I was a child of the Reagan administration whose immediate family—Silent Generation parents and Baby Boomer siblings—had a complex and largely negative relationship with social or recreational drugs. As such, my culture at every level inculcated a strong anti-drug stance that would make me permanently uninterested in hard drugs, and would delay my experimentation with milder substances. I didn’t try brewing coffee until I was 20, and I didn’t buy beer for the first time before I was 30. After that, I remained cautious about trying any drugs that had been illegal and culturally demonized earlier in my life.

Last year, a friend helped me try cannabis for the first time in a controlled setting. They give me half of a THC-infused gummy, and then let me hang out at their place for the next few hours, lying on their couch while they played Tears of the Kingdom on their Nintendo. The effects of this abbreviated dose were mild and pleasant, with my friend texting my partner Amy how I’d fallen fast asleep at one point.

Now that I have returned to freelancing, with more control over my daily schedule, I made up my mind to experiment with cannabis further. Last month, a few days before a flight, I marched into one of the few legal dispensaries in Manhattan and bought two tins of the same weed-gummy brand my friend had shared with me. One tin had gummies treated with THC and a mixture of other additives to resemble indica, the strain of cannabis that is generally regarded as more relaxing. The other mixed in CBD to emulate a hybrid of indica with sativa, the more energizing strain. I wasn’t following any sort of experimental schedule, here; trying two kinds seemed apt, and those looked as good as any, from a cold start.

I have sampled these gummies four times, with differing contexts and observed effects. I share a log of my experiences here in part to organize my own thoughts about it, and also as a public service for others with a similar curiosity about the effects of edibles. My experiences are my own, and represent a mere slice of the possible, but they’re what happened.

Hybrid, half dose, airport

Hours before leaving for the flight, I cut one of the hybrid gummies in half, and ate half immediately. I am a nervous flier, and the power of edibles as a relatively safe and inexpensive antidote for air-jitters was something multiple friends had described to me. I put the other half in a sandwich baggie and threw it in my backpack, figuring I might like it for the flight back home, and not daring to take more than that.

All advice I could find online said that traveling through TSA with edibles is technically not allowed. TSA operates under federal laws, and the federal government still regards cannabis as a controlled substance, even if an increasing number of states have growing tolerance for the drug. But—the advice continued—TSA agents are busy enough already that they’re unlikely to care about seeing some edibles, and the worst that can happen is that they’ll make you toss them out.

Still, the dose was enough to make me feel a ratcheted-up sense of caution verging into, yes, paranoia. Because I ate the half-dose too early, it started hitting just as we got to the airport, and I must have looked quite nervous as I watched my bag vanish into the scanner. And then, with a terrible sense of inevitability, an agent pulled me aside for a thorough pat-down—but not due to anything in my bag, which went through the scan unmolested, even if I didn’t. And then I was sent on my way, one half still in my bag and the other fizzing behind my eyes.

I don’t think the drug made this flight any easier. All around, I think I got the dosage, the timing, and the strain all wrong. In retrospect, I should have kept all of my first experiments at home, until I had a better sense of my personal reactions and tolerances.

Hybrid, half dose, hotel

Our flight home got canceled due to weather, and for convoluted reasons outside of our control Amy and I had to return home on two rescheduled flights, separated by a full day. Frustrated and not wishing to repeat the mistakes of last time, I ate the other half during my last night away, and whiled away the evening alone in the hotel.

It was all fine. With nothing stressful happening, the mild dose encouraged me to just fart around online a bit and play the new edition of Riven on my Steam Deck until it was time for bed. I considered doing some work, but felt resistance against pushing my brain towards that kind of organized thinking, much like when I’ve had a beer or two. I didn’t otherwise feel any noteworthy effects.

Hybrid, full dose, home

The following Saturday, after dinner, I announced my intent to try a full dose of the same gummy variety. Amy made a statement of benign acknowledgment and turned her attention back to her No Man’s Sky expedition, and so I proceeded. I stayed home for the whole experience and was able to observe myself in a completely comfortable environment.

I have to admit that I was surprised at how many stereotypical effects of pot visited me, this time. I learned that it takes my body around 90 minutes to digest the gummy enough to start releasing the drug into my blood, because that’s when my eyes turned red. I could feel it happening—a light prickling sensation—and went to the mirror to confirm it. A growing sense of woozy weight and lagginess of motion soon followed.

I hadn’t prepared any particular activities for myself, so I simply crossed the apartment—carefully—and lay down in bed. There, I experienced a number of interesting perceptual effects from the drug:

• I enjoyed an auditory hallucination of our neighbors’ air conditioners sounding a lot like a pounding surf outside the apartment window. I thought, “I bet I can convince myself that I’m not in Manhattan, but I’m at actually resting in a lovely beach house.” I closed my eyes, I was instantly in that beach house, even though I was also aware that I wasn’t. It was great fun.

• I kept my eyes closed and let my mind drift. I visited homes and other places from my past, and either could remember their interior layouts in stunning detail, or hallucinated that I could. Either way, I explored these spaces with a clarity of visualization that I generally can’t achieve while sober.

• Without meaning to, I fixated on details from the No Man’s Sky soundtrack I hadn’t noticed before, picking out leitmotifs in the background music as Amy explored the galaxy, and finding it quite clever and beautiful.

A little later, as I sat on the couch and watched Amy play, I continued to be struck by singular elements of the game’s sound effects. At one point, while she wandered around a space station, a certain rhythmic pumping or pulsing sound in the backdrop captured my attention completely. I tried to tell her about it but I couldn’t express it in any sensible way.

Then we watched an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks and I enjoyed it even though I had absolutely no ability to follow the plot; the characters’ motivations from scene to scene left no trace of an impression on my short-term memory. Putting effort into remembering resulted in such a mental strain that I gave up trying in short order. Writing this, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened during the episode. This is not the show’s fault.

As for gustatory effects, my appetite did ratchet up and stay constant for the length of the high, just like the jokes say. It was entirely mental: my guts didn’t request more food, but it seemed like a swell idea anyway. This is how I discovered the surprising intensity that strong flavors carried. In particular, we happened to have a bag of orange jelly candies, and they absolutely overwhelmed me. Normally I find these candies mildly sweet and pleasant, but under the drug’s influence they were quite literally and simply one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted. I ate only a few, very slowly. Magnificent.

I sobered up completely by bedtime. The whole experience from consuming the gummy to coming down lasted around five hours.

Indica, full dose, home

About ten days later I found myself in an inexplicably foul mood with little to be done for it, so it seemed like an apt time to continue the experiment by trying one of the indica-only gummies. Now that I had a better sense of timing, I ate it a bit before dinner, and managed to accomplish some chores and tasks before the effects arrived.

I have fewer interesting notes here, in part because I performed less mental exploration, and also because—I suspect—of the difference in cannabis strain. Hallucination and fixation were absent this time. Instead, I felt something like a deep but soft-edged drunkenness; my bad mood melted away and I felt quite relaxed and chill, just like it said on the tin. (Literally: the two flavors I purchased were labeled “Balance” and “Chill”, respectively.) I mentioned this to Amy, while in the depths of it, and she remarked that I wasn’t acting particularly drunk from her perspective. That seemed like a positive.

After things got started I watched the film Hundreds of Beavers and had a marvelous time all by myself. Once again, I kept forgetting the main character’s motivation and history from scene to scene, but the plot of this particular film is so simple that I could grasp it again with a little conscious effort. (I enjoyed the film so much that I watched it a second time while sober two days later, and do count it among my favorite movies now.)

You know that I had some more of those orange candies. I also sampled some mint-chip ice cream, and some peanut butter. The latter is one of my favorite foods, and to my delight I found a new savory depth to its flavor, an earthy nuttiness I don’t normally taste.

The length of the high seemed a little longer than before, but not by much. Maybe six hours from gummy to landing.

Where to from here

I look forward to more experiments from home, and want to more carefully prepare some snacks and different kinds of media—music, in particular—ahead of time. I’d also like to try purposefully meditating, or just doing nothing and letting my mind wander more; the more sativa-emulating edibles might be more appropriate for that.

I don’t expect that I’ll write another public journal about it. The particulars of my cultural background made this feel like crossing a long-standing threshold, something that deserved an acknowledgment like this. With that now accomplished, I hope that a mindful and conservatively paced use of cannabis might nudge me towards a richer life, perhaps with more interesting things than the drug itself to write about.

I finished Cobalt Core in June, around six months and 45 play-hours after starting it. Over the weekend I discovered, while checking out a newly added play mode, that you can replay the endgame sequence any time you like. So I did, and I cried at least as much on my second visit as I did on my first.

Cobalt Core is one of my all-time favorite solitaire videogame experiences. I’m not sure it’s a great game; mechanically, it’s just a variant of the undeniably great Slay the Spire. But I have found it a much more welcoming game, combining a more accessible Spire-like ruleset with an attitude that is brightly wry, slightly melancholy, and a little wounded. Which, you know, resonates.

I stuck with Slay the Spire for as long as I did, years ago, because its design is so brilliantly original—and not because of its unrelenting difficulty. Spire is a game that actively resists your success, pressing you with a weight which you start to feel on the second battle of the first level if you play out your deck with anything less than perfect efficiency. Subsequent battles force your deck further and further out of balance as enemies grind you down with successively stronger attacks and curses, outpacing your ability to recover between battles. Every fight feels more and more painful, every victory scraped raw from the serrated teeth of defeat, until finally all my numbers zero out and I can bleed no more.

I mean, it’s fun! It’s a great game. It just doesn’t want you to win very often, is all. And that’s okay, that’s part of the fun! I have only “won” Spire once, somehow reaching the end of the run with only one of the three main characters. That was pre-pandemic, so I had plenty of time to try to repeat the feat, and I have long since had to content myself with considering this meager triumph as much of a victory as I’ll ever get from that game.

Cobalt Core does not have this attitude. It is a much easier game, even on its hardest difficulty settings, once you get the hang of it. With its emphasis on positional combat, the key to success is to completely dodge or block all enemy attacks, usually with no loss of health or other ill effects.

Your ship only ever has a handful of hit points, compared to the dozens-to-hundreds of HP that a Slay the Spire character has. Cobalt Core enemies want to do just as many nasty things to you as Spire baddies do—and they can actually nail you a lot faster, if you let them. But right from the start you can gaily dance your ship around almost all enemy attacks, so long as you pay attention, earn a bit of familiarity with the different characters’ decks, and practice a modicum of patience. The final battle of every winning run is tough, but beatable, feeling more like a dangerous bomb to carefully defuse than a malevolent enemy who wants you dead as quickly as possible.

And that right there is what I wanted from Slay the Spire all along, it turns out: I wanted its amazing, genre-defining design paired with a play-style whose challenge is closer in intensity to a crossword puzzle than a chess tournament. Coblat Core knows it’s easier, too, putting its ultimate victory condition behind 18 successful runs, versus the handful that Spire asks of you. I got there in 33 tries, which feels like the right win/loss ratio for Cobalt Core, because it is at least as interested in telling you a meaningful and moving story as it is in giving you a deck-building challenge. (Slay the Spire has a story insofar as any questions about the characters’ motivation and purpose are answered by the game’s title.)

And that I cried at its ending—twice—should tell you how well I thought it manages that! The Cobalt Core cast of characters, and their ongoing dialogue throughout every run and through all the intervening cutscenes, sparkles with so much genuine wit, charm, and surprising tenderness. The game is a funny-animal cartoon above all, and its surface-level humor is indeed fantastic, leaning into the time-loop framing with jokes that have setups and unexpected punchlines that stretch across several runs. (A certain long-payoff joke about Riggs’s boba tea is one for the ages.) And part of the brilliant comedy writing is the flashes of emotion, honesty, and pain that one glimpses beneath this veneer.

The finale of Cobalt Core recapitulates the shared trauma that the eight (or nine?) main characters have experienced over umpteen time loops of terrible violence—and for all their joking around, they do let slip now and again how utterly fucked up and mentally scarring their situation is. It gives them, together, the catharsis they all want so badly. After six months and dozens of runs with them, I wanted it so badly for them, too. The game ends with an act of long-denied unity even as the characters commit an unfathomable shattering, and it is perfect.

Great game.

A handful of games in my Steam library don’t work with the Steam Deck default controller settings when I use a third-party, Bluetooth-based controller, such as PlayStation 4 controller. Specifically, using the controller’s D-pad or left analog stick to navigate a list of menu options within one of these games results in the game highlighting every other option, as if every D-pad press moves the selection by two items instead of the expected one item. In addition, some buttons on the controller might not function at all.

I believe that this happens when a game’s built-in controller support conflicts with Steam Input, the controller-support service that SteamOS applies by default to Steam Deck games. You can try to mitigate this conflict by disabling Steam Input for each affected game:

1. Connect the Bluetooth controller that you want to use with the game. When following the rest of these steps, use that controller, and not the Steam Deck’s built-in controller hardware.

2. From the Steam Deck home screen, click the game that you want to apply this fix to. The game’s detail screen opens.

3. Click the 🎮 (Controller-icon) button. The Controller Settings screen opens.

4. Click the ⚙️ (Gear-icon) button. The Layout Options pane appears.

5. Click Disable Steam Input.

6. Click Confirm.

7. Navigate back to the game detail screen.

8. To see if the controller works better now, click Play. Wait for the game to load, and then try to use its main menu normally.

If you ever want to revert to using Steam Input with this game, repeat the first two steps and then click Enable Steam Input.

I have successfully applied this fix to Luck be a Landlord and Slay the Princess, and I fully expect that it works with many other games. My thanks go out to Steam users AnguzBeef and Volks for their Steam Community posts that helped me investigate and confirm this solution.

Or: How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.

I have resigned from Google. I plan to return to the world of open-source projects, for now. After three years of grinding away at the cutting edge of cloud services documentation, I feel the call to help tend to the world’s slow, stable technologies instead.

My time at Google, in retrospect, was like a full graduate-degree course in technical writing and teamwork. I will treasure the skills and the professional relationships I developed there for the rest of my life. Part of me wishes I could have stayed longer, but I know that moving on is my best path today.

Every major transition like this involves both external incentives that pull you to a new place, and internal factors encouraging an exit from your current location. As for my reasons in the latter category, I only gesture to how Google itself has adjusted its goals and attitudes quite publicly in the three years since I joined, making it feel like a different employer than the one I interviewed at. I don’t fault Google for trimming its sails—life is change, for both individuals and organizations. Inevitably, the growing tensions between my values and the company’s became large enough to make my third anniversary seem like a natural Graduation Day, and so that’s how I met it.

Embarking upon these transitions often requires a shift in perspective, as well. Sometimes these come about through a trigger, such as a surprise encounter that shocks you into a new realization. This happened to me, at the end of May, and I can tell you that story.

A theatre-loving friend insisted that I see the show Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, a one-woman performance by the self-described clown Julia Masli. My friend instructed me to avoid reading about the show before attending it, and so that is what I did.

As I chose my seats while buying tickets, I noted with curiosity how most people chose seats as far back in the theater as possible, except for a smaller crowd who purchased seats right up against the stage. The middle rows were oddly empty, especially along the center aisle. I shrugged and chose a center seat in the fourth row. This was because I didn’t know what would happen if I did.

The gist of the show is that, after a tone-setting introduction that mixes meditative chanting with sudden furniture-wrecking violence, Masli asks audience members to name their problems, so that she can improvise solutions for them. Problems on the night I attended included worry over homelessness in Los Angeles, grief over a lost friend, anger about the conflict in Gaza, weariness from raising three children, and a tummy ache.

Masli responded creatively in every case, sometimes with small gestures. She instructed the tummy-ache person’s friend to put her hand on his tummy, because caring touch can feel good. Does he feel better now? Yes? Problem solved.

After the grieving person said that her fondest memory of her friend was smoking together behind their high school, Masli paired her up with another audience member who had cigarettes and directed them to share a smoke outside the theater, remembering the lost friend. Masli followed them out with her wireless mic, and we listened through the theater’s speakers as the woman, out on the sidewalk, laughed how she hadn’t smoked since high school.

A few solutions later, inevitably, Masli approached me as I sat squarely in the target area. “Problem?” she asked in a smiling sing-song: Prob-leeeeem?

I smiled. “Can’t complain.”

“Oh… yes you can. Here, tonight.” Masli is Estonian with what I would call a Russian-accented voice, and her clown persona spoke in a slow, deliberate cadence on top of that.

Amy, who had read up on the show and therefore knew precisely what we were in for, sat beside me. I turned to her. “What’s my complaint?”

Amy and I are married to each other so a lot of our complaints are about our jobs. So this is how she answered, as succinctly as possible: “AI?”

Masli immediately drew back, looking horrified.

“Sure, we can start there,” I said.

“Oh, AI. That’s very scary,” Masli said. “Very frightening. I am worried I may lose my job to it. Are you worried you may lose your job to AI?”

“No, I am worried it might make my job much worse.”

“Oh. What is your job?”

And there was only one possible answer to this, right? It came to mind immediately, but I waited a beat before saying it:

“AI.”

I gazed at the performer placidly while we both paused to let the whole theater respond to this. It was a beautiful moment.

Eventually: “And you have moral difficulties with this, yes?”

I looked pained. I worked my jaw. I started to say “We can start there” as a weak callback joke, but Masli, the actual artist here, had already taken control back: “All right. Tonight, you shall be… the symbol of evil. We are all capable of evil! But you will symbolize it now tonight. OK.” And she carried on to the next problem-haver.

Some problems Masli solved by producing props from the wings, sometimes surprisingly large ones. The tired mother got a full-sized lounge chair, a sleeping mask, and noise-canceling earphones. The Gaza conversation resulted in the name of a Gaza children’s charity written on a back wall in fluorescent marker while another audience member symbolically repaired the chair that Masli had destroyed in a screaming fit at the start of the show.

And then Masli found an opportunity to speak about the importance of washing away our collective evils together, as she walked back towards my seat and held out her hand, beckoning me to join her on the stage. I watched along with the seated audience as she pulled a curtain aside to reveal a full-sized shower stall. I did my best to respond with a silent pose of grim acceptance. She then directed me to prepare myself, backstage.

Masli’s assistant greeted me as I entered a backstage wing, led me up some stairs, and assigned me costuming and blocking instructions for the rest of the show. Shorts approximately matching my skin tone had already been laid out. I was to change into them, then wrap myself in a white towel and a robe, both of which I’d flip up onto the frosted stall door after entering. “That way it’ll look like you’re naked. It’s a gag.”

I changed, descended the stairs, and re-entered the stage barefoot and dressed for the bath while Masli worked through another chaotic solution. The audience vocally expressed its surprise and delight. I took a seat on an upstage chair to watch the performer complete her work, even though I couldn’t see very well because I had left my glasses upstairs. She was collecting socks from the audience, to burn them in a bucket; I admit that I never learned what the problem was, here. With all that completed, Masli directed me through gesture and spotlight to enter the stall. Dance music commenced as soon as I turned the water on, and I threw my hands up and bopped like I was on a crowded club floor. So did everyone else that I could see.

And the guy finished his chair, and everyone had a good time. Amy took the photograph accompanying this article, capturing the moment. You can just make out my hands reaching over the shower stall as I hyped up the chair guy. The seated woman in the photo was using the computer to order some plane tickets for Berlin on Masli’s instructions, if I recall correctly.

And the next day, a Friday, I showed up to work as usual. By lunchtime I felt strangely sick. By the end of the day, I had an inkling as to why. I wrote up a summary of the evening’s events and shared it with several friends. One who knows a thing or two about modern-day magick said: “Okay, actually, yes, that is absolutely a ritual.” I had stripped (pretend) naked before an audience of hundreds, and had all their attention on me as I engaged in act of overtly symbolic ablution of a named “evil”, because outside of the bounds of the ritual space I was an active and direct participant in the thing that was named.

And what could I do then? One of two things, really. I could reject the experience, swallow the tension that the event had put in my heart, let all of that energy dissipate and go to ground. It would take a while and I’d feel soul-sick the whole time, but I could do it. Perhaps I’d emerge with a fiery and renewed will to succeed at my work for my employer.

Or, I could accept the absurd and oblique energy of that evening as a gift, something truly unexpected that happens maybe once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and let it transform me. The acceptance would require reciprocation, an action that would complete the circuit and reify the focus. I would need to do something to shift myself from a passive receptacle of one audience’s one-time attention to an active and ongoing conduit, a person choosing to adjust their stance to make the world a little less bad.

And I chose what I chose, and I feel pretty good about it.

Played and enjoyed Unpacking, an interestingly minimalist narrative game released by Witch Beam in 2021. It tracks twenty years in the life of a young woman as she works through various trials and tribulations to land finally at career success and family fulfillment. The genius of it lay in how you experience her story: every level of the game represents one of many successive moves into new homes—starting with her first by-herself bedroom, as a young teenager. You learn about the progression of her life at every stage by unpacking all of her possessions from cardboard boxes, one at a time, and deciding where each one goes. And that’s it! You don’t see anyone, much less talk to anyone—you never even directly see the main character. All you get is her stuff, with every book, toothbrush, and chipped coffee mug rendered in wonderfully chunky pixel art.

The act of putting things away encourages you reflect on every item, and what it means for its owner. You can’t help but track subtle changes in her wardrobe over the years, and you note which silly tchotchkes from her college days she discards quickly and which she carries into her thirties, move after move. You watch as she gradually finds her focus, with more of her possessions bending towards a passion for making art—with a side order of healthy fandom. Just noting things like this makes up ninety percent of the game, and it works, even though there’s no boss-battle challenges where you must apply what you’ve learned about the character’s life in a race against time, or something. You just put more of her socks away, at your own pace.

The other ten percent happens during surprising moments of storytelling that emerge from occasional, carefully orchestrated difficulties encountered in placing objects. Oh, the heartbreak you feel when you realize that the tiny city apartment she’s moved into is too small—and too crowded with its current occupant’s belongings—to let her framed diploma fit anywhere other than under their bed. There are a couple of moments like that in her future, even subtler, and unforgettable.

In fact, it did take me a long time to understand that stuff already on the shelves and tabletops at the the start of a level were things that belonged to people she was moving in with, whether roommates or romantic partners. In every case, I vaguely thought that we joined the unpacking in medias res, for some reason, and that the main character’s interests over the years flitted from dressmaking to electric guitars and then back to drawing again. I mean she’s young, right? One tries out all kinds of stuff at that age. I figured it out in retrospect by the time the game inverts this pattern, with good reason.

Unpacking also helped me reflect on a particular aspect of sexuality shared by many contemporary indie games. As the story proceeded past its low point and promised new beginnings for the unseen hero, I felt positive that she’d end up with another woman, and: ah, wouldn’t you know it. The thing is, if she had ended the story paired with a man, the whole work would seem discordant, though not for any reason explicitly present in the text. Queerness has, I think, become a kind of genre expectation for short, interesting narrative games. The unnamed family that we briefly glimpse in the finale of Unpacking are the latest gay bildungsroman characters I’ve enjoyed accompanying for a few hours, a lineage I can trace back at least as far as the kids in Night in the Woods or Gone Home.

I actually have difficulty thinking of a center-stage heterosexual couple from any recent higher-profile indie game I’ve played in the last several years; the only ones who come to mind are Sam and Lydia from Paradise Killer. (And that’s overlooking the fact that Sam is a skeleton. But if Lydia can live with that, so can I.) I hypothesize that because heterosexuality remains the default in the larger popular culture, small-studio game creators feel encouraged to explore different directions when it comes to representing romance in their work.

Anyway, Unapcking is a great game. I can recommend it to anyone.

I want to tell you what happened with the colonoscopy that I philosophized about last year. A lot happened, actually, though it mainly involved the same thing repeated four times. Yes, friends, I traveled through my fiftieth year as a man for every season, and I met every season curled on my side in a hospital gown, unconscious. I still managed to learn a thing or two.

The rest of this post gets a little frank about my bodily and medical experiences; proceed with caution. I’m doing fine! You won’t miss worrying news if you bail out now.

My prep strategy

Before I get into the whys of it, let me say that having my first four colonoscopies all happen within one twelve-month period allowed me to rapidly refine my prep techniques. “Prep”, here, being the common nickname for the nasty stuff you must swallow to thoroughly clean out your guts for a proper examination. I learned that prep takes many forms, today. As a first step, I had to choose one.

My doctor gave me three choices of prep medicine: the old-school method of chugging a full gallon of “GaviLyte-G” solution, a newer technique that involved only two glasses of a different formula, or gulping down a lot of pills. I chose the big bottle twice, and the smaller drink twice. I found significantly more success using the GaviLyte, also known as GoLYTELY. Even though it’s the least pleasant of the options, I intend to continue choosing it in the future.

By my fourth round of prep, I had settled on this step-by-step:

1. Two days before the procedure, mix the prep according to its instructions, and refrigerate it.

2. The afternoon before the procedure, place these items on your kitchen counter:

   • A liquid measuring cup.
   • A drinking glass.
   • A little dish. If you have a dish in a fun shape that makes you happy, use that. I used a concrete banana designed by Alabaster Pizzo.
   • Eight coins or other tiny objects you can use as tokens. Do not put them in the dish yet.
   • A handful of hard candies, any color except red or purple. Pick something sweet and fruity. I used an assortment of sugar-free Jolly Ranchers.
   • A timer. I used the “Hey, Siri” voice controls on the various Apple devices I surround myself with.
   • Plenty of drinkable water. I just used tap water.
   • A paper towel or two.

3. At least eight hours before your usual bedtime, begin drinking the first half of the prep, repeating this procedure until all the tokens are in the dish:

   1. Measure out eight ounces of prep, then put the bottle back into the fridge.

   2. Pour the measured prep into the drinking glass.

   3. Put a hard candy in your mouth.

   4. Drink all of the prep that is in the drinking glass.

      This is the hard part, and you have to do it a lot. Go at a slow and steady pace, alternating sips with sucking on the candy. You don’t need to chug, but you do need to get that whole glass down within a few minutes. If you start feeling sick, take a short break to focus and breathe, without putting the glass down. Then get back to it, sip by sip.

   5. Place a token in the dish. This is you putting a point on the scoreboard, right? You’re one step closer to finishing.

   6. If there are still tokens outside of the dish, then set your timer for ten minutes.

   7. Take the candy out of your mouth and put it on the paper towel. You’ll use it again for the next glass. (Or just chew it up and eat it if it’s almost gone.)

   8. Fill the drinking glass with water, and drink the water.

   9. If you set the timer earlier, rest until it goes off. When it does, go back to the step “Measure out eight ounces of prep.” Otherwise, continue to the next step.

4. By this point, the prep should be half gone. You can take a longer break now! Set the timer for up to 60 minutes and relax. You can rest a little longer than that if you need to, but you shouldn’t delay for much more than an hour.

5. Remove all of the tokens from the dish.

6. Drink the other half of the solution, eight ounces at a time, following the same steps as before, starting with “Measure out eight ounces of prep.”

7. If there’s still a little prep left, drink it up using the same pacing and technique.

And that’s it; all the prep’s inside you now, doing its thing. This whole ordeal can take around six hours to complete, but you have to budget further time to handle the consequences. In my case, things don’t start moving until a couple of hours after I finish the prep.

I prefer to start in the afternoon and not the evening in order to avoid the misery of being awake past midnight with more drinking to do. You could start the process even earlier in the day, but since you cannot ingest anything besides water once you have emptied yourself, that just means a longer fast for no benefit. My method, when paired with a morning procedure, tries to balance a shorter fast with getting a good night’s sleep.

As for the the actual business of elimination, I find it untroubling. While the experience does resemble extreme diarrhea, the fact that it’s voluntary and predictable imbues it with a sense of accomplishment, rather than uncontrolled illness. It just happens, in a coldly mechanical way, until it’s finished. You have certainly weathered worse than this.

But now let me tell me why I did this four times.

How not to screw it up

My third colonoscopy happened because the second one revealed an unusually flat and large polyp that the team couldn’t casually snip away with the tools at hand. I needed to return for the services of a specialist-among-specialists to perform some trickier internal surgery. That went fine, but required a fourth visit several months later to confirm that it healed properly. I’m pleased to tell you that it had.

My second colonoscopy happened because I, the patient, utterly botched the preparation for the first one. My colon was flooded with “opaque liquid”, as the medical team put it, and what colon walls they could see were caked with undigested, grainy food. “It looked like birdseed in there,” the team lead told me, as I lay confused in the recovery bed.

Here is why this happened:

• I ignored the admonition to swallow nothing in the critical hours before the procedure. I somehow thought that water didn’t count—I mean, it’s water, right? Water!—so I chugged a tall glass or two right before leaving for the hospital, on the theory that it is always good to hydrate before a stressful situation. Reader, there are exceptions to everything, it turns out.

• I am sure that my doctor told me to switch to a low-fiber diet a few days before the procedure. Obviously, I didn’t listen. I love eating seeds and grains and lentils and fibrous roots and vegetables of all sorts, num num num. But, counterintuitively, you want to denude your guts of all these friendly helpers of day-to-day digestion. The doctors can’t see through this stuff while it’s wallpapering your colon, and the prep solution absolutely does not need its help in moving things along.

I adjusted both parameters for my next three colonoscopies, and none of these problems surfaced again. I didn’t need to turn my life upside-down for the diet: I just ate mindfully for the three or four days leading up to the procedure, and then restricted myself to only hot broth on the final day, right up until that first glass of prep goes down the hatch.

I am, as ever, very grateful to be alive now, when the technology and expertise exists to help my middle years stay as healthy as possible—and also lets me share what I’ve learned with you. I hope the year to come brings us both good health and prosperity, inside and out.

For further reading and friendly advice, see the delightful Welcome to Colonoscopy Land by Anne Helen Petersen. Thanks to Fogknife reader Tully H. for sharing this article with me last year.

The prologue of Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors reminded me of Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice. Here is poor Fetter, a small child with supernatural gifts and uncertain lineage, raised to be a cruel killer. But after a time-jump to meet young-adult Fetter in the big city, it becomes something more like The Tick. Fetter takes breaks from his gray-market job as a community fixer for the immigrant-swollen slums to attend a support group for “unchosen ones”. These are unfortunates born to be world-altering messiahs, but who either ditched the path or got bumped out of it through dumb luck.

In Fetter’s case, he has no shadow, can ignore gravity at will, knows the secret songs that sharpen knives to murderous efficacy—and is fated to slay his father, the beloved and possibly immortal leader of his land’s most prominent religion. But as soon as young Fetter got a taste of city life, he decided to just forget about that last bit. In the world of Bright Doors, this sort of background is common enough to merit a standard designation code on citizen ID cards, alongside race and caste classifications.

Fetter struck me, around this point in the story, as a Philip K. Dick protagonist: a good-hearted nebbish living in a weird world and possessing uncanny powers, but still a nebbish. Of course, you can’t have Fetter’s history and hope to life a peaceful life forever, and soon enough his adversary arrives—who is absolutely a PKD antagonist, straight out of Ubik, someone can edit reality at a continental scale to suit his needs. You need to understand that this is praise from me! I have been thinking lately about how Dick’s fiction fits into these strange days, and was predisposed to see these correspondences. But I am very happy that I did.

Details: I love the way this antagonist doesn’t so much remold time and space as smear it, smushing passes through mountain ranges by speeding up erosion. This requires the wrenching apart of two consecutive moments by millenia, forcing whole histories to swirl in, uncontrolled, to fill the void, like the start of a Dwarf Fortress game. And for all this, the narrative points out that the religion he heads will never become more than the fourth- or fifth-most powerful in its world, if you take everything into account. The world of Bright Doors, like our world, is still a very big place, even for demigods.

Fetter’s corner of his fantastic place evokes the Indian subcontinent, and perhaps Sri Lanka in particular, in both geography and culture. It melds supernatural intrigues, like Fetter’s “unchosen” crowd and the eponymous bright doors—delightfully weird artifacts scattered around the city, and the object of Fetter’s growing obsession—with social media and crowdfunding campaigns. The city bustles with life and art, and trembles under the growing presence of militarized religious orders led by TV-celebrity monks in saffron robes. Inevitably, the winds rushing from those bright doors sweep readers past breathtaking betrayals and reversals and into a kind of uncertain apocalypse, one that allows Fetter to meet the demands of fate while rejecting the chains that would bind his name.

I loved this novel, and can recommend it to anyone.

I felt sure this 1984 film would prominently feature the synth-pop hit “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco someplace in it. It didn’t—not even over the closing credits! Wikipedia tells us that the film merely inspired the song, but for most of my life I thought the song was part of this movie.

The official music video, which my cable TV-loving child self absolutely watched many times, features actors in powdered-wig period dress bopping along to the synths. I must have assumed that these visuals were not original to the music video but clips from the movie whose title Falco sings again and again in the chorus. That’s reasonable, right?

Anyway, great movie. Saw the director’s cut from the aughts, which seems to be what you’ll find on streaming services. It clocks in at three hours long, and I was riveted through all of it. Such a well-assembled picture! I loved Tom Hulce’s portrayal of Mozart as nasty little gremlin in a shaggy pink wig who plays unspeakably beautiful music like he’s telling a rambling, filthy joke. The film’s use of Mozart’s music—both diegetic and otherwise—is simply astounding. My favorite: the scenes of Salieri, seething with jealousy, catching a glimpse of Mozart’s original scores and brought to his knees by the soaring magnificence that would roar unbidden in his head from just seeing those scrawled staves.

Two scenes run oddly long: the chaotic farce that Mozart watches in the theater alongside the commoners, and the final-act scene where Salieri helps the dying Mozart transcribe his Requiem. I loved watching every minute of these and also found them wanting abbreviation. I would wager that those and—judging from the PG-to-R rating slide between the two cuts—the nude scene were both left on the floor for the theatrical release. I am too lazy to go confirm this.

Speaking of flights from reality for the sake of a better blog post, the likelihood that I was watching an entertaining fabrication rather than a dramatic historical document didn’t strike me until the film’s last hour, when Frau Mozart castigates her husband for agreeing to score a silly libretto about magic flutes and giant snakes. He shrugs, as if agreeing that it’s hack work, but this absolutely tripped over my understanding that Mozart was totally into co-creating Die Zauberflöte, pouring his personal fascination with Freemasonry into its celestially bizarre imagery.

In the end, the whole movie is a beautiful work of pure fiction that just happens to drop a lot of names, right? Whatever Salieri’s sins in real life, he objectively was not the obsessed villain portrayed here. But boy, what a great villain F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri makes, declaring war with God Himself in his monomaniacal quest to destroy his absurd, giggling rival! One wants to take such a good story as also the most true telling, and one reflects on how often the movie version of a thing just ends up as the truest version, in our culture.

The trailer for Amadeus is astounding! Doesn’t it make you want to see more trailers like this, versus the whun-chun-whun-chun-squeeee kind that’s been the film-trailer industry standard for god knows how many years? But maybe the whun-chun business is like price tags that end in 99 cents instead of a round dollar: it’s a local-minimum neurological hack that folks in the business perfected years and years ago, and nobody likes having to do it, but also the math works against anyone trying something else.

But anyway, they invented two characters just for the trailer, right? These two dudes playing two anonymous but in-period busybodies whispering themselves hoarse over all of the film’s plot points. This is amazing. Could you imagine, like, the trailer for the next Star Wars movie centering on a conversation between two moisture-farming knuckleheads in a cantina, trading the latest rumors about the latest blaster-hot shenanigans happening light-years over their heads? And having neither appear in the film istelf? Oh, I’d love to see that.

While planning this post, I remembered that I had, in fact, written about a Christopher Huang work before. Back in 2013, I was invited to review all the nominees for the previous year’s XYZZY award in the “best implementation category. The list included Huang’s delightful parser adventure Sunday Afternoon, about a bored little boy stuck in his family’s stuffy Victorian mansion, unaware of the grown-up drama unfolding around him.

And now, as I actually set about to write this post, I further recall that he interviewed me about a text adventure game I wrote years before that. What’s more, I pull-quote his own review of that same game on my own webpage about it.

All of which is to say that it didn’t come as a complete surprise to me to receive, as a quite unexpected parcel in the mail, a new and handsome copy of the mystery novel Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang some weeks back.

Look, okay, I just now dove into my email archive, and I find a forgotten thread from years ago where Chris himself told me that he’d started to write this novel, after which I cheerfully pledged my support through the Inkshares platform. This both confirms my educated guess about how I came to receive this book, and makes me feel slightly embarrassed about writing a public post before sending him a private note. Well, I’ve come this far already, so:

I really loved this book! The blurbs decorating its cover praise it for its adherence to the mode of Agatha Christie, but that’s not really an author or genre I have direct experience with. The nearest touchstones for me include the detective films of Rian Johnson—and Aaron Reed’s Subcutanean, another novel by an IF hobbyist-luminary that shows a particular interest around the exploration of interesting buildings with hidden passageways.

Unnatural Ends presents us with the gruesome but puzzling demise of Lord Linwood, cruel master of a Yorkshire estate and draconian father to three adopted children. Now in their early adulthood after the Great War, the children find themselves drawn back to the place of their shared origin by their father’s bizarre death. But the old mansion has generations-old intrigues marbling its stonework, of course, and it rapidly entangles the three protagonists in a twisted mystery which obsesses them all.

Inevitably, they discover family secrets about themselves, their true parents, and their monstrous adoptive father—secrets far more terrible than the bloody event than summoned them. Ultimately, each must decide whether to bind together to seek justice for past wrongs—or to succumb to their late father’s will, fighting one another for dominance and power.

How exciting! I will now probably spoil which way things go by confiding in you that I found the three principal characters of Unnatural Ends entirely likable and believable, each already gone through enough trials by the novel’s start that they’ve quite thoroughly shaken off their father’s evil influence, even if they begin the story not knowing the half of his depravity. The job lands on them now to bury their father, literally and figuratively—but 400 pages of complications ensue, testing the childrens’ will and humanity at least as much as their intelligence.

I tore through this delicious novel quite quickly. Listen: I read half the book on a plane. I hate reading on planes, right? Or I thought I did! It may be true I get a little better about flying with every trip I take, but sinking so deeply into a novel at 35,000 feet represents a quantum leap against flight-fear that required a truly captivating read, and that’s what I found here.

I recommend this new novel without reservation, and—as I probably always say about novels I adore—I’d love to see it adapted to film or TV, sometime. A period drama with blood and guts and a delightfully diverse main cast! We love those!

Chose Black Narcissus from the Criterion Channel’s “All-time favorites” lineup during my free-trial week with the service, grabbed by its evocative title and its stunning marquee artwork of a nun pulling a bell-rope atop a dizzyingly high cliff. That title ends up sitting quite uncomfortably in a film full of discomforts, both intentional and otherwise.

Two things within the movie’s world are called “Black Narcissus”: a perfume worn proudly by “the Young General”, played by the Indian actor Sabu Dastagir—and that character himself, nicknamed slyly by the British nuns inhabiting the Himalayan cloister that he visits. As such, the Young General’s arrival to the troubled nunnery signals that, the setting established, the plot may now get underway.

So it’s all a bit strange when, midway through the picture, he falls in love with a local girl and simply leaves. This elopement occurs off-camera, and lasts for the remainder of the picture. The best explanation I have is that the hesitant, close-up embrace between the lovers—the last time we see either, but for a brief scene at the end—triggers a switch in the movie’s tone from grounded realism to a vertiginous dreaminess, commencing the nightmarish events which eventually dissolve the cloister. All because of… something in the air, I suppose!

That embrace also carries a strangeness not present in the context of 1947: like countless movies of its era, Black Narcissus sees no issues in casting white actors in other-than-white character roles. A modern viewer feels the friction this produces nowhere more keenly in the romantic pairing of the Young General with an Indian commoner played by the not-even-remotely Indian Jean Simmons. The teenaged Simmons—never speaking, layered in swarthening makeup—gets quite a bit of screen time, and I found her performance both pleasingly memorable and deeply embarrassing. I understand that the science of cinematic casting has learned a lot over the last 75 years, but I still find it strange to imagine that audiences were ever okay with such an objectively obvious mismatch.

I much more appreciated the film’s handling of two other unusual characters. I believe we are meant to understand the hunky and fortyish Mr. Dean, the local ruler’s European liaison, as gay. Nobody else in the movie seems to realize this, despite his penchant for extra-short khakis and brightly feathered caps, or—more significantly—his stoically amused detachment from all the nuns and village women who fawn all over him. While he does form an affectionate bond with protagonist Sister Clodagh, he gently brushes aside any naive probes towards romance that she offers. The final shot of the picture has the monsoon rains swallow up her mule-train as she leads the failed convent out of the mountains—while Mr. Dean only watches, eyelashes fluttering under the downpour. We must write our own background for Mr. Dean, based largely on everything unspoken in that last—admiring? regretful? nostalgic?—gaze.

The film’s depiction of Sister Ruth, meanwhile, struck me almost from the start as a surprisingly accurate and even sympathetic portrait of a person suffering with untreated bipolar disorder, though I don’t expect this to be a term in popular circulation at the time this film was made. The poor nun spends the earlier part of the movie lurching between being too sick to get out of bed, and then declaring that she can single-handedly run the convent’s elementary school and manage its gardens. The other nuns have absolutely zero idea what to do with her, driving her even more heartbreakingly off-balance.

The Young General’s sudden departure transforms Sister Ruth’s illness into a more generic sort of Movie Crazy. She starts ambushing nuns around corners with garish lighting and musical stings, while her motivations sink from the tragically misunderstood to the merely murderous. But, even so: she looks so amazingly ghastly in her final scenes that I would have assumed her appearance punched up with subtle CG in a modern movie, and not carried entirely by expert makeup and the actor’s own facial contortions.

On that note: the very modern work that this movie brought to my mind again and again was Immortality, the 2022 filmic video game directed by Sam Barlow. Players of that game spend hours sorting through a jumble of clips from three supposedly “lost films” of the 20th century, the most complete of which is Ambrosio, a lurid drama set in a Spanish convent. It also possessing a title that evokes heady aromas, enough to make the head swim at high altitudes. Black Narcissus did prove to have dangerously lingering scent, didn’t it?