media, and it comes up so frequently. Why not?! The Chinese have located the center of the world, after all: their country, and, in fact, a precise point within it. What’s more is that the post-moderns tell us the center’s everywhere—even in space, which explains, in part, why the Chinese just blew up one of their own satellites. It’s about self-regard, for one thing.
Robert Wright and Jeffrey Lewis, a journalist of ideas and a weapons expert (common descriptors; I’ll re-examine them at a later date), blabbed about this test of anti-satellite weaponry for half an hour on bloggingheads. The upshot: we ought to have a treaty that prevents this sort of thing and have a good many satellites up on all sides in order to arrive at “transparency”, meaning “mutual surveillance”. The theory is that the more each side observes the other’s activities, the less ignorance will feed suspicion and mistrust (other things may feed them, but not so much ignorance). That’s rational in a rand institute way, but this requires us, of course, to know what Chinese perfidy—or villainy?—looks like.
Transparency could have side effects of some benefit, even without the understanding necessary to make it function according to our rational hopes. Qiu Xiaolong reminds us a couple of times in his Inspector Chen novels that no direct equivalent exists in Chinese for the English word ‘privacy’. It may work in the favour of both the U.S. and China—and in accord with Messrs. Wright and Lewis, if the Chinese should translate for the Americans a strategic discourse that has no need of that concept. Mutual Benthamitism? It could result in good behaviour, even good manners.
Good Manners! Apparently, the Chinese have chosen to avail themselves of a dose, as the NYTimes reported a few months back that some well-off Chinese send their children to finishing schools. Further, the great bane of the retention of the lessons learned at these schools is vulgarity at home: parents’ “spitting seeds or chicken bones out of their mouth” bedevils the inculcation of good habits. Now, I’ve heard of such uncouthery’s occurring on the Fung Wah or the Luck Star, the Chinatown to Chinatown intercity buses that web throughout the NorthEast, but I’ve never seen it in the several trips I’ve made on them. Just this week, however, while reading Martha Gellhorn’s reporting of the war in China in 1941, I came across this passage: “…he was crouched alongside the charcoal cooking fire in the stern, eating his dinner with the loud smacking and sucking noises, belching and spitting, that are common to China.” The very behaviour they hope to eradicate in favour of certain manners of the west.
Just the thing for them to see through their satellites: the upright practices of the American table. But what would we see in them? Consider the following staccato dispatches from a young American woman, a graduate student in urban planning, who studied development in Shenzhen:

3 disneyesque theme parks here
many gated highrise communities
visited one with its very own wal mart yesterday
traffic is nuts
pollution
fog
shipping containers
three developments
one ultra modern one called "the village" made to mimic old village courtyard
style housing, one that is all out of scale spanish hacienda stuff called
"Vanketown/dreamtown"
the neighborhoods are called :
1. honolulu
2. california
3. Picasso

I’ve never seen so many massive and i mean MASSIVE
but mostly VACANT office parks, highrise towers, mega malls, etc

we went to the largest mall in china today (our hosts seem to think we really
like malls) only to find that 99% of the space was still unleased

these special economic zones are nutty
the motto here seems to be

if you build it - they will come

theres alot i could say about this captialism on steroids
commando style
its opportunistic
very very naively gung ho
and on a crash course to environmental disaster
they decided automobiles were the way to do it in these new cities
and they spread it all out and made it so massively unwalkable

and they are trying to outlaw bicycles... jesus
so fucked
and insanely inhumane towers are their m.o.

It seems, then, that if the Chinese were to shoot down those satellites of ours that spy on them, it would amount to knocking a mirror out of our hands. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want us to see: Chinese in the process of re-making themselves as Americans. Could this be the birth of their need for privacy? Or does it simply amount to yet another appropriation of a symbol of power: nothing says you’ve made it like anti-satellite technology. If they name gated communities after American locales, in order to acquire with the naming some aspect of the original place, what do they call their space warfare program? And if they’re eager to play a variation on Cold War games, will they develop their own Rand Corporation to guide them? It may be helpful to ponder at this point the significance of the fact that, when Bioware developed those character models the Chinese kids found so villainous, the designers had in mind a peculiar kind of gameplay: in Jade Empire, the player makes moral decisions at certain points in the story, decisions that can be either good or evil. Bioware developed the looks of the characters in order to make them viable as both villains and heroes. It’s possible the Chinese players never expected to play that sort of game.

Blogs are trouble.

Yes; blogs have troubled me in the past, and I expect this one to burden me in the future. The last time I messed with a blog--it was only in a trifling way!--the FBI investigated me. We'll see how Negative Edge turns out.

Let me explain what happened. It all started in Libya. Libya, when it had just opened it up. The new U.S. Liaison there wanted the non-profit I was working for, an internationally-focussed book donation program, to send books over for the Jamahariya International Book Fair ('jamahariya':"Republic"; Libya's a dictatorial republic, cousin to our democratic one). We said, "yes". They also wanted us to provide some staff to help with the distribution of our donated books at the fair. I said, "all right!"

I'd already had some fine experiences dishing out books to Algerians and Moroccans, at their respective international fairs. I even have a little (very little) Arabic. I was still young at the time, healthy, and even recently insured for my health. I tan well and can pass for a Berber mix. Decidedly, I was the man for North Africa.

Problem: Libya enjoys a particularly disfunctional brand of communism, as outlined in Qadhafi's little green book. This entails that a number of committees have oversight of each and every visa for which earnest, generous, even charitably organized Americans may want to apply. These committees are frequently at odds with each other. Plus, the U.S. Liaison is, after all, only a liaison, utterly without Ambassadorial privileges. Far from operating on American soil, Liaison staff punched clocks in a hotel (though, they assured me, a pretty good one). This made the prospect of my visa tenuous at best.

Not to mention the fact that the Libyan government saw fit to muck around with the actual date and duration of the fair. That Colonel!

Nevermind. I had a shot at travel to an extremely unusual place. The tickets came; the visa had "a good shot of being granted"; I took the chance. I gambled. I lost. Arriving in Heathrow to change planes, I heard my name called over the PA--a chilling experience, I don't mind telling you. An unwelcome message lay in wait: probably no visa, if I should continue on my scheduled way, but, if I should stay in London for, say, a week, perhaps a higher probability of receiving it.

What kind of choice is that? I went ahead as planned, and, when I showed up with no visa waiting for me, the security guys thought I was nuts. I couldn't believe it: this happens five times a day in Tripoli! I know it! Whom, I ask, do they think they're kidding? Well; I could at least take some time to appreciate the pastel portrait of Qadhafi, a good three by fiver, hanging on a glass wall and, really, drawing the whole lobby together.

After an hour or two, they sent me back on the same plane, with maybe four or five other passengers. A true bummer.

Then, I had to buy a one-way ticket back to Boston and hang around for the flight. 'What better thirty-six hours have I ever spent?', I thought, as I skipped back into Logan airport--skipped back into the trustless embrace of the mightiest of customs processes.

Ho ho! They had an all right time with me! Why would I go to Libya and then turn around and take the same flight back? Because I was denied entry, naturally. Why would they deny entry to a good-lookin' guy such as yourself? Because I had no visa. But-but...why would you fly to Libya, to Tripoli, of all places...without a visa? I didn't know I didn't have a visa.

And so on.

Meanwhile, they searched my bags, glared at me, and told me to keep my hands out of my pockets. "Sir, would you keep your hands out of your pockets, please?" What could my pockets possibly have? And if they could possibly have it, why not search me? Why, to keep me uncomfortable, of course! Regular jedis, these customs officials!

In the fullness of time, they came across the thing they'd all been waiting for: several pages of incriminating blogspeak. You see: along with State Department advisories (advising me not to travel to Libya) and packing lists and contact information and copies of my passport and all that normal jazz, I'd also included in my dossier printouts from a blog that concerned itself with the Middle East, specifically with the authour's travels through Palestine. Now, this means that the words Hamas, Gaza, and, yes, Palestine appeared in the documents. The customs gentlemen detained me on the sight of them. "This says 'Hamas'", said one.

So much for me!--but, no, it turned out not that bad at all. They kept me aside for only an hour and a half while they looked me up, tried the website of employer, and, best of all, read the blog. The mustachioed fellow--there's always one--did the latter. He hitched up his bat-belt, stepped one foot onto a low ledge, spread my manila folder out on a desk, and, licking his finger at every turn, went through it all, page by page. He studied that bastard moustache-hard. Lick, lick, lick. And then it was over.

They gave me back my shit and sent me on my way. I figured that was the end of it, but then the FBI called. Six months later.

We'll finish the rest of the story, my interview with a G-man, next time. Also: the purpose of this blog.